Welcome to Cambodia Part I: police and handcuffs

Our guide in handcuffs

I don't know how to even begin to describe the day I entered Cambodia. It was another one of those trips from hell that make travel unforgettable. And why it’s never boring.

Since there is no local public transportation to the border between Laos and Cambodia, the only option is to take an international bus that goes from a city in Laos to a city in Cambodia. So I bought a ticket for a bus to take me from Four Thousand Islands where I was staying in Laos to Kratie in Cambodia.

The trip was supposed to start at 7:30 in the morning and finish in Kratie at around 14:30 in the afternoon. Good, that would give me plenty of time to find a place to stay, settle in, take a stroll around town, find a nice place to have dinner and catch up on emails in the evening. I probably don’t have to mention right now where this is all heading. Fat chance would I have an afternoon off!

I was at the boat dock on Four Thousand Islands as instructed at 7:30 in the morning. I know, the boat never leaves on time, but I get up early anyway and I went to sit there and wait. I always carry my Kindle with me to pass the time. It took the boatman a half hour to show up and then he still had to have breakfast and run errands. The boat left an hour late, at around 8:30.

I was then shown to the office of the bus company whose bus I would be taking with a bunch of other tourists. The bus company provided immigration forms for Cambodia that we could fill out right there, before getting to the border. A representative of the bus company, let’s call him our guide, collected our forms, passports and visa money and sent them ahead to the border to be processed. In the meantime, we sat there and waited for the bus.

Eventually, a guy with a shiny hairdo (some of the girls in our group thought that he looked like a male escort) showed up and said “OK, let’s go”. We got up and some people started following him, but our guide, in a weak voice, said “No, wait”.

We were confused. Should we go or should we wait?

Shiny haired guy is second from left

Our guide reminded us that he was the one who collected and sent our passports to the border and that convinced us to stay with him. The guy with the shiny hairdo did look somewhat sleazy and on closer inspection he had scars on his face that gave away he must have been in some serious fights in his life.

We continued to wait patiently with our guide who kept reassuring us that “the bus is coming in 10 minutes” over and over for more than an hour.

The shiny haired guy wouldn’t give up. He came back with reinforcements, a group of tough looking guys, marching in as if they were ready to fight. They urged us to “Come on, let’s go” but we knew by then that they were from another bus company and we had to wait with our guide who had our passports to go with his bus company.

The back and forth game continued, with the shiny haired guy’s people becoming more and more aggressive, trying to pick a fight to which our guide didn’t react, they shouted threats and lured us to go with them. Our guide kept asking us nicely to wait and was on the telephone with his boss constantly.

Finally, our bus arrived!

As we got up to board it, the shiny haired guy’s people had had enough. They enlisted a policeman or perhaps some kind of soldier dressed in camouflage shorts and a black tank top carrying a hefty gun on his back (I would venture a guess that he was bribed) who slapped handcuffs on our guide! Allegedly our bus was illegal.

Our guide didn’t know what to do and we didn’t know what to do either.

More people joined the melee, including our guide’s brother and the chief of police. There were many discussions going on, telephone calls and threats all over, people coming and going in little groups. The chief of police eventually gave the order to unlock our guide’s handcuffs but this was done only after our guide’s people agreed that we would take the shiny haired guy’s bus.

Since I didn’t understand most of what was going on, I can’t say for sure what happened. It seems that the shiny haired guy and his cronies are some kind of local Cambodian mafia who come across the border (their bus had Cambodian license plates) to poach tourists from reputable Lao bus companies. That’s how I saw it. But I guess I’ll probably never know.

Anyway, it was 11:30 by the time we finally left on the shiny haired guy’s bus. Little did I know that it was still going to be a long, long day.

To be continued…