Friday, October 20, 2006


Our experience at the border was not your normal "Anything to declare?" sort of experience. First of all, everyone ignored us. We would stand in front of a booth with four men in it and they would all be reading ladies magazines. They would not look up or even acknowledge us. We would ask a question and they would grunt or point down the road. We had no idea what they meant. Finally one of the men put down his magazine for a moment to hand us the proper forms for filling out. He gave no explaination and we began filling them out. We stapled our passport pictures to the papers and handed them in. He looked through our passports and realized we did not have the stamp for Vietnam (how were we supposed to know-there were no signs!!). So we had to trudge the walk to the real Vietnam-pay some guys to write out our name on paper-turn around and check-out of Vietnam. Granted this MAY have taken 30 minutes to walk the road and such. We come back to Cambodia and I showed the government worker my stamped passport and asked for the documents we had just filled out. "They have been destroyed," he said. ARGGGGGHHH!!! We were the only people coming through for the day---why would he destroy them! Thankfully we had another picture; I took two of each because I have learned you can never be too prepared here:) So we filled it out and waiting for the officials to hand them back. Meanwhile, while we are sitting there we see people just walking right across the border. No one was stopping them or even questioning them! The picture above is one example. These people looked like they were moving but no border patrol batted an eye! They were obviously too busy ignoring the Westerners and reading their style magazines!!! As we have heard so many times...Welcome to Cambodia!

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