To Fly or to Drive? Crossing the Border from Thailand to Cambodia

Has it ever bothered you when you’re on a short-haul flight that by the time you drive to the airport, waste two hours waiting for your flight, collect your baggage, and arrange for a transfer to your hotel, you could have driven to your destination in less time? Well it always bothers us!

We’ve been open to the idea of road transfers for longer trips on our trip so far, but our recent transfer from Koh Chang, Thailand, to Siem Reap, Cambodia, was the first time that they actually seemed to be the logical option in terms of convenience, trip length, and price.

First, in terms of convenience, as a family of four traveling with two young children (ages 5 and 7), we (the parents) end up having to carry most of our kids’ luggage through the airport. So every transfer is a sweaty and unpleasant ordeal (we have luggage for four for a year). The ease of simply moving our luggage into a car once and not needing to touch it again sounded like a very convenient and pleasant way to travel — door-to-door service. (Or so it seemed … but more on this later.) And being able to travel when it works for you, without being beholden to flight schedules, is also a nice perk.

In terms of time spent traveling for this trip, as between flying and driving — the only two viable options for us from Koh Chang to Siem Reap — flying seemed like it was going to actually take longer. The time to get to the closest airport to Koh Chang is around 1.5 hours, if you don’t miss your ferry off the island, so you need to make sure you add in some buffer time to account for the erratic ferry service. You would likely have also built in some extra buffer time to ensure you get to the airport on time. From the airport in Trat, the flights to Siem Reap are typically connecting flights through Bangkok, meaning that there would also be necessary layover time in Bangkok between flights. And even when you get to the new Siem Reap airport, it’s then a full hour’s drive into the city.

Alternatively, heading from Koh Chang to Siem Reap in a private car generally takes eight or nine hours or so in total, including the ferry time, washroom stops, and the time it takes to go through customs at the border. So overall, it seemed like flying would actually have been slower.

Based on these factors, and the fact that it was significantly cheaper to drive than to fly, we chose the overland route.

We were picked up by our private mini-bus in Koh Chang fairly early yesterday morning (7 am) to try to beat the crowds at the border. While this timing worked well for the ferry and we did not experience any significant traffic, we still didn’t just sail through at the border. It took us around an hour to get through customs, even though we had pre-purchased our visas.

The border crossing itself was not overly pleasant, either, as you need to switch from one van to another at the border, which means you need to take all of your luggage out of the vehicle and carry it down the road to the border and through the various customs buildings, including up and down several flights of stairs and through the long, hot line for the border agents. So much for the convenience of packing our things in a van and forgetting about them until we arrived at our destination!

After we loaded our stuff into the van waiting for us on the other side of the border and another couple hours of driving,  we finally arrived at our hotel in Siem Reap at 3:30 pm, which gave us just enough time to relax a bit and take Little Miss and Young Mister WorldSmith for a swim before dinner.

Ultimately, while the overland journey wasn’t quite as smooth as we had hoped, mainly due to the border crossing, we still think it was easier than the flying route and would recommend it to anyone who plans to travel from eastern Thailand to Siem Reap.

We booked our transfer with Lamoon Tours in Kai Bae, Koh Chang. You can contact Kai, their representative, via WhatsApp at +66 93 007 1668. Their team will help you across the border and link you with your second driver on the other side — ours was waiting for us right at the bottom of the stairs as we descended from the customs area and knew what we looked like, so that aspect of the transfer was very smooth.

The total cost for our private road trip journey was 8,000 THB, which we paid to our Thai driver before we crossed the border from Thailand to Cambodia.