I travelled a long way and saw a lot of stuff today. Too much to take in really, and certainly too much to adequately put into words. As it turned out, I didn't get any more sleep last night, so I was very tired most of the day.

I checked out of the Atlanta and got myself to Hualamphong station by about 5am. The first thing I did there was get my ticket, which was only 48 baht, not 140 baht, as I read somewhere. Being so early, I wasn't able to have my usual pancake, toast and coffee at the Atlanta, because the dining room opens at 6:30, so I got a tuna sandwich from the mini-mart in the station. It was so good I went back and got another one.

The train from Bangkok to Aranya Prathet was a 3rd class train. These trains have timber bench seats, and fans, though the fans are never used because all of the windows are usually opened right up. Travelling out of Bangkok at 6am was actually nice - it was still dark, the air was cool, and the city was very peaceful. As the train passed through the city I got to see people going about their early morning routines in the shanty's and cheap apartment blocks near the railway line. Sometimes the train would pass by an outdoor kitchen, and I could smell smoke from the charcoal stoves and the meat cooking thereon.

At first, the countryside outside Bangkok was the familiar rice fields with farm houses on stilts, but as the train progressed eastward into I-San Thai (eastern Thailand) the land became dryer, and the rice fields gave way to grassy paddocks where cows and buffalo graze. There are still rice fields in I-San, but it's not the lush green velvet landscape that you see in Northern and Central Thailand.

After around 6 hours on the train, we arrived at Aranya Prathet. I hadn't even gotten my bag down from the overhead shelf when a tour operator asked me if I wanted to go to Siam Reap. His price was $US5 which seemed okay (perhaps a little high) so I let myself be drawn into the usual process of first being coralled with all the other backpack equiped foreigners, and then partitioned off into groups to board a mini bus.

The border area was more than I expected from my experience at the Thai / Burmese border near Mae Sot. The Poipet crossing (about 5 or 6 km from Aranya Prathet) is an incredible example of ordered chaos. Before any of us had gotten off the bus, dark skinned kids (not sure if they were Cambodian or I-San) surrounded our bus. A couple came up to my window hands outstretched and calling out "1 baht. 1 baht". When I got off the bus I decided to give the half a packet of chips that had to the kids. As soon as I made the first movement of extending my hand in offering, one of the kids snatched the chips from my hand, and another kid leapt at him to try to wrestle the chips away. When we started walking towards the border post, a couple of other kids with umbrellas came up to a girl who was with the tour and shaded the girl with the umbrellas all the way to the immigration office.

Aside from the swarms of kids who hassle foreigners and scrounge through rubbish bins, every day, hundreds of Cambodian's trek across the border into Thailand, mostly pulling man-drawn carts laden with wares that they sell to Thai merchants, and foreign tourists. I didn't get to browse through the market (which I wanted to do) because the tour operator was keen to get us through immigration so we could get on the next bus, but it looked really interesting. I'm considering making a day trip back to the Poipet border post when I'm back in Thailand just to look around the market and to try to take in the chaos there a little better.

Eventually we went through the departures queue at the Thai immigration office, and through the arrivals queue at the Cambodian immigration office. After everyone with the tour had been processed (which took about 2 hours) we got onto different busses and started the trip to Siam Reap.

Siam Reap is about 90 km from Poipet, but the trip took around 5 hours. This is mainly due to the incredibly poor state of the roads. There were some sealed sections (punctuated by flurries of potholes) but most of the road is a rough dirt (hardend mud really) road. It's been very dry, and everytime a vehicle passes along the road it kicks up a massive plume of dust (we had to stop a couple of times due to poor visibility). Everything along the roadside is covered with a layer of dust, including banana trees, houses, unused vehicles, and people who stand still too long. The countryside was much like that in I-San, though there were a lot more cows and buffalo, and more haystacks along the side of the road. In some of the villages there were also donkey drawn carts, which I had never seen in Thailand. Only after we'd been travelling for a couple of hours did we see any rice fields,

The villages that we passed through were extremely interesting. They were much more basic than those I've seen in Thailand. There were some houses of similar construction to the traditional Thai houses, but thatched buildings were more common. As dusk approached we saw people bathing in the traditional way, but standing in a canal, or a dam and sluicing water over their heads with a plastic bucket. Girls bathe with a sarong wrapped around them, and boys bathe in shorts. Also at around this time of the day, there were cooking fires everywhere, especially in the villages, but also outside them along the roadside. There was smoke everywhere.

We arrived into Siam Reap at around 8pm, and the tour operator showed us a couple of guesthouses. I chose to stay at "The Orchid Guesthouse" which reminds me a little of "The Lotus Gardens" where I stayed in Sukhothai. The upstairs level, where my room is is constructed of teak, and the floors are bare timber. The Cambodian staff are extremely eager to make your stay a pleasant one. While I had a snack of a chocolate pancake and lemon tea, I was handed the remote 3 times and instructed to pick any show I wanted, but I was happy watching CNN.