Crossing the border from Vietnam to Cambodia (Post #87)
Crossing the border from Vietnam to Cambodia on Friday, January 27th was quite an adventure (yea, yea, I know I’m behind on the blogs…someday I’ll catch up). The adventure started out when we went downstairs to meet the travel agent who told us the night before that: a) it was o.k. to leave to walk to catch the bus at 8:20a or 8:30a even though our bus tickets showed the bus left at 8:15a and b) she would walk with us to show us where we were supposed to catch the bus. We were downstairs at about 8:10 and asked for the travel agent who regularly works in the lobby. Well, she wasn’t there. We told the receptionist that we were supposed to catch the bus to Cambodia. She looked at our tickets and said something like, “Oh, you need to leave right away, the bus is leaving now!” We told her we didn’t know where to go. She said that we need to go around the corner to another travel agency. O.k., fine, we knew where that was. We run there and find the bus is already full. This looked grim because everyone’s luggage was loaded in the back and in the aisles and there was no place for anything else anywhere. For a split second we felt a wave of panic but then we saw a lot of other people standing around with backpacks. We heard a lady tell the crowd of travelers that another bus was coming to pick people up to go to Cambodia. Whew! That was a relief!
Shortly after taking off on this – in theory – 6 hour bus journey, the air conditioner stops working. It is very hot and humid and Mike and I, along with everyone else on the bus, begin sweating to death. We get to the border at about 11:00am along with 3 other huge bus loads of people. Our bus is the last to arrive so we end up in the back of a very long line that extends out the back of the Vietnam border control building. We couldn’t figure out why the line was moving so slow. Usually exiting a country is fast and easy. The passport control people normally just look at your entry date, put a stamp in your passport and that’s it. We know it didn’t help that each time a Vietnamese or Cambodian person or group appeared they got expidited to the front of the line. It also didn’t help that there were several lines initially but as time wore on, the number of lines decreased until there was only one line and one man stamping passports. This aspect was particularly frustrating because we were so close to the front of our line when we saw “our guy” get up, walk out the door, and ride off on his motorcycle. We figured he was going to another building to get more supplies or something since he didn’t say anything to anyone. In fact, we all just remained standing in line while we watched the other line moving forward. Finally, the one man that is working stands up, looks over at our line, and says, “Move here!” pointing to his line. Turns out we had been standing in our line for no reason since the man who left on the motorcycle was never coming back. We all moved over to the back of the one remaining line. When it was all said and done, we ended up standing in line for over 3 hours in order to exit Vietnam. Next we had to enter Cambodia…
We walked from the border of Vietnam, through “no man’s land” (a common phrase used by travelers to describe the area between two borders) and on to the border of Cambodia. We brought photos with us in order to get a visa and we had U.S. dollars – two important requirements. We stood in line at a small booth and after a short period of time, we hand our applications, photos, and two $20 bills to the Cambodian visa officers. One of the men looks at our passports and says, “No pages for visa. No visa. Next!” and hands everything back to us. I wasn’t totally stressed but I was somewhat concerned. I told him he could just put the visa over some old entry and exit stamps that were from 1999. He said no. I then said that he could put the visa here, on one of the back pages of the passport. He said no, he needed a blank page. My passport didn’t have any blank pages but Mike’s did so Mike showed him the blank page and he told Mike that the page didn’t have the word “Visa” on the top so he couldn’t put it there. (This is actually not true since other countries have put visa stamps on pages that didn’t have the word “visa” at the top.) Then I decided to bribe the man. The “word” among travelers and guide books is that police and government officials in countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Loas, and Cambodia are corrupt and will usually make your problem disappear if the price is right. I offered $20 but he still said no. At this point, my concern was growing because out of 3 busloads of people crossing into Cambodia, there were only about 5 of us left who were not on a bus yet. He told Mike and I that we would have to go back to Vietnam. I knew this probably wasn’t true but I didn’t know what were supposed to do. He gave us a lecture about the fact that we shouldn’t be leaving our home country with a full passport and no blank visa pages and how we couldn’t get into Cambodia with a passport as filled up as ours were.
Suddenly, he said, “You need to write here on your visa application, ‘I am very sorry…’ I wrote, ‘I am very sorry’ without having any idea what it was I was going to be writing next. He continued, ‘…that my passport is full.’ O.k., I wrote that. So on my visa application I had written, “I am very sorry that my passport is full.” Then he says, “You write here, ‘I o.k. a visa on page 24′”. I was unclear what exactly was going on but I wrote that and then he says, “O.k., now press your right thumb in this ink, roll it on the paper and sign your name.” Meanwhile, Mike has been told to write the same thing on his application and is also rolling his thumb in red ink. I am thinking, “Oh God…where are we going with this?” Then all of a sudden he says, “Give me your passports.” He puts visa stickers on them and we are told to pay an extra $10. Then says, “I’m hungry. Are you?”
Next we move on to the Cambodian passport control where we quickly get a entry stamp and get on the last tourist bus going to Phenom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Our little border experience took 4 hours and we had barely made a dent in our journey to the Cambodian capital. We were some of the last people on the bus and because of this, we didn’t get seats together. In fact, we were lucky we got seats at all since 5 people ended sitting in the aisles with the luggage. This new bus was completely overloaded and it didn’t seem to have working air conditioning either. We were at least able to open the windows, which gave us some air flow but about an hour later when we got to a river crossing, the bus stopped because we had to wait in a line of cars to catch the ferry. The bus became incredibly hot and with the high humidity levels, you could see everyone started to sweat and their shirts getting wet. At one point, a woman came by selling giant fried cockroaches for $1. Mmmm…yes! That’s exactly, what I’m craving right now on this hot, humid, stuffy, bus, a giant fried cockroach! How could she have known?! So, we waited about 30 minutes to get on the ferry and then had to laugh when we realized this slow ferry took 5-10 minutes to cross the river. We all said in amazement, “Has anyone ever thought to simply build a bridge?”
We evenually arrived in Phenom Penh at 7:00pm – almost 11 hours after we left. Of course when we arrived we didn’t have any place to stay. (This is our MO now – just show up and figure things out once we get there.) We caught a cab and after some searching we finally found a place to stay at about 8:00p. Needless to say, this turned out to be a very long day!
Tags: Category #23: Cambodia
Michele Harmon
I’m laughing so hard that tears are coming down my face. You both are amazing. Nothing about this sounds appealing at all. I guess you have to be “there” to understand it. Aren’t you getting a little bit home sick? Tired of living out of a backpack? 🙂