Travel Day: Siem Reap to Phuket

Yesterday, we relocated from Siem Reap to the Nai Harn Beach area of Phuket.

The trip took approximately 11 hours door-to-door. We hired a driver from one of our Angkor tuk tuk tours to get from Siem Reap to the local airport (he had a little Lexus SUV), which turned out very well. The cost for this service was 30 USD plus tip (booked through our hotel, it would have been 40 USD plus tip).

Notably, we departed from the brand new Siem Reap Angkor Airport, which is still quite underutilized. This made for a very pleasant airport experience, with quick movement through security and our family getting a whole large section of the departures lounge to ourselves. The drive was not overly busy, as there is a new highway that seemingly exists just to service the new airport. The airport was quite modern and clean, although a lot of the food options are not yet open. Getting to the airport took us under an hour.

This time, we flew with Air Asia connecting through Don Mueang in Bangkok before continuing on to Phuket Airport. We recommend building in at least a few hours between connecting flights through Don Mueang, as we certainly ended up spending at least an hour in line at the customs desk for transfers to get from the domestic terminal to the international terminal.

On arrival in Phuket, we had pre-booked a private car transfer via Klook (20 USD). In the past, our Klook transfers have been fairly good, but this time our driver was not great. He arrived late for our scheduled pickup (we were by far the last people from our flight to get picked up), his vehicle was out of gas so he needed to stop to refill it, he was constantly on his phone not looking at traffic, he did not know where he was going, and he was driving erratically. He also wanted to drop our family of four with luggage off on the opposite side of a very busy road from our accommodation to avoid a right turn, despite our accommodation having a driveway for him to turn into.

By the time we arrived and settled into our Airbnb it was 7:30 pm. Thankfully, the Airbnb host’s manager was not overly talkative and check-in was quick, which meant we were soon able to enjoy a much-needed dinner ordered from Grab in our new home-away-from-home.