With the benefit of hindsight, and 16 hours sleep, it appears that my trip to Aranya Prathet was not as good an idea as it first seemed.

It would have been good, but as it turns out, most of the traders there are selling second hand clothing. There's hundreds of sellers, and each specializes in a certain range of products. There's sellers with hundreds of pairs of wrinkled second-hand American jeans, sellers with wrinkled second-hand t-shirts, second-hand shoe traders and a whole lane of handbag briefcase and luggage sellers. There's also traders who sell new cooking utensils - everything from packs of cheap wooden chopsticks, to woks, pots and pans, and gas cooking stoves. There's hardware, rice sellers. The people at the market are mostly Thai's and Khmer's buying or selling. There's also girls with flat cane plates covered with cooked fish that they try to sell to the shoppers and traders. Also, like at the Mae Sot border post with Burma, there's guys who approach you and whip out a packet of cigarettes or sunglasses and try to sell them to you. I passed up a number of opportunities to buy genuine Police and Rayban sunglasses, which the guys trying to flog them off assured me came from Italy.