Border Adventures: Cambodia to Laos

6:20am: impatient tuk-tuk driver from the bus company shows up for our 6:30am pick-up. We are not ready.
7:30am: our 7o'clock bus leaves with us crammed into the front and our bags crammed into the back
8:30am: we get a flat. driver puts on temporary spare
10:00am: we're off again
10:30am: we stop at a car shop for the experts to fix the wheel. we order noodles; they forget Ben's noodlesoup 4 different times
11:30am: we're off again
noon: we stop for a pre-scheduled meal/pee break where driver gets free food. we're not hungry
12:30pm: on the road at last
7:00pm: it's dark. the bus stops, a pick-up truck pulls up, and the driver starts tossing our packs out the window to the truck. that's how we find out that the bus doesn't actually go where the ticket says, to the border town of Stung Treng... the pick-up will take us. we pile into the back.
7:30pm: we are unceremoniously left in front of an office called Hua Lean (our tickets say Hua Lian), where the people are very puzzled to see us and call up two men who zoom up on motorbikes to tell us that the bus company whose ticket we have and used that day... no longer exists and hasn't for 3 months. this is a small problem because we paid for a through ticket to take us on to Si Phan Don (4,000 Islands) in Laos the next morning. they also tell us that this has never happened before in the last three months that this company has supposedly not existed, and obviously it must have been our 3 separate guesthouses where we and the other travellers bought our bus tickets, THEY must have been the ones ripping us off, but why don't we come back to their hotel to talk it over.
8:00pm: they tell us they work for the van company that would have been our transfer three months ago, but now they will help us out, do us the favor of taking us across for just $11 each.
8:03pm: we don't tell them to go fuck themselves... but we want to
8:04pm: Ben picks up his bag to leave
8:05pm: Orro, a wonderful Cambodian guy who we would run into everywhere we went for the next two weeks, managed to reach the guy in Phnom Penh from whom he'd bought a ticket, who reached a (the?) bus company, who called Orro back, and said they'd come pick us up tomorrow morning afterall.
8:10pm: the hotel staff tell us this new driver who is supposed to pick us up is untrustworthy and will abandon us at the border. we have no idea what is going on and decide to wait til the morning to see what happens. but where to stay for the night?
8:15pm: they show us a $5 room with no fan, holes in the sheets bigger than my hand, and cockroaches of a similar size who don't give an inch when the lights go on
8:16pm: Ben demands a nice room in the main building for the same price and picks his pack right back up to walk out again -- he's fed up, and they know it
8:20pm: we are ungraciously shown to a very nice room, and sullenly tossed a key
8:30pm: we look for food with Orro and his Belgian friend, Chris. I am grumpy, Ben is angry, we're all hungry and confused. nothing is open but one place that overcharges.
9:50pm: we get home, realize we have tv with HBO and discover that Flight of the Conchords is about to come on. sweet mercy at last -- this makes everything all better.

The next morning, miracle of miracles, a driver shows up and we, Chris and Orro, and two Israeli girls jump in and are whisked to the border. Getting through the Cambodia side requires just a single dollar bribe apiece (much cheaper than the entry 'fee'!), and the Laos side requires the same. After all stamps are stamped and we are officially in Laos, we sit. And wait. And watch as cars of locals pull up to customs, slow to a roll so that the passenger can hop out and deliver a fish, or a chicken, or some perfume, to the customs officials, hop back into the car, and continue on their merry way.

Eventually we were picked up, driven 20 minutes down the road, told to get out, to go to the dock, to leave the dock and walk along the bank, to wait, and finally to jump into a long-tailed boat which ferried us across a full-bodied and fast-moving Mekong to reach, at long last, the glorious peacefulness of Don Det: paradise tucked away among Laos' 4,000 Islands.