Visa Run

It's been a little while since we've written anything, so I thought it would be a good idea to update our avid readers on our recent visa run. When traveling to Thailand, tourists don't have to buy a visa to enter, but they are only allowed to stay a certain time before leaving and getting your passport stamped again. For stamps in airports it's every 30 days and for stamps at the border it's 15 days. Our 30 days were up, so we had to leave the country. The cheapest and quickest way we found (with the help of Pi Maam at Ben's work) was to wake up at 3:30 in the morning so we could catch a 5:00 bus to the Cambodian border. It was a double decker bus that was taking a bunch of Thai people to the casinos on the border. Neither Thailand nor Cambodia allows gambling, but they have an agreement to allow casinos between their borders. We had been warned of the likelihood that officials would try to trick us into spending way more money than necessary. Right as we stepped off the bus, we were taken by someone to an office to fill out some paperwork. When we took it up to the window, the man tried to charge us twice as much as we knew we should pay. When we told him we knew what the price was, he became furious and stormed out of his office and started yelling (in English) at the man who had brought us over, saying he should settle on a price first. That was quite an experience. Shortly after that we made our way through the Thai border and over to the Cambodian one. We also had to argue with the officer there because he kept increasing his price. But we held out. All in all it wasn't too much of a hassle. We then had all day to kill because the bus we came on didn't leave until 3 that day. We spent about an hour walking into Cambodia. It was an extremely hot, dusty road, but it was interesting to see the differences between Cambodia and Thailand. It is obviously much poorer. We bought some water there (so Ben could officially say we'd been in Cambodia) and then when we turned around to head back to the border, a man offered to give us a ride on his bike. We then spent the rest of that day in a casino in the middle land between Cambodia and Thailand. We ate some free lunch, I got a foot massage, and we watched people gamble. We actually had fun with that, trying to figure out how the games worked and what people's strategies were. To end this adventurous day, we got to walk back to Thailand through pouring rain in order to catch our bus on time. All in all, it was quite an exhausting day. But we enjoyed ourselves, and we'll be headed back there in about a week and a half for a real trip to Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh.