The northeast corner of Cambodia used to be very remote and difficult to reach, with the appalling state of the only road to the province restricting regular transport links. But in just a few short years the road has improvedly significantly and with it has come an avalanche of new bus services. It’s now possible to get to Phnom Penh in just ten hours on a good day, and there is talk that the main road will be fully paved within three or four years.

For the time being, however, NH78 is still unsealed and throws the signature red dust of the region over everything that passes. The 140 kilometre stretch of dirt varies from a smooth well-graded expanse as wide as a football pitch to narrow rutted tracks joined by creaking wooden bridges that look like they won’t survive the next wet season. This is a very poor region: poverty visible from the bus ranks with some of the worst I saw in northern Laos. Tiny wooden huts built on stilts to escape the wet, sometimes with only three walls and always nearly free of any furniture. In or under these wispy structures families cooked, slept and lived, and the surrounding countryside was often sparse and devoid of useful crops or firewood. For the first time on this trip I felt a sense of desperation in the locals, and to see the weary dead-eyed look in the eyes of a fifteen year old youth was singularly depressing. I met an aid worker called Chris who is helping to establish schools in remote villages here, and he says that once you get more than ten kilometres out of Ban Lung conditions can be “medieval”.

Ban Lung is nonetheless a lively town of around 25,000 people, the provincial capital that also acts as a service centre for all the surrounding and far-flung villages. Chris says that when he first arrived three years ago there were no sealed roads here; now all the main streets are tarmac and through the town the highway is a huge dual carriageway with flowered median strip. The improved transportation has brought more tourists, and while it’s not on the mainstream backpacker circuit yet this area is attracting more and more adventurous types, especially those wanting to trek in the savannah and jungle northeast towards the Vietnamese border. Ban Lung also has some unusual quirks that I never saw in all my travels through Laos, even though Laos is nominally much poorer. For example ice is still delivered in the morning to street vendors on a small trailer hinged to the back of a motorbike, the food and drink sellers sawing the metre-long frozen rectangles to suit and placing the chunks in large plastic chests to keep their wares cool for the day. Nearly every petrol pump is simply a 44-gallon drum on its end with a hand-crank on top, feeding into a large clear glass cylinder so the purity of the fuel can be seen and quantity measured. There is always a parasol on top to prevent this improvised explosive device from going off, but punters still smoke while being refueled.

As the only service town for the whole province, the market area is packed with stalls and shops selling all manner of goods not normally available in the villages. Ban Lung is where you come when you want roofing materials, hardware, pots and pans, medicines, furniture, childrens’ toys, whitegoods, clothing, scooters, shoes and most widely available of all: mobile phones. It seems that every third store is a phone vendor, all hawking the same chinese knock-offs that have flooded markets further north. The food market features the usual plastic hessian roof hung five feet off the ground to offer some protection from the sun; it’s the perfect height for the locals, and I’ve gotten used to stooping endlessly when wandering such places. Here though the heat was particularly oppressive: around the meat section I noticed thick black tubes strung across alleys at head height, which on closer inspection were revealed to be normal thin ropes with a solid crust of well-fed flies.

There are some strange contrasts in the marketplace too: DVD shops also stock a healthy range of modern pop on cassette tape, and television stores carry ancient transistor radios alongside older-style television sets. The market and surrounding streets of shops – all with rubbish liberally strewn along the dusty red verges – are pretty much all you will find in the town; apart from street food vendors and perhaps a dozen restaurants and guesthouses there is little in the way of suburbs. Walk just two kilometres in any direction and you’re well and truly back in the bush, but it’s not all rustic. On a Sunday morning stroll I noticed two small roller rinks for kids, public volleyball courts and even a small ferris wheel on the restaurant strip beside the town’s Kansaign Lake.

The main tourist attraction near town is a volcanic crater lake called Yeak Laom, described in the guidebook as “one of the most serene and sublimely beautiful sites in all of Cambodia”. Quite a rap, and enough to make me walk the four kilometres from town to have a good look. It’s pretty and pleasant, but if this really is one of the natural highlights of Cambodia then I won’t be diverting myself greatly in the future. Vegetation reaches right to the shore and it’s only a few hundred metres across, so you can take in the whole lake in one pleasing view. You can swim in the lake, which I didn’t. You can walk around the lake, which I did. At first glance I thought the area was nearly empty of life, with almost no bird life apparent and the water eerily dark and quiet. However once I started walking the lake’s edge I began to hear the birds and crickets clearly, and moths and butterflies flitted freely about. Snakes and lizards slid noisily off the path as I walked, and I made sure I clumped along as loudly as possible so they would keep away. On the walk back I stopped for lunch at Norden House, which quite improbably is a Swedish hotel and restaurant on the road to the lake. I had to try the house special – Swedish meatballs with mashed potato – which was excellent and authentic, right down to the gravy served in a jug and dill pickles and lingonberries on the side.

I desperately wanted to do a two-day kayak tour while here, but unfortunately the guides won’t do it for just one person and noone else has been interested over the past few days. I considered doing an overnight trek but decided against it, partly for cost and partly because the shorter treks on offer didn’t really interest me that much. I’ve been quite happy to stay in Ban Lung, a decision greatly aided by yet again finding some superb accomodation. Tree Top Eco-Lodge has eleven fabulous bungalows widely spaced on the side of a valley, with rough wooden walkways through the treetops joining them all to the airy and all-wood bar-restaurant. The near-new wooden bungalows are huge with very high ceilings, fan, large balcony and hammock with views over the valley. Each also has a private cold-water bathroom attached, though it’s open to the elements enough for me to find a frog loitering in the toilet bowl last night! The cost for this extravagance: US$10 a night. It’s so pleasant that I haven’t rushed to leave Ban Lung, and it’s been easy to find other travellers to talk to because it’s popular too. Tree Top Lodge is far and away the best value accomodation option in the area, and even though it’s too new to be in most of the guidebooks a reservation is still strongly recommended.

I was sitting still in Si Phan Don for so long partly because it was so lovely, and partly because I didn’t have any urge to move on for a while. In fact the thought of travelling further was very off-putting for a few days there, but I knew that the urge would return if I simply waited long enough. Well it came back with a vengeance on Tuesday, which is the first day for a nearly week that I’ve felt lively and active. Suddenly the idea of lazing in a hammock staring at the water held no further attraction; not that I regretted all the downtime I’d spent there so far! One of the greatest benefits of this kind of travel to me is that you can sit still for days if you want to. It may be many years before I return to that idyllic part of Laos – and when I do it will no doubt be quite different – so I wanted to leave there because I’d had my fill, not because I had to be somewhere else. It turns out one week was the perfect length of time 🙂

After exactly fifty days in Laos I was keen to get over the border to Cambodia and see a new land. But I have plenty of time still and don’t want to rush it, so my first goal was always going to be Stung Treng just an hour over the border. It’s where transport to the remote north-east departs from and is a decent-sized town, so surely it was worth at least one night. Besides I didn’t want to spend a whole day in a bus which is what the vast majority of other travellers were planning to do. Being on Don Det in Si Phan Don exposed me to many more budget travellers than I’ve seen in the one small place so far, and it came home to me how different my mode of roaming is on this trip compared to most people. For example of the forty or so people on my bus over the border (who were all westerners), exactly one person got off at the first stop: me. All the rest were carrying onwards to Kratie or Kompong Cham, but mostly to Phnom Penh. Another bus had gone ahead of us aiming directly for Siem Riep – more than twelve hours away. Even in this age of mass travel, it’s remarkably easy to avoid the hordes if you’re prepared to take just a few more steps along the beaten track than the rest.

And anyway I had an inkling that crossing the border would take a while, so the idea of suffering a long bus journey afterwards seemed nuts to me. And I was right: the border is less than 25 kms from Don Det, yet it took us almost four hours to hit the road again on the Cambodian side… things started simply enough at 8am with a short boat journey from the island to Ban Nakasang on the mainland, where a bus was already waiting. And waiting. And waiting… for no obvious reason it was nearly an hour before we set off for the border, arriving there a little before 10am. Exiting Laos was straightforward, and to my surprise I was not charged for overstaying an extra day. I don’t think they noticed: the Customs guys were too busy extracting a US$1 “fee” from everyone on the bus. We all knew it was a self-imposed bribe but few grumbled and noone refused that I could see, we just wanted to get the process over with. We then had to grab our bags and walk a hundred metres across a paved no-man’s land to the Cambodia side, where the circus really began.

First up was a Quarantine desk where we filled in a short form, had our temperatures taken with an infrared ear thermometer, and were explained in atrocious english what we should do if we showed symptoms of H1N1 flu (is that still a problem?). And we were clipped another US$1 for the privilege of listening. Then to the Visa Office where visas on arrival are obtained. We all knew that it should cost US$20 each, but here it was US$23. I am convinced the extra $3 was because there were three guys in the booth, honestly. Another US$2 if you’d forgotten your passport photo (I got a dozen made up in Sydney so I’d never be caught by that one!). Then to the third and final booth where your visa was stamped and you were officially allowed into Cambodia. After coughing up another US$2 there, that is. By this stage there were loud and mutinous rumblings from some people – almost all of them Europeans, if you’re interested to know. A German guy simply refused to pay the last bribe, saying he was a cop and he knew what was going on. He was waved through; he’s actually a bus driver.

Once through, we waited. Again. For nearly two hours we sat in the stifling heat, waiting until the bus had filled up enough with new passengers for the bus jockeys to decide they could move on. For two unlucky sods there was a final hassle. They were cycling from China to Thailand, but had decided to take the bus for this stretch because it was supposed to be unscenic (which is true). They had bought their tickets on Don Det, confirming first that their bikes would be allowed on the bus all the way. Just as the Cambodian bus was about to depart – in other words almost two hours after they’d first shown their tickets – they were forced to pay again if they wanted their bikes to be loaded. They knew they were being screwed and eventually paid up, but one of them sat next to me for my short trip and he was openly calling it extortion. Which it was, of course. Or you could put it another way: “welcome to Cambodia”.