Story from RovingNavigator73332

We wanted to cross from Thailand to Cambodia and one of the land-based routes I had researched (this was 2015, so I'd found a pretty informative blog) was the Aranyaprathet (Thailand) / Poipet (Cambodia) crossing. I had also read that the crossing can be difficult to cross and that people attempting to scam tourists was pretty common. I decided to chance it and reckoned that I knew (kind of) what I was doing! We arrived at the bus station to only discover that the bus we had tried to book online the night before was fully booked (?how, we hadn't been able to book it online!) but there was an alternative bus leaving at 09:00am. My sister and I booked it and as we turned to find a handy 7/11 for breakfast (littered everywhere in Bangkok) we bumped into a lovely couple, who we ended up becoming fast friends with, who I directed to how to get tickets for the same bus we had just booked. A little while later our new troupe of friends (we'd befriended four more people at the bus station) got on the bus and headed for Aranyaprathet. Probably about 4-5 hours later, after stopping at what felt like every town between Bangkok and Aranyaprathet, we finally arrived at the border crossing. We disembarked the bus (you have to get off your bus to walk to the Thai Border Crossing building, get your passport stamped, walk across the border to the Khmer/Cambodian border crossing building then get your VOA/or online visa stamped by the Khmer/Cambodian officials and then get back on a partner bus to continue the journey to Siem Reap) and some guys tried to convince us to go a little hut/building to get our "Khmer/Cambodian" visas for a small fee however I was highly suspicious of this. I asked one of these guys for his "ID card" and when I checked the ID card, it was a year out of date! I felt, I was possibly being scammed so I decided to ignore him and go and find the Thai border building which I knew to be somewhere close by based on my research. I subsequently walked past him with my friends following along and found the Thai border building a short distance away. We got our passports stamped to show that we were leaving Thailand, crossed a stretch of ground approx. 400-500m long to the small low ceiling-ed building on the Cambodian/Khmer side of the border which was the correct place to go once you get stamped out of Thailand. My sister and I had e-Visas which we got approved and got our passports stamped so we could enter Cambodia. We waited for our friends who had to get VOAs - a fun wait when it was 33°C, and little shade but they got them and we proceeded to head into the bus terminal to find our bus to continue our journey to Siem Reap.The fun bit was about to start... We proceeded to try and queue for our partner bus however we were confronted suddenly by a group of guys who started shouting at us and acting aggressively. We were pretty scared when suddenly our knight in shining armour showed up - a lovely guy we'd befriended on the first bus who worked as a Logistics manager for an international NGO. He proceeded to shout back at the group of guys and match their somewhat aggressive behaviour and like magic we were allowed to board our bus. As we got on, the whole bus cheered and we got seats at the back of it. We set off thinking we were finally on our way to Siem Reap but alas it was not going to be as straight forward as that!We subsequently stopped at a restaurant where we had something to eat and then finally we were told that we could board the bus again to get back on the road to Siem Reap. Finally, after another 2 hours - we finally reached Siem Reap! Twelve hours of travelling later - we had finally reached our destination! We managed to get a tuk tuk to our acccommodation and our long day culminated in a fabulous dinner with our new friends ! We went on to have a very memorable 10 days in Cambodia as part of our bigger trip to South-east Asia .