Border Crossing part 2 of 3

But once we were in Koh Chang, we started to see signs in the windows of all of the tour operators advertising guided trips over the border into Cambodia.

For those of you who know my brother-in-law, you know this ex-military guy doesn’t have the words “no can do” in his vocabulary. After brief deliberations, we ducked into one of the tour operators and booked our guided transport into Cambodia.

Early Wednesday morning, our Thai driver picked us up right on time in front of our hotel. At noon we stopped at a little restaurant where we were met by a man who was expecting us. He took our passports and started filling out the paperwork for us. After lunch, he handed us back to our driver. It was still another hour to the border.

At the border, our van pulled in and there was a man waiting for us. Before I fully realized what was going on, our van driver back up and drove off. We essentially had no idea where we were. We were hours from Koh Chang and hours still from Angkor Wat. We were in the custody of a man we had never met before who spoke little English. While our phone still worked, if we ran into trouble, whom would we call anyway?

We were on a little dirt median between two parking lots standing under the weak shade of an anemic little tree. While the guy who would be walking us over the border looked over all of our paperwork, we shifted our heavy backpacks from one shoulder to another and tried to avoid making eye contact with the beggar who was trying to sell us cheap-looking velvet-covered plastic horse with beady red eyes. Finally, our guide indicated for us to follow him. It was time to walk the one kilometer through the city of Poipet to the border crossing.

The guy in the TravelAdvisory.com chatroom who described the city of Poipet as a cesspool was being kind.

At the immigration station, we cued up behind a hundred other would-be border crossers. Mostly they were young, western backpackers. The line did not seem to be moving. With our lack of dread-locks, our recent showers, and our blonde-haired children, we certainly stuck out from our fellow trekkers. My nephew sporting his bandana and scruffy beard could have blended in if he weren’t hanging out with us breeders.

After disappearing for a minute, our crossing guide returned and said that it might be a couple of hours before we could get across. He paused for a second, looked at me, looked at my brother-in-law, and then said that for US$10 per person, he could get us across in a few minutes. Knowing that we would be cutting in front of all these fellow travelers, my egalitarian American sensibilities recoiled at the suggestion. Furthermore, I didn’t like the idea of being squeezed for some extra payola.