Bus journey from HELL

The next morning we awoke early to book our bus ticket to the north-east of Cambodia, a town called Ban Lung in the Ratanakiri Province - off the beaten track! We booked a ticket from a little man who had a make-shift office (i.e. a table) next to the Red Sun Falling cafe. He spoke perfect English and assured us that he was the real deal - luxury bus, no diversions, no restaurant stops. Great!
Little did we know that we were embarking on the world´s worst bus journey ever!

We turned up at 12.10 to catch our bus in 20 mins. 12.30 came and went and our ticket salesman came over to tell us that he had just heard the bus would be an hour late as they had to stop for lunch because the passengers were very hungry... yes, he said that the bus stopped because the passengers were very hungry. Yeah right!! It was ridiculous, we´d seen him sitting in the same place for the last half hour without picking up a phone. "Maybe", he said to us, "you would like to buy lunch here while you wait?" We were very frustrated by this. The bus clearly always makes that stop so that the bus company can rake in the commission, our ticket salesman just decided to omit telling us that or else we may have taken an earlier bus with a different company and we would not have bought those drinks at his restaurant next door. God I could be the next Miss Marple. So if you ever go to Kratie and see this man don´t buy a ticket from him!: Anyway, the bus eventually arrived at 14.20 but we had to wait half an hour before we could get on. When we boarded chaos awaited us. The stench of rotten fruit and odorous bodies hit us like a minesweeper! This bus had clearly never seen a mop and dettol before. We walked down the aisle stepping carefully over the piles of debris, stepping on people´s luggage and pushing over stools where people were sitting in the aisle - no seatbelt laws here! We sat down in our hard leather seats to await the 8 hour coach journey. We began speaking to two tourists near us, they said they were heading to Stung Treng, a town which required a diversion from our course. We confronted our ticket salesman about this as he had promised us "no diversions", all of a sudden he couldn´t understand us. A man was sitting across from me eating an orange like an animal, chomping and chewing loudly and obscenly. I put on my ipod and tried to block it all out.

As we drove we noted how the colour of the earth changed from a light dusty beige to a deep red sandy colour.
A couple of hours into the journey a crazy lady with a moustache came and stood next to us screaming and laughing at the men sitting behind us for an hour. We thought she might be a hooker/ a druggie - she certainly looked like either. Not only this but a child infront of me was sick on my foot and we watched as a little girl stood up and peed into a plastic bag in the aisle. Another child was sick in the aisle and the parents mopped it up with a jacket. We were slowly being driven insane, it felt like a scene from the Far Side. After stopping at the town of Stung Treng and at a restaurant for half an hour we continued on an unpaved (very bumpy!) road for three hours. The sunset was at least beautiful as were the trees which were caked in red dust whipped up by the tyres of passing vehicles. We were quite concerned by this stage as we would be arriving in a strange town after dark which always makes things that little more difficult. As we neared Ban Lung down a narrow, dusty road, flanked on either side by forest, we noticed small fires all around us. At first we thought they might we controlled fires to clear the ground but as we drove on we could see that houses were surrounded by blazes and whole trees and even parts of the road were on fire! This made the journey even more eery. "What kind of a place are we coming to?!" we wondered in alarm...