Six months ago, I thought that itchy feet were a genetic disorder, doomed never to go away, no matter how much I travelled.
I’ve always had itchy feet. I’ve always longed to travel.
But now, after nearly six months of being constantly on the go, living out of a suitcase, not spending more than 5 nights in one place and not knowing where I’m heading next, I can officially report: Itchy Feet Can Be Cured.
I’m ready to go home.
Yes, Real Life has a lot of admin to deal with – bills, work, shopping, washing up, cleaning, hassle. And of course I’m not excited about any of that. But Travelling also has a lot of admin, just of a different flavour – figuring out places to stay, trying to find the right kind of food (three times a day), finding out how to get from here to there with the least amount of hassle and the smallest cost, searching for an ATM that accepts international cards and will give you the amount of money you’re asking for. There’s a lot of inconvenience about travelling – you have to do things now because there’s no option to wait until later (even as I type I’m thinking that we have to go for dinner soon and I don’t have any food on me). When you run out of cash, there’s nobody to borrow from. When you need to get somewhere, there’s nobody to give you a lift.
I’m really looking forward to the ease of being at home. People speaking my language. Food that I recognise. A bit of good old-fashioned stability.
And yes, we will miss the adventure… It has been the most extraordinary adventure imagineable. But I think there are small adventures to be had in real life. I’ll keep you posted on that.
For now, I have to go and pack my suitcase (for the 1657th time), find some dinner, and go to bed early. 4.30am wake-up call tomorrow, for our 33 hours of travel till we reach Cape Town. We’ve just recorded our last video diary, so that will go up soon, and there are a few more moments to share with you.
But this is the Last Real Blog Post. After six months! Crazy…
We travelled from Iguassu Falls to Buenos Aires last night, an incredibly easy hop over the border from Brazil to Argentina (an absolute dream, actually – we didn’t even have to get out of the car!), a couple of hours wait in the bus station, and then a 20 hour bus ride.
20 hours.
Tiring.
It was a super comfortable bus, kind of like business class airline seats, with lots of room to spread out and some great scenery passing by before the sun went down. They even served food! Which was more problematic than you might think… Argentina is an hour earlier than Brazil, so we started getting hungry around 6.30pm (7.30pm on our body clock). For some reason, they didn’t pick up the dinner to serve us until 9.45pm (10.45pm on my body clock!) and I was hungrier than I can ever remember being. I was sitting there clenching my fists to keep from grabbing the bus attendant and shaking him. I tried telling them I was diabetic and needed food, but they didn’t seem to understand my urgency. I tell you, a hungry diabetic is a scary thing – I wasn’t low, I had supplies against low blood sugar (juice and fruit, not much good for hunger), but I felt crazy with hunger.
When it finally arrived, I ate everything in sight in about 3.5 minutes. Cheese, ham, biscuits, roll, pasta, all of it, gone!
So we pulled into Buenos Aires this morning, found our lovely spacious room, and are slowly settling in to the charming area of San Telmo. Only. We’ve just found out the sponsorship we were hoping for for our internal flights hasn’t come through, so we have to pay a small fortune to get ourselves from here back to Rio de Janeiro for our flight home; and it looks like we won’t be able to afford our one final indulgence – a trip to Patagonia, to see the Glacier Moreno, the last advancing glacier in the world.
And I’m disappointed. I think I’ve been very good and grown-up about the disappointment of having to go home early, and miss out Peru and Ecuador, I’ve swallowed it down and understood that things happen as they should. But this? This feels sad. I’ve been wanting to go to Patagonia for such a long time, it’s the one thing Mark and I have been referencing constantly.
Bleeurgh.
So now I feel tired. Perhaps this is travel weariness, perhaps it’s finally hit. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow, after a good sleep and a steak, I’ll be all raring to go and discover this gorgeous city. But for now? Time for a lie down, methinks.
Yesterday was so awful that I feel the need to get it off my chest, before I catch you up on Our Most Eventful Week Ever (capital letters intended).
It was without doubt the worst diabetic day I’ve had since I came out of hospital post-diagnosis.
Before I begin, let me explain some numbers, so that what I say makes sense to you:
Non-diabetics (normal people) have blood sugar between 4 and 7. Diabetics should always aim for below 10 – 7 is the magic number, but I’m happy anytime I test in the 8s too. Between 10 and 12 is high, over 12 is really high, over 16 is dangerously high and I start panicking. I’m hardly ever over 16 – it means something has gone very wrong (i.e. my insulin isn’t working).
Yesterday, Thursday the 10th of December, promised to be a somewhat challenging day before it began. We woke up in Cemoro Lawang, the mountainous village not far from Gunung Bromo, the most famous volcano in Java, Indonesia. The plan was that at 9am we would catch a public minibus down the mountain to Probolinggo (1 hour), then catch a train to Banyuwangi (5 and a half hours), then catch a ferry to the port of Denpasar (45 minutes), a bus to Denpasar city (3 and a half hours), and a taxi to Sanur (20 minutes), where we would finally be in Bali and wouldn’t move for 5 days. That’s what was keeping me going: the thought of staying put for a few days. I’ve had a cold all week, so my blood sugar has been slightly high the last few days (I blamed it on infection and simply took more insulin). All in all, though, I was feeling strong.
Everything went smoothly till I tested my sugar two hours after breakfast (we’d just boarded the train) and found it was 15.9 – crazy high considering I’d taken slightly more insulin than usual at breakfast, because of my cold. I thought maybe I was going high because it was so hot (SO hot, like sitting in a humid oven, and we’d been waiting on the platform for an hour) and took another 3 units of insulin, which would definitely take me down to below 10. So far, not too worried.
Two hours later, I tested to see if the insulin had worked (you have to wait 2 hours for it to get into your system).
It hadn’t. I was still really high – 13.4.
So I deduced that the heat had killed my insulin, and took a fresh pen from the cool pack in my backpack. Not too worried. Fresh insulin would sort me out in 2 hours. I had a small lunch, took a generous injection, and waited.
2 hours is a long time to wait when you’re not feeling too well and not sure what your blood sugar is going to do.
When I tested at 3.45pm my blood sugar was 18. The highest it’s been since I came out of hospital over two years ago and figured out carbohydrate counting. The 2nd pen had obviously also been heat damaged, and wasn’t working at all.
And this, dear friends, is when I freaked out. Because if an insulin pen that was in my cool pack wasn’t working, that means that all the insulin pens in my cool pack might not be working. I’ve been as careful as possible with my insulin, but as you know it was left out of the fridge for 2 days last month, and most of the places we’ve been staying in lately haven’t had fridges, so it’s been going in a communal fridge. The weather is so hot here that to take it in and out of the fridge probably doesn’t help, and I’d come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t as effective as fresh insulin. But if it wasn’t working at all that was dangerous. Really dangerous.
We were only due to arrive in Sanur after 10pm. If the next insulin pen didn’t work I wouldn’t be able to eat anything until we could find a hospital or emergency room that could sell me insulin. We’d have to buy insulin to last the next 3 weeks. Who knows if that wouldn’t get heat damaged too – Bali is having its hottest summer ever known.
But on top of all these fears racing around my head was one clear question: Were we idiots for trying to do this? Was 4 months too long to travel in sub-tropical climates with diabetes? Was I being really stupid and careless with my health? For the first time since we left home, I felt scared. I wanted to go home.
But of course I couldn’t. I had a ferry to catch. Two hours later, on board the ferry to Bali, I checked my blood sugar again, and Hallelujah, Praise Every God in Heaven, it was fine. Totally fine. So now I’ve found a magic insulin pen that still works perfectly. I need to test all my others so that I don’t have another yesterday happening to me again in a hurry.
When we finally arrived after 11pm last night, I was completely exhausted and hollowed out. I can handle travelling with a bad cold and stuffy head. I can handle a 14 hour journey. I can handle high blood sugar for 8 or 9 hours (although I’d rather not have to ever again, thank you very much). But a 14 hour journey with a bad cold and high blood sugar is too much for me. Being that high is so awful. I couldn’t stop crying, my head felt full of clouds, my body felt weird and hot, and there was no sense of balance in me, no rational thought to cling to. I honestly haven’t felt scared of being diabetic since I got my eating plan and got it under control over two years ago. Yesterday was the first time that I really felt the weight of my condition.
Poor Mark was wonderful. Calm and soothing and practical, figuring out how we could get to a doctor or a hospital as soon as we arrived, and not getting freaked out by my constant tears.
And now, today, I feel shaky. My blood sugar is fine and I’m eating really normal food to keep it that way. I’m going to test the other insulin pens over the next two days and chuck out anything that doesn’t work, so I’m pretty sure this won’t happen again. Yesterday, of all the days of this wonderful trip, is one day I would not want to repeat. Not for anything.
And just recovering from the trip here. Well, the busy week leading up to the trip here, and then the actual trip itself.
I foolishly thought that because we were flying (from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh at 2pm and then from Ho Chi Minh to Jakarta at 8pm, arriving at 11.30pm) that it would be easier than a land border crossing. Well, no. Yes and no – the actual travel was easier, but finding real food (at a semi-reasonable price) in an international airport is a nightmare, and all the waiting around in queues is pretty exhausting.
And, of course, as is now common, my blood sugar was crazy all day. I think I might be allergic to border crossings.
Actually, I started a new insulin pen the night before, and realised when my sugar went through the roof at breakfast (17! One of the highest readings I’ve ever had!) that it wasn’t working. At all. Of course, seeing as I was high and not thinking straight I’d already given myself a come-down shot by the time I figured this out, and seeing as insulin on its own is usually pretty powerful (even if it’s not working 100%), I didn’t want to jab twice and risk going low on the plane.
Turns out the bad pen wasn’t working at all, so I stayed high for hours until I could test again after lunch. Bleerurgh. By now I was feeling truly rotten. Emotional, irrational, cotton wooly, hot and cold, all kinds of horrible.
I had taken a new pen from my luggage before we checked it in (thank goodness!) and the moment the insulin started to work I felt instantly better – like a fog lifting.
So we arrived in Jakarta at about half past midnight and woke up exhausted yesterday. Mark had a cold, I had a whole heap of tiredness, and we’ve spent the interleding day and a bit catching our breath and aiming for somewhere halfway human. We’re staying at the very comfortable, extremely stylish Alila Jakarta (a lovely business hotel) which is the perfect place to gather our energies. Feeling a LOT better today (both of us), and we’re off travelling and finally seeing a bit of Java in Indonesia tomorrow.
We’ve actually recorded a new video diary, too, but we still have to process it so it’ll be a tad delayed. I think we need a slight break from all the constant uploads too, so if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be taking it easy for the next couple of days!
In the meantime, any tips about Indonesia (on here, on Twitter, or on Facebook) are, as always, appreciated…
Yip, it had to happen. Two and a half months in, and although I’ve had disheartened days and sad days and bad diabetes days, I hadn’t had a freak out, till this morning.
Let me set the scene…
The last couple of days have been really interesting – we left the chaos and colour of Ho Chi Minh City on a late-night (11pm) overnight train to Danang, which was actually a lot of fun. We chose the soft-sleeper option, a four-bed sleeping compartment which we shared with two older American guys, who left at 5.30am so we had the whole cabin to ourselves for the rest of the day. Lovely! We could have flown for almost the same price, but we wanted to see some of the countryside, and I’m so glad we did…. It was stunning. Loads of rice paddies and local farmers and gorgeous scenery. I loved it (and just realised that I was so busy videoing it that I didn’t take any photos! How foolish of me). We arrived in Danang in the late afternoon, and headed to a beachside hostel that came highly recommended.
Not really our usual cup of tea – very basic accommodation and without doubt the hardest beds and worst water pressure we’ve had in any place so far – but we were won over by all the reviews of the lovely owners and the communal dinners. The dinners were fabulous, everyone heads down to the dining room and the family brings out big plates of food to share – incredible baby spring rolls, fresh grilled fish, tofu, a chicken dish, piles of vegetables, rice and noodles. YUM. What’s even better, though, is that because you’re all sitting at a communal table, it’s impossible not to start chatting, and make friends. It’s funny, most of the time I don’t really notice the absence of friends, but any time I do we meet some lovely people and make new ones – I suppose it’s one of the rhythms of travelling.
Anyway! To cut a long story short – we had a lovely two days in Danang, wandering around the town, swimming in the sea, and eating delicious communal dinners. Our room didn’t have a mini bar fridge (as most of our rooms do), so when we arrived I asked the lady at the front desk to put my bag of insulin in the fridge – and pointed at a fridge in the room. She nodded and said, “Fridge, yes, fridge, no problem,” then took my insulin off to another room – which they often do, to take it to a fridge with more space.
No problem! I thought, and sat down to dinner.
This morning, when we checked out, I asked for my insulin, and she went over to the safe, which was a cupboard, and took out the bag of insulin. So it had been sitting – unrefrigerated! – since we arrived two days before. Not only that, the room it was in wasn’t even air conditioned (as our bedroom was), so it had been sitting at room temperature or higher for two days.
I lost it. For two and a half months I’ve been carrying around this precious bag of medicine, making sure it’s kept safe and cold every time we stop anywhere, and now, because of a miscommunication and me believing that when a word was repeated back at me it meant that word was understood, it had all been put in jeopardy. I burst into tears, and it took me a loooong time to calm down.
I’m feeling better now, obviously, but I have yet to test out the insulin to find out if it’s okay… We’re about to go out for dinner now and I’m going to test it then. Please say many prayers to any god you know that it is, or I’m going to have to stock up from a doctor in town, and there goes any budget we have.
Ironically enough, yesterday was World Diabetes Day (we didn’t have internet, so I couldn’t blog), and this morning – before the drama – I was planning a blog post on why I’m grateful for diabetes. That will come soon, I promise!
… I get really sick of being diabetic. Today is one of those days, I’m afraid.
The last day or two I’ve had pretty crazy blood sugar – really high and really low, which is unusual for me. Yesterday, Border Crossing Day, was particularly bad. I was strangely high after breakfast, then strangely low a few hours later, low again before lunch and then high after lunch, despite having taken enough insulin. I couldn’t figure it out – I’d changed my short-acting (daytime) insulin a few days before, so I couldn’t blame that, and I was sure I was taking enough for the food I was eating. I actually started thinking I might have some kind of allergic reaction to crossing borders – that the stress of avoiding scams and waking up really early and figuring out a new country’s code of conduct made my blood sugar go haywire.
Not a particularly medically sound diagnosis but, you know…
It was only as I was lying on a garden lounger watching the sun set over the sea that I hit upon the answer. I think it was from watching a fishing boat bob in the waves – it made me think that my blood sugar readings didn’t seem to have an anchor, they were really up and really down. Anchoring blood sugar is the job not of your daytime (short-acting) insulin, but your nighttime (long-acting) insulin – the one I take every night before I go to bed. And that made me realise that although I’d changed my daytime pen a few days before, because it wasn’t working properly and had obviously been heat-damaged, I stupidly hadn’t changed my nighttime pen (extremely foolish, seeing as I carry them around in the same bag). D’oh!
But still , a solution! I went to dinner feeling rather pleased with myself, and made sure to take a fresh pen out of the cooler full of insulin I kept in the fridge.
And then.
I woke up this morning feeling like death-warmed-up. Exhausted, heavy and with flashing eyes, a sign that a migraine was just around the corner. It wasn’t a fully-fledged migraine, I must admit, but it was enough to send me back to bed, miserable, head pounding and feeling nauseous. Not a great first day in paradise!
I’ve just surfaced now, after 3pm, and I’m feeling somewhat human again, but pissed off at diabetes. I feel like it’s one of the only conditions that never gives you a break (this may be an emotional rather than a logical statement). If you work too hard and abuse your body, you’ll usually get a cold or flu or feel rundown, but if you catch it in time you’ll be fine. If you drink too much you’ll usually get a hangover, but sometimes you’ll be fine. But if you have a crazy blood sugar day, even if you figure out the problem and sleep 11 hours and do all you can to rectify it, it still punishes you with a bad health day the next day. I know, I know, you can’t look at it as punishment, but that’s what it feels like today. I want to say to my body: “Seriously, can you not give me one day off? Can the diabetes not take a back seat for one day? Please?’
But of course it can’t.
That’s the whole beauty of a chronic condition, it never takes a day off.
And just for today, I wish it were otherwise.
Tomorrow I’ll be chirpy and feeling well again, I’m sure. For today? I’m taking it reaaaallly easy. I think I’ll go for a stroll in the garden, check out some of the indigenous trees, and maybe take a dip in the ocean. Restore my perspective a little. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
PS – It’s a few hours later, and my blood sugar has stabilized, so I feel like myself again. I’ve also remembered that a side-effect of high blood sugar is that it makes me irritable… Something to bear in mind next time I’m blogging on a high!
I’ve been a bit slack on the blogging front lately, sorry…
We’ve been in the small riverside town of Kratie, on the Mekong River, and we had to pay a small fortune to go online so I didn’t want to blog till I didn’t have any time pressures. Now we’re back in Phnom Penh, the capital city, and I have some time to reflect on the past week or so.
It’s been a pretty heavy couple of days.
When we left Bangkok to go up to the North of Thailand, we discovered a magical land of trees, forest and mountains, a world away from the chaos of the city… So we were hoping something similar would happen when we left the chaos of Phnom Penh (an ugly, dirty, smelly city if ever there was one). But Kratie was just as dirty as the city, just as unkempt, and unfortunately without a whole lot of beauty. It was right on the Mekong River, which was cool, and there were parts of it that were really quite charming in a colonial kind of way, but it was violently run down and with piles of rubbish everywhere. It was quite troubling, actually, this attitude that many Cambodians seem to have about keeping their surroundings clean and habitable. Mark and I both remarked on it in this week’s video diary, which you can watch here.
Kratie was pretty wonderful for two reasons, though:
1. We got to watch the rare Irrawaddy dolphins playing in the Mekong River. There are only about 70 of them left in the world, and we were able to take a boat out into their habitat and sit quietly to one side as they frolicked around… Pretty incredible.
See how happy I look?
2. We found a kettle!! Oh happy day. It’s been such a mission getting hold of a cup of decent tea in Cambodia, I can’t even tell you. They serve hot tea either black or with condensed milk (yeeuch) and sometimes they don’t even have black tea, only green (I know it’s much better for you, but I simply don’t like it, sorry!) On the rare occassions I managed to get hold of a cup of tea, it was overpriced and tiny. I was not a happy tea drinker.
And then we found this beauty:
We spent four days in Kratie, catching up on work (writing and photography), sleeping in and learning a little about the local culture, which still largely confuses us. There was a big boat race on Sunday, our last day there, and honestly it just looked like a whole lot of people hanging out in the sun, playing screechingly loud discordant music, and watching a couple of boats ride up and down the river every half an hour or so. Not too dissimilar from a rugby match, I suppose!
On Monday morning we had booked our tickets back to Phnom Penh – a six hour ride in a 3rd class bus, which wasn’t toooo bad on the way up. Except that on Sunday night Mark felt a little funny, and on Monday morning I woke up with a screaming headache and nausea. I had hardly slept the night before and I had a whole rash of curious little red bites on my neck (could they have been bed bugs?) All of which resulted in me being sick on the bus in the first hour of a six hour ride with no air con, plenty of filth, and lots of people spitting food in the aisles, spitting out of the bus, hocking up phlegm into their hands and blowing their noses into their hands. It was truly disgusting. An interesting look at a different culture, but not too good for my tender stomach, especially when we were screaming around corners at high speed and dodging potholes, cows and water buffalos. I felt like a prissy Westernized princess. I suppose in many ways I still am…
We arrived in our lovely CLEAN guest house last night, and then first thing this morning we caught a tuktuk (check out a ride on one of these treasures here!) to the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum. Phew.
I actually think I need a day or two to gather my thoughts about what we saw this morning. It depressed me so deeply that I felt as if someone was pushing down on my shoulders and weighing down my heart. So so heavy. I’ll write down some reflections on it soon, I promise…
Tell me, though, what are your perceptions of Cambodia? When you think of it, what springs to mind? I wonder if the perception and the reality fit together at all.
Can I just say that there is nothing, NOTHING more annoying than having high blood sugar when it isn’t your fault?
The last couple of days I’ve had strangely high numbers after taking enough (and sometimes more than enough) insulin, but not every single time, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of exhaustion / jet lag / new country / resting versus exercise / malaria medication / any other number of permutations that could make my blood sugar go high.
This morning, though, I ate a very normal breakfast (fruit, cereal, eggs) and took more than the necessary amount of insulin, thinking that if I went low I have plenty of snacks in my room. But instead of going low I am high. Abnormally high. Which means the last couple of days of bad blood glucose readings weren’t my fault – my insulin isn’t working 100%.
GRRRRR!!!
It’s the equivalent of getting a hangover without drinking anything – all the punishment without any of the fun.
And yes, I’ve put this one insulin pen through a lot in the last two weeks – travelling from the heat and humidity of Bangkok to the autumn sun of Vienna, via over 10 hours on a plane, and then back again, then on a long train and a long bus and in the flooded heat of Siem Reap. Perhaps this is too much to ask of a poor insulin pen… It’s used to staying in a stable temperature and environment, I can understand that.
But it still makes me mad!! I’m t.i.r.e.d today. And part of that is definitely because we’ve been traveling so much. But part of it is also because I’ve been high for the last few days, and I had to wait this long to figure out why.
Yesterday, 1st October 2009, exactly a month since we left, was HECTIC.
Allow me to set the scene before I give you a blow-by-blow… I arrived back in Bangkok, Thailand, from a really busy (and fascinating) 4 days in Vienna. 10 hour flight, 14 hours in transit, 5 hour time difference. My second dose of jetlag in a week. The idea was to spend 2 days recovering, catching our breath and resting before the trek to Cambodia. Except my flight landed late, we had to wait an extra hour for the bus, and the traffic in Bangkok was crazy. So we only arrived at about 5.30pm, and then found out that the only bus that would get us to Cambodia in one day (and thereby avoid sleeping in a dodgy border town) left at 5.55am. So let’s change that two days into one. The day after that one day…
* 2am: Woke up sweating, heart pounding, head floating, and craving sugar. A night-time low, my absolute worst (and as far as I can tell, without direct cause – I’ve taken notes trying to find the source of a night-time low. Anyone have the answer for me?) After a super-sweet juice and a couple of miniature bananas, my heart rate slowed enough for me to go back to bed and try to fall asleep again (now 2.20am)
* 4.30am: Alarm went off to wake us for the day. Dragged myself out of bed, showered, drank tea. Had stupidly decided in my exhaustion the night before that I could quickly pack in the morning. Baaaad idea. We both scrambled to get everything packed in time to catch a taxi at 5.20am, to get to the train station in time for our 5.55am train.
* 5.30am. Still in the hotel room. Torrential rain outside. Pitch dark.
* 5.35am. Run through the rain with a backpack and suitcase each, desperately trying to protect our electronic valuables with an umbrella. There is water everywhere – huge puddles every footstep. We’re too late to care.
* 5.40am. In the taxi, at last. Our train leaves in 15 minutes. The hotel recommended we allow 20 minutes to travel. Thai trains are notoriously punctual. I chant a prayer the whole way to the train station – we’ve already bought our tickets and transfer tickets and they’re non-refundable.
* 5.51am. Arrive at the train station, throw money at the taxi driver, and run to the train. Find a seat just as it departs.
* 5.55am to 11.40am. Train ride. 3rd class seats only, so they’re a little hard (and dirty), and all the windows are open. None of the cushioned air-conditioned luxury we’ve been treated to on Thai trains before, but the tickets were ridiculously cheap, the scenery is fascinating, and we’re too tired to care.
* 10.21am. High blood sugar, for no reason. Makes me feel emotional (let’s make that extra-emotional, given the exhaustion, the jetlag, the low this morning, and the inability to sleep on the train).
* 11.42am. Met at the train station by a very nice man from the company we booked our transfer with. He takes us to a songthaew (a kind of open-backed, covered truck) where another very nice man drives us to what is supposedly the border between Thailand and Cambodia, but is actually a ‘consulate’s office’, one of the famous border scams. Two men dressed in official-looking costumes sit behind a desk with Thai and Cambodian flags, hand you official-looking forms, and ask you for 1200 baht each for a visa ($36 US dollars). When you say that you’d rather just get a $20 visa at the border, they tell you it’s impossible, and that it will take 3 days. We’d read all about the scam, so we insisted.
* Noon to 1pm. Made our way through the maze of scams and false stories out of Thailand, across the stretch of mud to the Cambodian border, where we went through a ‘quarantine’ (had our temperatures checked) and got a $20 visa no problem. Then we waited at the ‘bus station’ (a couple of benches just around the corner from the border, next to a stretch of mud) for our bus, which we had paid for in Bangkok, and was supposed to leave at 2pm.
* 2.35pm. An hour and a half later, still no bus. Eventually arrives and takes us to the bus station, where we catch another bus, which will supposedly take us to Siem Reap Bus Station or Market, depending who you ask. Either way, no problem to catch a tuk tuk to our guest house, they assure us.
* 3pm. We are now officially on the road, and officially in one of the tourist scam buses we had read about. I’m not quite sure how, because we’d booked from the State Railways of Thailand information desk, so you’d think it was all above-board. You’d think wrong. Our trip will take us 4 hours, so we’ll arrive at 7pm, after dark and, we’ve now been told, at a guest house that offers a ‘special deal’ for tourists (the special deal being that any tourist who checks in earns a $7 commission for the bus driver).
* 5.15pm. Mark keeps saying that the landscape around us looks flooded (there was a typhoon in this general area a couple of days ago, but we’d heard that it was concentrated elsewhere). I keep telling him maybe that’s just what Cambodia looks like.
* 6.53pm. We finally pull into Siem Reap, and it is F.L.O.O.D.E.D. People walking down the street with water up to their knees. Our bus making waves that wash over motorbikes. No distinction between the river and the street. Water water everywhere.
* 6.58pm. The bus driver tries to convinces us that the area we’ve booked a guest house in is severely flooded, but we don’t trust him (the dirty scammer) so we get a tuk tuk to take us there anyway.
* 7.09pm. He wasn’t kidding. The water is so high that it washes up over our feet while the tuk tuk is driving. Eventually it gets so bad that we get out and walk (the water is up to our lower thighs) while the tuk tuk valiantly carries our suitcases to the door.
* 7.15pm. We arrive! At last. Our guest house is clean and comfortable, and above ground (i.e. no flood water, thank goodness!) We have made it through over 13 hours on the road, without sleep, with jetlag and, oh did I forget to mention? Our first two days on anti-malarial tablets, which tend to make you tired and a bit under-the-weather.
So all in all, I’m going to go ahead and say that was our most hectic day yet.
