Into Viet Nam

During out three month stay in Phnom Penh we plan a month of travel through South East Asia. Many people contribute to our plans by suggesting must-see destinations and offering practical tips about procuring visas and which border crossings to avoid. Our plan is to take the bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. It is a single bus trip with no change-over at the border. The ride is about 6 hours long and the bus crew will facilitate the crossing into Vietnam. This seems an easy introduction into our four-week tour of Cambodia’s neighbour-countries, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos

The travel agent at the end of the street gets our visas for us, books the bus, and arranges a shuttle to pick us up from his office. As usual, we find ourselves outside the closed travel office early in the morning waiting well past the designated pickup time. Before the shuttle shows an employee arrives to open the agency. A quick phone call confirms the shuttle is on its way, though we have a sneaking feeling we may have been forgotten prior to the call.

The bus ride is unspectacular, but offers three diversions.

The bus is equipped with a bathroom amidships, a very few rows behind and across the aisle from me. The door is broken and at first no one can get in. The bus has a driver and an attendant, who is put to work prying open the door. Once access is gained, the door seals every user inside. Any use of the bathroom is accompanied by banging and yelling; the attendant springs to action, again and again prying open the door.

Prior to reaching the boarder, the attendant distributes a declaration card and then returns to collect it and our passports. At the front of the bus he opens each passport to the photo page, until he has a thirty-centimetre stack of passports. The crossing has two parts. First, we exit Cambodia. The passports are turned over to staff in a booth who check each picture, each Cambodian visa (which are glued into our passports), and each Vietnamese visa. There is a delay as one woman has let her Cambodian visa expire. There is a hefty penalty to pay, about US$50. Despite holding us up, she is quite flippant about the lapse, and thinks it easier to pay the fine than to have renewed her visa in Phnom Penh for half the price. Finally, we are back in the bus for the hundred-metre dash across the neutral zone to the Vietnam border.

Next, we form a “queue” inside a large officious building. Well, this is South East Asia, and the queue is a British invention that has not really taken hold here—so what we really do is mill about in a pack. Our names are randomly called (at least, it seems random) and passports and declaration cards returned. With these in hand we then form a proper queue in the fenced aisles that lead to the border staff.

My name is called and when I return with card and passport to present to the border staff, a young American guy asks me where I got the declaration card. I explain they were distributed on the bus. He has doesn’t have one (perhaps he was locked in the bathroom as they were distributed). He has a short conversation with our bus attendant, and then a card is produced for him. He brings it back to ask me what he is to fill in. To our mutual surprise not only has the card been filled in by someone else using his passport and visa information, but his signature has been forged. So much for post 9/11 security enhancements. Everyone passed through security without incident and was directed – yes, directed - to the duty-free shop.

The third diversion is the change in scenery across the border. Just as there is a distinct shift when crossing from Canada to the US, a shift that is variation within the same, so too does Vietnam both look both like and unlike Cambodia. The geography and vegetation are very similar, which is expected. But the road immediately improves, the architecture changes (gone are the classic wood houses on stilts, replaced with concrete strip malls), and the variety of commercial signage bumps up a few notches. In Cambodia, the only billboards are for cell phones, unsurprising as the cell phone requires no infrastructure of wires and poles, and that Cambodia lacked. Now we see signs for all manner of Japanese electronics and American consumer goods as well as astonishing snaking bundles of wires that bisect the sky while connecting buildings with telephone poles. We will shortly see the extent to which capitalism is a part of Vietnam’s particular communism.