We awoke on our second morning on Don Khone, thinking we were at least mildly prepared to get down to Phnom Penh. We knew it was a long day and weren’t even sure how far we could go. We bought tickets from Mr Pan the night before, but were informed we could only go as far as Kratie, so we bought tickets to Kratie.

At breakfast, we met Roger and Nadine, a Dutch couple who was going with us to Cambodia, but were allowed to go to Phnom Penh, for some reason. At breakfast, we also met a very sassy American woman in her mid 60s who was traveling through Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia ALONE. Her husband doesn’t like to travel, so every couple years she takes a trip by herself; she’s been to SE Asia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, China and Israel all by herself. When I heard that, she became my hero in life (I can overlook the fact that she liked Mike Huckabee. Or can I?).

At 8 am, the five of us got onto a longboat (the American woman was going to a waterfall) and cruised back past all the little islands and the seagrass and the water buffalo, to the jetty. We were directed up the hill from the jetty, where about a million other Westerners were standing in a big clump. Suddenly, I got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. What if Cambodian transport hadn’t improved at all in two years?

My fears were soon confirmed when three minivans pulled up and we piled 9 of us into each van (discounting the driver). We all squished in, and we soon became very closely acquainted with Roger and Nadine. They are almost done with uni, but decided to take a year off to travel the world and figure out what to do with their lives. They’ve done China and SE Asia so far, and are considering India and Nepal.

The bus bumped up and down for about a half hour down a dirt road until we reached Lao immigration. Lao immigration at the Cambodian border is a shack that looks a lot like the ones in Maine, for kids to wait for the bus in the winter. We cleared the Lao side, then walked about 500 meters down the dirt road to an identical shack on the other side of the road for Cambodia. T paid extra for us to go to Phnom Penh (we ended up paying an extra $10, just because Mr Pan was too distracted to get us the right tickets, thus, I have put out a hit on him.) And then we sat. And sat. And sat. For about three hours, we sat in an increasingly large group, just waiting around for no apparent reason.

Just when I was about to expire from dehydration, they decided it was time to go, and three minivans appeared from the other side of the border. They tried to fit everyone for Phnom Penh into one van, which clearly wasn’t happening. So then they just started throwing bags on top of buses and putting people in, regardless of where their bags were.

And so there we were again, T and I crammed into the back seat of a slightly larger minivan with an Englishman and an Aussie who kept falling asleep on T’s shoulder. We drove for an hour to Stung Treng, when we abruptly stopped and were ushered into some cafe and told to eat. Only our bus had arrived, and we were a little concerned about our bags, which were on a different van, but suddenly a Cambodian man came staggering over, carrying them and calling, “WHOSE BAGS IS THIS?” About 10 minutes later, the other two busloads of people crawled up, sweating and looking miserable. It turns out our bus just drove across the bridge, but they were all put onto a boat to cross the river, and then told to walk for about a kilometer with their bags in the blistering sun. For once, we chose right.

After an hour at the cafe, we were put onto two new, bigger buses and told we would go to Phnom Penh. There were some single seats by the window, so I claimed one for me, and the one in front for T. Unfortunately, there was an extra Cambodian driver who spent the entire ride sitting in the aisle between T and Roger and Nadine, so my planning didn’t work so well.

The exciting news was that there was a TV on this bus, so we started watching that movie with Jet Li and Aaliyah until we hit the dirt road at Kratie, when it was abruptly turned off. after the dirt road, the driver put on a whole new movie, and funnily enough, it was a Chinese one T and I saw on our flight to Beijing, about Vietnamese gangs and Hong Kong cops. We stopped for a quick break about an hour into the movie and when we got back into the van, the driver put a whole other movie on—another movie with Jet Li and Jason Statham, which we got to watch all the way through.

Apart from the movies, the most entertaining part of the whole trip was the Aussie from our first bus, who is a world champion sleeper. He somehow managed to fall asleep on the dirt road, which is a feat in and of itself, but he then managed to sleep as his head clunked against the window repeatedly. We would be watching the movie, and then CLUNK, and he would sleep right through. I think he should enter a competition or something, because I was getting a concussion just listening to him.

The least entertaining part of the ride was when we were careening down the road at about 70mph and CLUNK. No, not the Aussie’s head…a dog. T says the driver looked upset (I couldn’t see him), and I certainly was, but we kept on trucking down the road at a rapid pace and didn’t even slow down. I’m hoping the dog was completely fine (unlikely), or that he died on the spot. Poor pup.

Finally, 12 hours after we left Don Khone and 6 after leaving Kratie, we arrived in Phnom Penh. I am sorry to report that transport in Cambodia is not even remotely improved from 2005, and if you don’t believe me, just ask my crippled body.