Border Crossing--If You Didn't Think I was Crazy Before, You Will Now!

In order to save about $2000, I decided that we would not fly back from Siem Reap to Bangkok, but would arrange travel by land across the Cambodian/Thai border. In theory, it was a great idea. Our tour guide and driver offered to drive us from Siem Reap to Poipet (the border crossing) for an extra $100 total. That sounded like a great deal. On the way out, we stopped at a silk farm. We took a tour of the facility and learned all about how silk is handmade. They have made some adjustments in the process in the last decade, but all in all it is still very primitive and requires extraordinary skill.

The first picture shows Giselle and Sophia holding the silk worms as they wiggle all over. They breed these and let them eat piles of mulberry leaves. We were told that those are the best nourishment for the worms and enable the larvae to spin greater lengths of silk threads.

The second picture with Oakley in the center shows the special baskets they use for the larvae to spin their cocoons. They let a small portion hatch for mating, but the majority are fumigated and killed and their cocoons are put in a boiling pot of water. A worker uses a wooden spoon type thing to find the ends of the threads in the cocoons and slowly unwind the entire thing. About seventy cocoons at a time are combined together to make a single strand of silk thread.

This is a picture of Florence eating one of the boiled silkworms. The tour guide told her that it tasted good, so she said she wanted to try it and as I watched, I said I wanted to throw up!

After the silk strands are twisted into threads, they are spun on skeins and taken for dying.

Most all of the dyes used at this silk farm were natural dyes. They used banana leaves, coconut fibers, indigo, curry, and insect dung, to name a few. The colors were surprisingly rich and vibrant--especially the red color from the insect dung.

The threads are counted out into groups of seven and then tied off in the pattern that the finished product will bear. The work is tedious and all done by hand.

The silk threads are then attached to the weft and warp frames and placed in a traditional foot peddled loom using a shuttle. The lady then counts seven passages of the thread and switches the pedal and starts over again. Only the most skilled workers got to weave the patterned pieces as you see here. Even a skilled weaver can only weave about one meter of fabric a day.

The finished products were amazingly beautiful and we couldn't leave without purchasing a few gifts. We couldn't believe that the entire process was done by hand! Do they even do that in the U.S. anymore?

We then drove through the Cambodian countryside toward the border. I snapped a few pictures out the window of what I saw. I wish that I could have better captured the primitive, simple life that is lived in this part of the world. It was almost like traveling back in time a hundred years.

Here is a farmer taking a load of rice to market to sell.

All along the way there were fields of golden rice being harvest by hand by locals. It seemed like back breaking work. This is the way it has been done for centuries.

This is a typical town in Cambodia. Dirty, poor shanties, barefoot children and a Buddhist temple in the center of town.

A rice farm with a bamboo/palm branch hut for their home. This was the common housing in the countryside.

When I travel in developing countries, it never ceases to amaze me what they can carry on a little mo-ped. Yes, those are pigs--live pigs--being hauled to market for slaughter. We passed about ten of these pig-laden mopeds headed toward Poipet. These are the things I miss when I come back to the States. Have you ever seen an upside down pig on the back of a Harley? I'd guess not!

Right before getting to Poipet, I had to use the restroom, so the driver pulled over to a roadside cafe. These were facilities that welcomed me. I took a picture because it was pretty typical of the bathrooms that we used in both Thailand and Cambodia. Always, when traveling overseas BYOTP! Second, you never know if you will have to squat over a hole in the ground, hover over a seatless toilet, or stand on the sides of the toilet and squat over that. We got the whole range on this trip. In addition, to flush you had to dip the small bucket into the filthy trough of water and dump it down the toilet over and over until your stuff disappeared. Then after we all used the bathrooms, I bathed the children in hand sanitizer. Now that's real adventure!

So now comes the real story: The border crossing. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures to accompany this part of the story, because I didn't not feel save enough to get my camera out of my bag.

When we were dropped off at immigration in Poipet, we were accosted by a million different dirty men trying to sell us something or offer to carry our bags for us (yeah, right! carry them where?) or otherwise just loiter around us. We had to get seven children out of the van along with 7 suitcases and 9 backpacks and at the same time fumble around to find all the passports. We fought our way through the crowd of vultures to the lines of tourists. There were three lines at a tiny, dilapidated building at the end of a turn-about in the road. This was where we had to get our exit stamps from Cambodia. We stood in line for well over an hour. It moved like frozen sludge in a mud river. I suppose it's universally accepted that government workers don't actually have to do their jobs with any sort of efficiency. It was 95 degrees and we had no water. We were dying.

After we got all nine passports stamped, we had to walk about 3/4 KM through no man's land. There were motorcycles going all over and dirty casinos by the side of the road with people standing around staring at us, like they would rush us at any moment. So parched, sweating and frightened, we wheeled all of our suitcases down the dirty, broken road to the Thai immigration building at the other end. When we got there we had the privilege of getting in another long line that moved excruciatingly slow. A couple of the kids remembered that they had some warm sodas in their bags, so all nine of us shared two warm Fantas.

When we got through Thai immigration and got our re-entry visas, we had to find someone to let us borrow a phone to call the driver I had arranged to take us from Arrayaphet (the city on the Thai side of the border) to Bangkok. I must have looked so stressed and pitiful, because a woman came up to me and asked how she could help. We used her cell phone and found that our driver was another 1/2 km down the road waiting for us. So once again we wheeled all of our baggage down a dirty road until we found our van. The van was a lovely sight. What wasn't lovely was the van driver's driving skills which almost put us under a bus several times. After four hours of NDE (near-death experience) inducing driving, we arrived at our hotel in Bangkok. Our consolation prize was that the hotel was fantastic. We got a three bedroom family suite and order room-service of Thai food and sushi.

Miraculously, it all fell together, but I had a stress headache the size of Alaska! Forget saving money, somethings are NOT worth it. I was just glad that we weren't robbed or our children abducted. I admit it. I'm crazy. Sane people do not even attempt what I do.