Border Crossing: Laos to Cambodia
- Will Boddington
- Jan 15, 2018
- 4 min read
Before heading into Cambodia, we did a bit of research into how to make the border crossing from the 4000 Islands. This turned out to be a mistake; every article spoke of horror story journeys, from long delays to getting on the wrong bus to the numerous scams at the border. We had images of a very long and stressful day, but actually it was a reasonably easy journey.
At first, we were planning on just crossing to Steung Treng, about an hour over the border, then heading down to Kratie, then on to Phnom Peng and Siem Reap, as some accounts had stated that the journey from 4000 Islands straight to Siem Reap could take around 20 hours! However after looking into costs and times, it only actually took a couple hours more to get to Siem Reap than it did to just go to Kratie.
We got a boat at 8.30am from Don Det to Nakasang, then headed to the bus stop to be picked up by Green Paradise Travel. This was where we encountered our first problem - we couldn't find the GPT office, but we saw a stall with their posters outside. There was no one at the stand, but a man opposite was telling us he was the man we were meant to be meeting. We weren't convinced, but went over to him, where he promptly began to write out a new ticket. We walked away but didn't know what else to do but walk to the bus station. This didn't provide any answers, so we sat outside the Tourist Information Office wondering what to do. Again we were approached by a woman who claimed that we needed to wait with her for the GPT bus. We were sceptical but as we had no other options and she hadn't tried to write us another ticket, we trusted her. After waiting for about 15 minutes, a different woman approached us with a new ticket and took our old one. We knew this wasn't right but by this point we just wanted to get to the border. As we no longer had our original ticket, we were worried that we wouldn't be able to get our connecting bus from the border with Asia Van Transfers, GPT's sister company. We send an email explaining what had happened to both companies, who luckily both replied within minutes. A man also appeared clutching our original ticket and gave it back to us, and explained that we would have been going with a different company with the new ticket (as we had guessed). From then on, the journey was much easier!
The border crossing itself was pretty straightforward. We already knew we needed $2 each 'for the ink and stamp' to be stamped out of Laos (some stories claimed that people had refused to pay and hours later been let through anyway, but for the sake of $2 we paid it happily). We also knew that at some point we would encounter a $1 'health check' - this is completely irrelevant and easily skipped. We also already had our visas printed and ready, so we were first in the queue to be stamped into Cambodia. We were asked to pay $2 each again at this point which we weren't expecting, so when we said we didn't have any more dollars the man got angry and threw our passports back at us, telling us we had to go back. We calmly asked if we could pay in Laos kip several times, which he ignored, but after a while said we could and he carried on processing our passports. We even got change!
Once stamped in, a man pointed us in the direction of the AVT stand, and after checking the new ticket he was writing did in fact belong to ATV, we got on the bus to Siem Reap. We stopped at Steung Treng for an hour as expected but then carried straight on to Siem Reap. Unfortunately we broke down about an hour away, and had to wait a couple of hours for a replacement bus to arrive, but the house we were outside had three puppies so it wasn't too bad a wait!
Overall the journey was so much smoother than it sounded a few years ago, thanks to the new road recently opened. Tips for anyone making the journey would be to book through Green Paradise Travel with a combination ticket for Asia Van Transfer. The journey from Don Det to Siem Reap took about 11 hours (including a 2 hour break down!) and only cost $20 each! Also make sure that the person selling the ticket clearly explains where you need to be at each change, as we thought we knew what we were doing but the confusion in Nakasang proved otherwise! We were lucky that we managed to get our ticket back, but there are so many other companies trying to poach customers, you could end up going a much longer, less comfortable journey. We found that by already having our visas, we saved $5-10 dollars compared to doing it on arrival. Finally, it's easier to just pay the stamp fees than to refuse. We walked past a group who had refused to pay then later got sent all the way back to the start of the process as they didn't have the stamp out of Laos in their passports, and we waited about an hour for them to get all the way through again. Don't be that guy!
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