Entering Crooked Cambodia

For those who can afford the cost of a plane ticket from Bangkok to Siem Reap, I HIGHLY recommend it. The boarder crossing at Poipet, Cambodia is the worst we've been to...and we've been rejected at a boarder, leaving us stranded 3 hours from the local city, so we know how much boarder crossings can suck. As we have traveled, we normally enter a place and find things we like and don't like. Poipet offered nothing that we liked. It is a dusty, trash ridden town with loads of glitzy Casinos which just don't fit in with the fact that nobody who lives in Poipet can afford to enter the casinos. Oh, and the 18 yearolds with large hand guns are more than happy to keep locals and dirty sweaty backpackers like me from entering. The travel experience goes like this. Catch the 6am Government bus from the Northern bus terminal in Bangkok to the boarder town. This is about 5 hours and you then need to catch a tuk-tuk from the bus station to the Thai side of the boarder. Unfortunately you know the the tuk-tuk drivers are going to gouge you on the price - always a good feeling. Oh and then he makes 2 stops at travel agents who will expedite our visa for us for twice the price of the visa. Too bad we agreed with him that we wanted to go straight to the boarder. After you clear Thai passport control (the only honest people we dealt with in this experience) you walk across the 300 meters of no man's land between the Thai boarder and Cambodian boarder. When you hit the Cambodian side you must purchase your visa. Your intrepid travelers were idiots and had not purchased this ahead of time. The lovely guards at the boarder tell you they only accept Thai Baht and that with their exchange rate we must pay 1000 Thai Baht each. This is about $28, even though all the signs say US$20, your receipt says US$20 and the forms you filled out say US$20. After some pleasant words exchanged and Ewa's threat to kill them they eventually they saw it our way and accepted our US$20. Then as we clear the Cambodian boarder and enter the town of Poipet you realize the full extent of the warm and pleasant greetings laying in front of you. There are two options of travel to Siem Reap, taxi or bus and they are 3 hours and 5 hours respectively. Knowing that the difference in time is due to the fact that the road is unpaved and the buses can't avoid the bomb crater sized potholes we try to negotiate a taxi ride. The only problem as you try to negotiate a taxi is that they are all controlled by the same family so they don't negotiate... at all. This may not strike those of you in the US as odd but EVERYTHING is negotiated here in SE Asia. Everything. Oh well, we pay the high rate of US$50 to take three people (we met another traveler) to take us there and things are all good. Ride is painfully bumpy, mildly interesting and relatively uneventful until we hit the town of Siem Reap where the taxi driver refuses to take us to the hotel where the other traveler has his reservation and insists on taking us to his bosses hotel. More uncalled for shadiness! So between buses that drop you off 7km from the boarder, tuk-tuk drivers who try to screw you, corrupt board guards, kids with guns, mob controlled taxi's and drivers who don't get basic instructions we were pretty fed up with the experience.