Siem Reip to Phom Phen to HCMC

This was another long day of travelling.  We woke up early to catch our boat, but the people at the hostel had booked us onto the bus instead, we argued the toss for a few minutes, but it was to late to get to the boat by this time and we had to settle for the bus.  I was pretty gutted as I'd been looking forwards to the boat ride down cambodia, it was something Id told people at home I wanted to do, I was really loking forwards to it, and due to a simple mix up there was now no chance of doing it. 

Anyway, we made it to the bus station minutes before the bus was due to leave.  It was a 6 hour ride to Phnom Penh.  In Phnom Penh we had a 1 1/2 hour wait for our next bus, we found a travel agent to book the bus, and got online to find and book somewhere to stay in HCMC, then got some sandwiches and drinks in a cafe next door.

  The next bus would take us over the border.  The crossing wasnt great, we were the only white people, and the only women.  At the border we had to get off the bus, get our bags, go through security, where the man who was scanning the bags demanded $1 form us for no reason.  Sam told him, in no uncertain terms to get away from us and he left us alone! After the border we were sent back onto the bus, which took us into HCMC, Vietnam.  The traffic in the city was crazy, a bus crashed into the back of ours but both buses just kept going, no swapping of insurance details or whiplash claims here!

 We stopped at the side of the road and the bus steward told us that this was our stop, we got off and he told us to get in a waiting taxi, we gave the driver the address of the hotel we'd booked earlier.

The hotel, was called the 'Apple hotel' the logo was the same as Apple (the Ipod people!), no copywrite laws in Vietnam!  Checking in was a bit of an ordeal as no one spoke English.  We were shown to our room, as the door opened a masive cockroach ran across the room and under the bed.  The room was pretty grim, there was a note on the back of the door that said 'lock door', the only problem with that was that the door didnt really lock, there was a lock but the door frame was broken.   We were starving so we went out to look for food, we walked for ages but everywhere was closed.  We eventually found a small cafe, we had fried rice and something that claimed to be chicken, which was actually quite good.  When we got back to the hotel we decided to give the shower a miss, it was grim.  We also decided that we would sleep in our sleeping bags for the first time, the beds were also grim.  Steph actually slept on the litlte sofa as she really didnt like the look of the bed!