Cambodian passports

I learn something new every week; it helps keep me young. This week it was the rigmarole that surrounds getting a Cambodian passport. My current official consort/senior member of the (non-exclusive in my case) harem needs to get a new passport. Apparently it's not the simple matter that the Thais have more or less mastered - toddle off to the passport office at Klong Toei or elsewhere, cough up 1,000 baht and two or three days later there's a brand spanking new Thai passport either delivered or available for pick up. In Cambodia there's a very expensive service for delivery in roughly the same period of time - I'm talking several thousand baht - or you can wait ... and wait until it's ready for collection. This TripAdvisor thread from 6 years ago sets out the process - and it only lasts for 3 years, not the five (soon to be ten) years the Thais get - https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopi...-Cambodia.html

Wikipedia reports a lesser cost since machine-readable passports were introduced in 2014 but comments that Cambodian passports are still among the most expensive in Asia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_passport - and waiting times can still be expected

Many years ago, a Cambodian lad told me their passport cost about $200. I mentally discounted this, but it's still expensive.

Once they have one, there's a final hurdle of a 2-3 hour wait as Thai immigration seem to have selected the Aranya Prathet-Poipet border for a "go-slow" policy. In contrast, arriving from Laos takes minutes.

cambodia has passports...thought it was like mongolia..part of something else bigger and better

Depends, one major reason seems to be that under the then unrest and new-world brain-wishing of the red Khmer most of the feable documentation in civil registers were destroyed and thus its for many quite an undertaking to prove that they exist and that they are also those they claim to be. Of course these are rather understandable basics for any document as ID. Add to that the general Asean attitude of ´if they dont know where/who we are they cannot tax me´ and it gets more complicated to sort out.
Once having seen a Burmese passport (in a flight of AirAsia), just issued, just out of curiosity, from a friendly fellow pax beside me, one can well understand why developed western nations have reason to suspect such thingies now that they even have electronic gates for border checks with those chip-embedded passports.