The Siem Reap, Cambodia-bound tourist bus, AKA the “Scam Bus”: Cheap and, well, maybe not so cheap. Prices at the moment start at around 300 baht for a ticket to Siem Reap, Cambodia, home to Angkor Wat and a few hundred other old temples. This seems like a cheap option for a lot of tourists but for many this 300 baht ends up as only a fraction of what you ultimately pay and the service, in respect to time and treatment (you are definitely not seen as human, but as a stupid piece of cargo to be ripped off as much as possible), is absolutely horrid.

There are several ways this ticket is subsidized: First, you will be massively overcharge for your visa, with overcharges ranging anywhere from 200 to 600 baht ($5-$15). Second, kickbacks from the several restaurants you’ll stop at along the way. Third, upon entering Cambodia you will be pressured into changing money, significants amounts of it, and at ridiculous rates. And fourth, you will be sold to a Siem Reap guesthouse for $7, and that’s their money, not yours. To facilitate getting you into the guesthouse, what is normally an eight to ten-hour journey and easily completed by mid-afternoon, will be dragged out to fourteen to eighteen hours, resulting in arrival times on average of 10 pm to 2 am.

Now imagine arriving at 2 in the morning? How likely are you to move to another guesthouse at this hour? At you can probably forget about that nice shining bus they showed you in the picture, for the Cambodia leg of the trip you’ll be lucky if it’s even a bus, let alone one with working A/C.