I had planned a trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2010, going with a job offer on the side to oversee the restoration of vintage Vespa scooters in Vietnam.
Oops Bangkok 🤷♂️
Looking for a better life and an escape from poverty USA led me to the Vespa restoration job offer in Vietnam and the trip to Southeast Asia. I had intended to start in Bangkok, both because it's a super cheap airport to land in, and I had planned for a month of travels starting in Chiang Mai.
One of the few immigrants in my farmtown area in Indiana was a Thai woman with a small cafe in the back of her husband's tow truck business, a well-kept culinary secret with a small but loyal clientele. Even though she hadn't been back to her country in 30+ years, she insisted I start my journey in Chiang Mai with her family members.
With non-refundable tickets already booked, I received travel warnings from the US Embassy a week prior to travel, informing me there were curfews due to the Red Shirt / Yellow Shirt protest and fighting. Not to be deterred, I arrived in Bangkok late at night and decided to spend the night at the airport due to the curfew and complications.
Well, my one night in the airport was enough for me to realize that Thailand wasn't the vibe I was looking for. First of all, the place was more modern than where I'm from in the USA, so I was quite intimidated by that. Also, I was approached by no less than 25 hippies who gave me flyers with directions to various raves and drug-filled underground music festivals all over the country, and Chiang Mai was often mentioned.
I got the sense Chiang Mai wasn't the wild isolated frontier described to me by my Thai friend in the USA. Without wifi or even a guide book, I abandoned all my travel plans and bookings and found my way to a train station, where I found an isolated spot to take a nap. I was awakened by police within minutes of falling asleep, so I hopped on the first train out Bangkok.
This farm boy was overwhelmed by Bangkok, but luckily I found a random guesthouse in a random small town east of Bangkok not far from where I hopped off the train. I began getting the sense that most Thais were indifferent to me, but I've always been more interested in the social aspects of travel much more than sights.
A little bit of free wifi and I discovered I could take a train nearly all the way to Cambodia. The hippies at the airport hadn't been to Cambodia, and most of the Thai people I asked about Cambodia said only bad things, and I must admit that made me want to go even more.
After arriving close to the Cambodian border, I hired a moto to finish the last kilometers of the journey to Poipet, Cambodia. I spent three days in this wild west border town, and I must say the vibes were immediately very different on the Cambodian side. Even in the seedy border town of Poipet, I had some nice conversations and met a lot of interested locals.
Still without a guide and with only intermittent wifi, I hadn't done any research about Cambodia yet, but I was already living in it. I had originally planned to finish a month in Thailand before doing any further research about where to travel to next, so I was very much flying blind. I know now that Poipet is one of the sketchiest places in all of Cambodia, but I didn't at the time, and thought all Cambodian towns might have a similar feel.
Poipet felt very wild and lawless to me back then, and to this day it is still a hub for illegal trafficking of various things. Sisophon was the next town over on the map, so I made it my next stop, and I ended up spending three weeks in this town, never encountering one foreigner in all my time there.
Sisophon is where I fell in love with Cambodia, despite most Cambodians describing it as a very boring town. I went there without any research or prejudice, and was quite happy wondering the streets, playing football with the local kids each day, and getting friendly with the various cafe owners who were feeding me each day.
Cambodia was exactly the change in life I needed, and I think the above picture shows how much social interaction I was getting each day. I would later find out that 99.9% of tourists skip Sisophon on their way to Siem Reap and the Angkor temples, so I was a very curious site in this little town.
My cell phone was full of phone numbers by the time I left Sisophon, and I was enjoying the new diet of tropical fruits and fried rice. At the border crossing back in Poipet, I was asked if I wanted a tourist visa or business visa by the border police. I chose business visa, and was given it without question, so all I had to do was figure out how to find work of any kind.
It took several months, but eventually I took a job for $60 a month, rented a room for $30 a month , and I was able to actually cover my living expenses and rent eventually, and things only got better with time. You all know how some of the rest of the story goes, because I have a Khmer wife @sreypov.
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Return from Love At First Sight 🐃🏍️🍚 How I Stumbled Upon Cambodia In 2010 to Justin Parke's Web3 Blog
