Sweat at the border
“You go Lao”, says the Vietnamese border guard pointing over my shoulder. After eight years of existence and nearly two years of intense travel my passport is showing its age. Although it had miraculously survived my bamboo rafting experience in Thailand the water had somehow crept into the photo page and it was rejected by the scanner. This is a nightmare; even if Lao immigration allows me back in I’ll have to pay for a new visa and I’ll probably need to travel all the way back to Bangkok to get a new passport.
The border corssing is nestled in a mountain pass with steep jungle covered cliffs climbing on either side of the white concrete gates. An hour or more passes whilst the guards examine
every page of my passport with an illuminated maginifying glass, gabble on their mobile phones in Vietnamese and occasionally shake their heads at me and repeat, ‘you go Lao’. I try my best to look scared and desperate, not sure if I should even offer a bribe or how to go about it. Eventually they ask for a dollar ‘for the stamp’, which I happily pass over. I think I’d have just as happily paid twenty, but my relief is short-lived as still the fine toothcomb and ‘you go Lao’ treatment continues.
“Great Britain, embassy Hanoi, no embassy Lao”, I say eventually say hopefully, and finally they mutter then nod at each other and hand over my passport.
“You go Vietnam”, one of them says with a nod, and with immense relief and a dozen thank-yous I walk through to my patiently waiting transport; a minibus packed with sugar, bathroom ceramics, hair cream and other random cargo. As I climb aboard the bus and sit next to a pile of sugar sacks with ‘amazing Thailand’ written on them I remember that at the last minute I’d decided to buy two large bottles of Beer Lao for the journey. At this moment it seems like the best decision I’d made all day.
