South East Asia Travel Series #5 – SCAM at the Cambodian border!

Hej everyone!

Welcome back to my travel series about my journey through South East Asia. Todays blog is about our journey from Koh Chang, Thailand to Siem Reap, Cambodia. It is our second Asian country we ever visited and it was not the best start for us...

Even before we left Germany we knew we want to visit Siem Reap to see the world heritage “Angkor Wat”. So we decided to head to Cambodia after our beautiful stay on Koh Chang! We read in the Koh Chang traveling guide we got from a tourist agency in Bangkok which agency is the best on the little island so we headed there to get information for our trip.

Goodbye Thailand!

We booked a complete transfer from Lonely Beach to the ferry, to the border Poipet and from there to Siem Reap. When we arrived in Poipet we stopped at some kind of restaurant where the guides collected our passports and e-visas to prepare our arrival card for Cambodia.
After 30 minutes we got everything back. Therefore the first impression was really good. Everything seemed to be quite good organized. We needed to wait another 45 minutes until we were heading in a mini bus to the border.
The guide said we can keep our luggage in the bus except all important things like passport, visas, credit cards, etc. because we will take the same mini van to Siem Reap later on. That's also quite nice because its easier to walk around with just a small travel backpack instead of the big one. After a few meters of walking we made a stop close to another travel group we saw earlier.
The guide said that he will explain everything regarding border control, where we will meet again, what to do, etc. now. After we got all the information he said its the last chance to withdraw money out of an ATM before we enter Cambodia now. He continued explaining it is way cheaper to withdraw money in Thailand as in Cambodia and its better to have Cambodian Riel instead of US Dollar to pay there. He gave us an example: If you pay a water bottle there with US Dollar you need to pay 1$ and if you pay it in Riel you only need to pay Riel in the value of 0.1$ for it. He also said if we get the money now out of the ATM we can exchange it at a great rate just before the border. Since the whole trip was very good organized and everything went well so far we simply believed him. I also must confess that we didn't really inform ourselves about whats the best way to pay in Cambodia. As stupid as we were we got around 500$ in total for two persons. The guide actually even said that wouldn't be enough but we explained that we are "low" budget travelers so it needs to be enough. At that moment we weren't even suspicious which is ridiculous if we think about it now. Afterwards we continued walking to the border all together and leaving Thailand was easy..

Just before the Cambodian checkpoint!

We arrived at a small busy “street” after the Thai checkpoint and before the Cambodian checkpoint. The guide was suddenly a bit stressed and said we needed to hurry up a bit. Suddenly it was so busy and children started to beg for money and the guide said that we need to change to money in this shop now. It looked a bit strange but yeah, maybe its the Cambodian way of exchanging money. We queued in a line and in front of us another touristed we saw earlier was already finished exchanging money. He seemed happy about it. With a little bad feeling we gave away our 500$ and we got back 2.000.000 Riel.
Totally surprised about how much money we have now we heated the guide telling us again that we need to hurry up and we should continue to the next checkpoint. We hid our money and continued. While we were walking a short distance we were able to think about what just happened and then I realized that I have a money exchange app on my smartphone. A minute later I just saw that the 500$ we changed were worth 2.500.000 Riel. So we got ripped of 500.000 Riel. The worst exchange rate ever. They fooled us and got 100$. After we got back to the mini van bus the driver couldn't speak a word english anymore but we didn't have any idea what to do so we just took our seat in the bus and drove to Siem Reap.
After a hour of driving we made a stop at a street food market and a unfriendly Cambodian woman who obviously was part of the market opened the door and said we should get off the bus because the driver went to the toilet. Since the driver didn't say anything we just split. Two of us stayed in the bus and two got off to buy some water which was very expensive but we needed it... Back on the road we asked the driver where he will drop us off in Siem Reap but he always just answered us in a language we didn't understand.
When we were close to Siem Reap I opened my offline map navigation app called “maps.me” I saw that we are still a few kilometers away from the city center and our hostel but then the indicator started to blink. Final destination: Random gas station with many Tuk Tuks ready for us and a whole bunch of Cambodian guys. We were already pissed off from the border scam and now this on top. What a shitty way of welcoming us. We just grabbed all our stuff and walked away. The Tuk Tuk drivers were very unfriendly after we said we don't want to drive with them because they were obviously waiting for us and part of a big scam. We knew it was a long way to walk but we just didn't want to give them money because its a planed scam and we didn't want to be part of that anymore.
It started to get dawn already so we said we will get a Tuk Tuk a few hundred meters away of those scammers. Then, 5 minutes later an older, kind and serious looking Cambodian Tuk Tuk driver stopped and we showed him on our map where we need to go and he gave us a very good price for the ride. He was also able to speak a little english so while we were driving with a full loaded Tuk Tuk he explained us that there are a few big events sponserd by a Cambodian beer company. We started to feel a bit better again at this point. When we arrived at the hotel a few minutes later we met another very friendly Cambodian and we almost started to feel welcome...

At least our Hotel room was nice...

We definitely learned something out of this: NEVER go to a country without knowing how to pay and exchange money there for sure. Afterwards when we googled the Cambodian border crossing we found a lot of news about how people got scammed there so we could have avoided it. Never mind.

Jungle entrance of the Hotel area

Now we are already in Vietnam in Can Tho. We're excited for riding the Mekong tomorrow!

Take care,
Ken

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