It was hard to part with the peacefulness and beauty that was Koh Rong, but alas, we had to keep it moving. We/Yemi thought the best mode of transportation to Battambang, in northwest Cambodia, was to take the night bus. Up until this point, we’d been pretty lucky with night trains and actually rode a very nice, brand spanking new night bus (think the Emirates of buses) on a quick ride between Hue and Hoi An in Vietnam so we thought it would be fine; leave at 7pm, arrive around 5am. We were wrong.

You see, most people, when they talk about backpacking in southeast Asia, they mostly talk of the positive: amazing fellow travelers, cheap delicious eats, great hotel accommodations at shockingly low prices. However what we fail to mention is the less than ideal circumstances that come with all of the positive things aforementioned. Before I left, I came across an article about what no one tells you about backpacking in southeast Asia. One of them: night buses. This article had mentioned crowded buses (sometimes without enough seats), cockroaches crawling around, and less than professional drivers. I read the article and tucked it away, in the hopes to never experience but my time had come.

We left at 7pm however stopped just a short while later for nearly an hour. Luckily, the bus wasnt full so we had our own beds but at about 1 am, the bus came to a halt saying that we needed to switch buses. This was the first of 4 bus changes throughout the night. We then boarded the second bus: smelly, left over food strewn about the aisle, holes in the floor, COCKROACHES!  To say it was horrendous would be an understatement. The sugar on top was that our “bed” was wet from a leaky A/C vent which continued to steadily drip on me through the remainder of the ride on this particular bus. Fast forward to about 7am and it was time for another bus change. It was sometime in the afternoon when we finally arrived to our destination. This was officially the worst night of the trip.