The sky is still dark as our taxi turns, unexpectedly, onto a narrow road. The bus depot we arrived at is another mile or two down the road we’ve just left. Maybe this is another way of getting there? I am starting to get nervous now. I’m trying not to panic but my heart is racing and imaginary headlines like: “American tourists kidnapped in Can Tho!” are flashing in my head. Maybe the lady at the hotel wrote the driver’s instructions wrong? Maybe the driver is just lost? I look over to check on Bella. She is leaning her head against the door, her eyes closed; she is still sleepy from having to get up so early. I reach over and stroke her arm.
The street we’ve turned onto looks residential. I can see lights in the windows of houses, set a little ways back behind bushes and fern trees, cutting through the darkness along the road. The taxi slows and turns right onto a wide gravel drive. The taxi’s dim headlights shine a short ways ahead, I can just make out a large warehouse, and the face of a bus parked next to it. I see light coming from an open door on the side of the building. I see several men sitting around a table just outside the door smoking and drinking coffee. As we get closer, I see the white and green bus looks much older than the one we took from Ho Chi Minh City a few days ago. Can this be the right place?
The taxi driver puts the car in park and gets out. The engine still running and his door hanging open, he pops the trunk, removes our teal rolling bag and backpack, and sets them on the ground. Quickly, I rouse Bella, grab the backpack between my legs and we slide out the door on my side. Before I can organize everything in my arms, a man gets up from the table and grabs both our bags from the ground. Without saying a word, he starts walking away with them toward the building’s open door.
“Cam on ban,” I quickly thank the driver in Vietnamese before he closes the car door.
I take Bella’s hand and rush after the man with our bags, still not sure where we are. We follow him through the open warehouse door, the bright fluorescent light assaulting our eyes as we enter the room. He sets the bags down just inside the door, turns on his heel and leaves. Looking around, my eyes still adjusting, I see a woman behind a desk. She is looking down at some papers and seems not to have noticed our abrupt entrance.
“Is this the bus to Phnom Penh?” I ask, hoping she understands English. She looks at me blankly, so I hand her the tickets I’ve been clutching. “Phnom Penh?” I repeat. My now empty hand pointing to the bus outside.
“Yes. You sit there. Wait,” she replies sharply in a thick accent, and points to the chairs against the scuff marked white wall just in front of her desk.
Leaving the bags where the man dropped them, we walk over and sit in the chairs. The clock on the wall reads four forty-five, fifteen minutes until the departure time printed on our tickets. The woman at the desk has returned to whatever task we briefly interrupted. Bella is leaning against me, eyes closed, dozing off again. She is blissfully unaware of my anxiety—she trusts me completely. Backpacking with a child is like a balancing act. You want adventure, but not too much. Is this too much? Have I put my daughter in danger? No. There is a bus. And this doesn’t look like a human trafficking operation—not that I know what one looks like…
I look around the room, my heart rate starting to slow. We’re safe. We’re totally fine. The open space to the left of the door is filled with what appears to be pallets of canned food. I’m trying to make out the pictures on the cans, but a man with a dolly comes in and starts moving them out the door before I can decipher it. I hear voices and movement outside now; I get up to investigate. I take the small backpack from my lap, put it on my chair for Bella to lean on, and go look outside.
Half the men who had been sitting around a few minutes ago are now busily employed loading the bus with the pallets of food. Confused, panic returning, I turn to the woman at the desk and, pointing to the bus, ask again, “Is this the bus we are going on? The bus to Phnom Penh?”
“Yes. Ten minutes. You wait.”
I pace near the seats as the men continue moving the food from the office to the bus. I don’t see any other passengers, and I am questioning my decision to take the “local” bus more with every second that passes. The food pallets are now all gone and the clock on the wall reads two minutes past five. The bus’s engine suddenly roars to life, and I snap my head around fixing my gaze on the woman behind the desk. Bella sits up and asks me, “Is it time to go?” I look back to the woman, hoping she has the answer I don’t.
“You go now,” she says. “Bus ready.” She hands me back our tickets.
I gather our bags and we head out the door. The sky is a hazy pink now and the bus doesn’t look as bad in the soft morning light. My spirits rise a little when I see there are people —including two women—in line to board the bus. We get in line with the others and as we near the front, one of the men takes my rolling bag from me. I watch him walk to the back of the bus, lift it over his head, and hand it to another man who pulls it through the window. They must have filled the underneath with the canned food.
The interior of the bus resembles a luxury coach from the 1980’s. Sets of two, comfortable looking, captain’s chairs on either side of the aisle line the bus. The seats and aisle in the back of the bus are filled with canned food, boxes, and our luggage, which is stacked on top. The first eight rows have been left empty for passengers. We are the last ones on the bus, but several rows still sit empty. Our assigned seats are in the fourth row. As I walk past the other passengers, I realize we are the only white people on this bus. After three months of backpacking through Asia I’m used to being a minority, but this is the first time there are no other tourists anywhere. None of the passengers seem to care that we are here, so I let the thought pass as we take our seats and organize our bags around us, settling in for the nine hour journey.
The driver closes the door and the bus sluggishly lurches forward—hopefully toward Phnom Penh. Now that we’re on the bus, and there are other people with us, my anxiety starts to dull. But, I pull out my phone and open Google maps to make sure we’re headed in the right direction, anyway. Reassured that we are heading towards Cambodia, I relax, lean back in my seat, and watch the only sunrise I’ve been awake early enough to see in Vietnam. It’s beautiful and I doze off feeling as though my time in Vietnam is complete having seen it.
I’m startled awake by a man handing me two small pieces of paper. They are identical, but the writing is Vietnamese.
“What are these?” I ask. He shakes his head in response, letting me know he doesn’t speak English. I vaguely remember the blog post I read about this bus saying there would be a voucher for breakfast. I open Google Translate on my phone, turn on the camera function, and position it over the paper. “Breakfast” is one of the words in the headline. It’s enough confirmation for me. I tuck the vouchers in my pocket and close my eyes again.
Twenty minutes later, the bus stops at an open-air restaurant on the side of the road. I take out my phone and check the time, eight o’clock, before we get off the bus and head inside. Bella and I use the bathroom—a shack around a hole in the ground behind the restaurant—before exchanging our vouchers for some fresh looking baguettes. We climb back on the empty bus and resume our nap while all the other passengers are eating their breakfasts.
Our next stop is the border. When we arrive, Bella and I are the only people who have to get off the bus to purchase visas. Everyone else is either Vietnamese or Khmer, and can cross the border visa free. The bus parks and the driver points to the building where we need to go. Please don’t leave us! When we walk in the building, the officer greets us in English—thank God!—and hands us visa applications to fill out. I hand our completed forms and our passports, along with the seventy U.S. dollars I had hidden in my backpack, back to him.
“No,” he proclaims, after counting the money. “It’s forty dollars each”
I looked up the visa prices last night and the website said thirty-five dollars each. I look around for a fee list, which isn’t there, before I respond, “Your website says it’s thirty-five.”
“It’s wrong. The price increased.” He just stands there, straight faced, knowing there is nothing I can do about it. My phone won’t work in Cambodia without a new SIM, and there is no one else in the office to turn to. So, he’s right; there is nothing I can do. Luckily, I’ve read several blog posts about other travelers being cheated by corrupt officers at overland border crossings and I am prepared for it. I set aside a little extra cash before leaving this morning, just in case. I pull out another ten-dollar bill and hand it to the officer. He smiles, stamps our passports, and waves us out after handing them back. At least it’s only ten dollars and not worse.
We are walking in front of another building, heading back to the bus, when another officer stops us. “Wait,” he says. “You need a health check.”
We follow him into the small room with large windows. He walks behind the half table and produces a forehead thermometer. He waves it across each of our foreheads, writes down our temperatures then puts it back in the drawer without sanitizing it. “That will be one dollar,” he says.
“For what?” I retort.
“For your health check.”
Rather than making the bus wait longer while I argue, I think about all the stories I’ve read about people crossing borders and having to pay hundreds of dollars in bribes for false accusations, or having all of their luggage stolen. It could be worse. I reach into my backpack, grab one more dollar, hand it to him and exit the room. They must need this money more than I do. We walk back to the still waiting bus, once a source of trepidation, now of relief, and climb aboard. The driver welcomes us back with a smile. We take our seats and cross safely into Cambodia.
I watch out the window as the landscape begins to change slightly. The houses of the Khmer people look different from those in the countryside of Vietnam, less thatch and more clay. The script on signs is different now, too. It’s the first time we’ve been in a country with an alphabet that is illegible to us. I wonder if this bus, where we are the only English speakers, and our less than ideal border crossing are precursors to our month in Cambodia. Or, is today’s experience an oddity and Cambodia will be just as amazing as the rest of Asia has been?
After a few hours of driving, the picturesque countryside gives way to more urban landscapes. There are large buildings and heavy traffic out the window now. Is this Phnom Penh? Is there more than one stop? Will someone tell us when to get off? I look around to assess the mood of the other passengers. Most people are napping, and everything is calm. A few minutes more and the bus turns and stops in the middle of a side road.
Tuk tuks are zooming around the stationary bus. People are gathering their things preparing to disembark. I stand up too.
“Is this Phnom Penh?” I ask the person rising from the seat in front of me. They just smile. I look out the window and see a group of tuk tuks outside the bus waiting for passengers to alight. I turn around to question the people behind me when I see my luggage being pushed through the back window and handed to a man standing below on the street.
“I think we’re here,” I say to Bella. She smiles, glad to be getting off the bus. We grab our bags and shuffle to the front of the bus with the other passengers. Everyone is getting off and this reassures me we are in the right place.
Immediately after stepping on the pavement, one of the tuk tuk drivers asks, “Where are you going?”
“Double Leaf Boutique Hotel,” I tell him. “How much to take us there?”
“Six dollars,” he replies. His smiling round face makes me smile, too.
“Ok,” I respond. Strange, he told me in U.S. dollars. “I need to stop at an ATM, though. Is that Ok?” I add, realizing I don’t have any riel to pay him with.
“Sure. No problem,” he says with a smile. He grabs our rolling bag from the pile below the window and guides us over to his tuk tuk. We climb in with our bags and suddenly I’m so excited to finally be riding in a tuk tuk—something I have wanted to do since I began researching Asia a year ago! We clamber in the open back of the motorbike-powered cab, that loosely resembles an old horse drawn coach, and sit together on the purple seat facing forward. Bella and I are all smiles as we cruise down the road taking in the sights and smells of Phnom Penh. The hot humid air encircling us blows away the stress of the day.
In just a few minutes we pull up in front of a bank of red and white ATMs that read “Bank of Canada” on them. The driver points to them and says, “I will wait.”
Bella and I walk over to an unoccupied ATM, leaving our bags in the tuk tuk, trusting him not to drive away since I haven’t paid him yet. The backpack containing all our important items rests securely on my back. As I approach the ATM, I realize I don’t know the exchange rate and my phone doesn’t work yet to look it up. I’ll just pull out thirty thousand riel. That should be ok for now. I punch 3-0-0-0-0 on the keys when prompted, then hit enter. “Insufficient funds” flashes across the screen. I must have hit the wrong key. I try again. But again the machine reads “Insufficient funds.” Maybe it’s a higher exchange rate? I try one more time, this time for twenty-thousand riel, but still, no. Oh fuck.
I run back toward the tuk tuk and shout to the driver, “What is the exchange rate?”
“U.S. dollars,” he responds.
“Yes, in U.S. dollars. How many riel?”
“U.S. dollars,” he says again.
“No,” I shout in frustration. I repeat slowly and loudly, “How many riel in a U.S. dollar?”
“U.S. dollars,” he shouts again.
Why doesn’t he understand? Panicked that my card doesn’t work in Cambodia for some reason, and not sure what to do, I head back toward the ATM to see if I can check my balance. As I’m entering the vestibule, I see someone stepping out of the ATM next to me folding a stack of bills that look like U.S. dollars. Does this ATM give U.S. dollars? I go back in and this time I punch in 5-0, then hit enter. Two twenty dollar bills and one ten dollar bill appear below in the cash dispenser. Thank God! I have no clue why there is American money coming from these ATMs, but I am so relieved that I don’t even care. I retrieve my card and we return to the tuk tuk.
Our hotel is only a few miles more down the road. All the way there, I can’t help laughing at myself for all the unnecessary anxiety I created today, just because I didn’t understand. When we arrive at the hotel, I pay the driver and remove our bags from the back. The hotel is lovely, and after the ups and downs of another travel day, I am ready to check in, relax, and enjoy whatever Phnom Penh has in store for us.