Bangkok to Siem Reap by bus

Walking between the Thai and Cambodian borders

I did a fair amount of research on how to travel from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and I found a couple of very helpful blogs and articles (here and here) outlining the process; nonetheless I thought I would add my own experience and tips, if only for my own future reference.

There is a bus from Bangkok to Siem Reap, run by The Transport Company Ltd., which leaves the Mo Chit bus station at 8am and 9am each day. It costs 750 baht and goes directly to the border and to Siem Reap, the gateway town for Angkor.

Note: You can buy the ticket online at the Transport Company Ltd. or Thai Ticket Major for a little extra cost I think, but I can't comment too much on this as I didn't do it. Good luck deciphering the first website.

How to buy Cambodia visa:

• I bought my visa online, because I'd heard that if I bought it at the border I would be queueing for a long time. Give yourself three days for this, just because the website says you should; mine was emailed to me the following morning but perhaps some seasons are busier than others.
• Buy it from the official government e-visa website https://www.evisa.gov.kh for USD $37; this is the visa cost of $30 plus the $7 online processing fee. 
• This single-entry visa is valid for three months from point of entry.
• Don't buy it from cambodia hyphen evisa dot com, evisa hyphen cambodia dot net, or any of these  fraudulent websites listed by the Cambodian government.
• You need your usual passport information, as well as a photo which you email in after you've completed the online process. I used a random headshot photo from Facebook (of me, I mean, it wasn't completely random). But there are no rigorous restrictions on the photo layout. 
• Point of entry is Poipet.

Other visa options:

We stopped at Aranyaprathet (Aran) on the way to the border and were given the option to buy the visa here. I had read a lot about scams and people trying to sell overpriced visas, but I was told it would cost 900 baht here, which works out at around the same price that I paid online: $28 (note: this was in 2014. In 2016 it costs $37 as stated above). However, my fellow travellers on the bus who took this option had to leave their passports with the bus company, who assembled their visas and photos before returning them half an hour later or so. As a rule I never leave my passport with anyone, so I would not have been happy with this.

I met a couple at the border who said that the bus company they were on tried to convince them to buy the visa for 1,200 baht, $37, somewhere en route, and that if they did not (they did not) then bad things would happen (the usual dire warnings of this being the only place to buy said visa). This is not true, of course: at the border there is an option to buy "visa on arrival" and, when I accidentally wandered into this area by mistake, there was barely any queue at all.

How to get from Bangkok city centre to Mo Chit bus station:

Note: The BTS skytrain goes to Mo Chit, but the BTS Mo Chit station is not near Mo Chit bus station. Here's how I got there:

• Take the BTS skytrain to Mo Chit on the Sukhumvit line. I left my hostel at 6.30am and took the BTS Sukhumvit line from Nana to Mo Chit; this took around 30 minutes (42 baht).
• You could also take the MRT to Chatuchak Park, which looks as if it's the same stop as Mo Chit BTS.
• Cross the road to the Chatuchak Park side using the overpass.
• Take the orange-coloured bus number 77. This took around 15 minutes, 10 baht, to get to the bus station - it would have been way too far to walk but perhaps there is a handy shortcut through the park; I don't know. You'll know you're on the right bus when you see a lot of market stalls on your left; this is the Chatuchak Market, and the bus station which is huge and orange, on your right. It's signed Chatuchak Bus Terminal; you're in the right place, it's also called Mo Chit 2 or Northern Bus Terminal. The bus drives past the station and does a U-turn shortly before stopping.
• The bus stops at the back of a covered market; walk through the covered passageway and take a right turn (the only turn available, I think) in the market about halfway down. You'll come out of the market and see the bus station ahead of you. If you come out of the market and don't see the bus terminal, you missed the turning inside the market. 
• The Transport Company Ltd. is at booth 22 in the centre of the ground floor. The one-way ticket costs 750 baht (about 16 euro) and the bus leaves from platform 106, just to the left of booth 22.
• It took me an hour exactly from leaving the hostel in Sukhumvit to buying the bus ticket. 
• There is a food court, and a 7-11 and other shops in the station where you can stock up on snacks.

The bus:

The bus itself is comfortable, air-conditioned and not busy (I'm here in March) so I have two seats to myself. A little packed breakfast is provided containing juice, water, iced coffee, a muffin and a cookie, and later a hot lunch of fried rice and cucumber. There is a toilet on board. I was armed with my own toilet paper but in fact there was some in there. There is a strong, hot wind blowing upwards out of the toilet bowl, which is not conducive to relaxed seating, but apart from that it seemed reasonably sanitary. However, the heat inside the cubicle combined with the long journey on bumpy roads dissuaded me from venturing inside after about midday. There are places to go en route when the bus stops. Take advantage of the casinos at the border; they have clean facilities.

Packed lunch on the bus

It took about an hour and a half to drive out of the city of Bangkok. At 11am it stopped at a petrol station where there was a shop, at which you could get out, although I didn't. At 11:45am we passed the Royal Thai Army barracks and stopped to let on board a soldier with a large gun to search the bus. At around 12pm we stopped at Aran where we were told we could buy the visa. At around 1pm we reached the border, and got out to walk through immigration: departure from Thailand first (where you need your departure card they gave you on arrival) and then entry to Cambodia (where you need to provide your completed arrival card, visa, and fingerprints). The whole process took no more than half an hour. It was very easy, no hassle at all. We arrived in Siem Reap at 5pm, and were swamped by tuk tuk drivers working for the bus company who drove us for free to wherever we were staying. The way they gain from this is that the same driver would like to take you around the temples for the whole of the following day. Try to choose an older driver who will remember more history.

Final tip: If you want to sleep on the bus, take your nap on the Thai side. The landscape in Cambodia is beautiful, well worth staying awake for, and the roads are rather bumpy so you may not sleep well anyway!

Note: this is not the cheapest way of getting from Bangkok to Siem Reap. You can take the train from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet for 48 baht; there's one that leaves at 5.30am. But there is no train line from Aran to Siem Reap so you have to take a tuktuk to the bus station once you're on the Cambodian side, and then a bus to Siem Reap which stops outside the city. Then you take a tuktuk into town. It involves more haggling but is quicker by about three hours. When I took the train in 2016, I left at 5.30am and arrives at 5.30pm. With the bus above I left at 8.00am and arrived at 5.30pm. I liked the train because it was full of locals and had people selling quails' eggs and chilli mango throughout the day.