Cambodia Arrival

If Phuket International Airport reminds one of Key West, then Siam Reap’s is more like Lawton, Oklahoma, or maybe Kinston, NC.

Those are the only tiny ones that leap to mind that actually have commercial service.

Our plane, which was about 2/3 full, left us with a row to ourselves. This always makes the ride better. Even though the trip from Bangkok to Siam Reap is just a little over an hour, they served us lunch again.

Not just a sandwich, but a sandwich, and an egg roll, and water and orange juice and a something we didn’t recognize for desert and a fruit cup.

Larry didn’t eat his, for reasons that you might suspect. One doesn’t tempt fate with mystery meat on an airplane, especially when you’ve got the window seat.

When you land, there are no gangways to swing out to meet you. Everything is done by stairs that roll up to the exits on the plane. Then you walk about half a block into the terminal (which looks very Asian, with an orange-red tile roof) give your myriad of declaration forms to the customs people and get your luggage.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Seems the internet didn’t tell us about one form, and we got sent back to fill it out. Then Eddie didn’t fill his out right and ran into a customs official that obviously had taken lessons from Homeland Security – he simply kept barking the same thing over and over to him (in Cambodian, as if volume would suddenly make one learn!) until he finally figured out what the problem was.

By that time, Larry had collected the luggage and found a money-changing place to get Cambodian Real (Reals? – not sure of the plural here) for the Thai money we’d been unable to get changed earlier.

The exchange rate is even more incomprehensible than it was in Thailand. Best we can tell, $1.00 US is 4,132 R. Try figuring that out at an open market.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter. They use Dollars. Plain old George Washingtons that we’re used to, and don’t especially want the Cambodian money, although we’ve now got 619,800 R worth of it to deal with.

It was still an easy transition and our guide (Suddorath, who goes by Rhat) was waiting out front for us. 15 minutes later (of driving a very, very careful 25 kph, for some reason) we were delivered to our hotel.