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Vietnam: A Smuggling Operation
When we arrived at the bus station for the bus from Laos to Vietnam the ticket-seller told us the tickets had already been sold out. Sold out? This was incredibly infuriating considering we had been trying to secure tickets for several days. We had initially attempted to buy tickets two days earlier, but we were told that tickets only started selling on the day of travel. We returned early on the day of travel, but the situation had changed: we were told tickets started selling only two hours before travel-time. Now it was just under two hours before the bus was due to leave - how could the bus had filled up already? The ticket-seller shrugged ignorance, and swivelled his chair away from the ticket window - away from our indignant harangues. We stood our ground, glowering and puffing, haughty in the belief that we had a right for those tickets. This went on for fifteen minutes, and our demands for tickets grew angrier. I told the ticket seller that I was a journalist, and I was going to make sure he would be punished or fired for the way he had tricked us and dismissed us. I thrust a business card in front of him. He studied it with weary indifference, then he glared at me deridingly, and finally started filling out two tickets.
The Vietnamese men who were loading the bus had wiry bodies and long necks and pointed heads. They spoke in rapid staccato bursts, and their voices were clipped and aggressive. Their posture was erect, and they had fast bird-like movements, darting this way and that, their heads flitting in response to external stimuli. They moved in tandem, in a way that suggested that they spent a lot of time working together, like factory workers; now pausing, now jostling, now whirling their heads to the left, now loading the luggage, everything conducted with deft nimbleness. They looked the same too; most of them were in their thirties, and wore baseball caps and old jeans and old T-shirts. There were a scattering of better dressed women, and four Westerners, including us. It was hard to discern who was crew and who was passenger; orders came from different directions, and everyone seemed to be loading the bus.
Something like a truckload of cargo disappeared into the bowels of the bus. The roof rack and various luggage booths were packed solid, then cartoon boxes full of the energy drink Red Bull were pushed underneath the seats which had been elevated by welding an extra piece of leg to them, and passengers' luggage was heaped in the back of the bus where the last two rows of seats had been ripped out. We - the passengers - were treated like an additional piece of incidental cargo which could be twisted to fit into the seats, or straightened and placed horizontally in the aisle. There was no space for our legs; we had to sit with our legs splayed apart or twisted to one side; and the ceiling was too low to stand straight. I was ordered to sit next to a Vietnamese woman who proceeded to tie a bandanna over her mouth and nose, and don elbow-long skin-hugging white gloves, to buffer herself from the musty stuffiness and stale breath and cigarette smoke. Behind me, in a wicker cage, there was a beautiful blue-black bird with expressive black eyes, a bird of the tropical undergrowth; it moved with a thrusting, exploratory, anxious gait; and all night it squawked in a muttering, sulky manner.
The engine of the bus grated and jarred, and soon after we left town the road degenerated into a muddy track hemmed on both sides by pitch-black forest. For seven hours the bus flailed ahead carelessly - the engine revving, the tyres squelching, the suspension groaning - and perhaps the driver had no choice but to blaze ahead in this manner, achieving the momentum necessary to overcome the resistance of the deep mud-pools that would otherwise stall the bus. The forest was ghostly and dark, and beam of my torch couldn't penetrate the lashes of mud that covered the windows. Every time I started to doze off I would be knocked awake with a groan as the bus jolted and climbed through a mud-pool. I couldn't even stand up to stretch my sore legs because the aisle was lined with bodies, men reclining on flattened cardboard boxes.
We arrived at the border at 5am - four hours before opening time. But why did the bus have to travel all night and then wait at the border for four hours? Wouldn't it be better to leave at first light, and navigated the muddy track in day-light? I was tired, sore, and confounded.
Someone collected some dried branches and started a fire around which several man now huddled on their haunches; I smelled tea and cooking meat, and bread scalded on the fire. Two men were struggling with the back mudguard of the bus which had been ripped into a mangled mess during the night. I caught some sleep lying on the cement porch of the border building. By morning there was a line of trucks parked down the road. I thought that perhaps we had travelled at night to beat the queues. But when the border opened the trucks drove around our bus and disappeared into Vietnam, and once again I was confounded.
The conductor turned up with all the passports - except ours', the Westerners - at the border office. He set them into two piles in front of the immigration officer. I counted 52 passports, but there were only 33 passengers. In each passport a 10,000Kip note had been inserted (US$1 - equivalent to two days' salary for an immigration officer). The civil servant then proceeded to cursorily flip through each passport, put the 10,000Kip in a drawer, scribble the entry in a ledger, and push the passport aside. Occasionally he would open a passport, shake his head, and push it towards the bus conductor. The conductor would insert an additional note, and the uniformed official would immediately process the entry. All this went on without the exchange of any words or eye contact, as though it had been agreed in advance. We, the Westerners, came at the end of the queue, and we didn't have to pay to have our passports stamped.
But our wait wasn't over. Another two hours of lounging and smoking and pacing went by. Finally, when all the trucks had gone and there was no one else at the border, our bus crawled across and stopped at the Vietnamese inspection spot. Two immigration officers walked through the bus and opened the luggage holds, conducting quick, formal, cursory inspections, then they waved us off, and suddenly my fellow passengers awoke from the sloth that had overtaken them during the six hours at the border. The driver whistled for everyone to assemble, and the bus took off as a trail of last passengers jumped on. Now the driving was manic, and within two hours we reached the outskirts of Hue, where the bus stopped, and we - the Westerners - were asked to get off. We said we wanted to go to the bus station. The bus conductor said the bus wasn't going to the bus station.
We stepped out, into blustery rain and wind. Standing on the side of the road, trying to hitch a ride into town, our umbrellas were useless against the slanted, tropical torrent. It was a grey and watery world - a scattering of scruffy houses, and flooded fields, and nowhere to shelter. If only we hadn't argued with the ticket seller who had only been obliquely trying to spare us the ordeal of being party to a smuggling operation. Now drenched and miserable, I decided that sometimes in Asia things are not what they seem, and the best policy is to shut up and resign, for being righteous doesn't make you wiser or necessarily gets you anywhere - righteousness just gets you into trouble.
© Victor Paul Borg
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