Word reaches me that my new UK passport has arrived in Pattaya. A surprise because I had been warned that a wave of strikes was adding to existing delays dating back to the pandemic lock-downs passport applications might linger in HM Passport Office for months. In fact it took just a little more than six weeks from despatch from Thailand to arrival in Pattaya. Rejoice, rejoice! At last something seems to be working.
Leafing through the pages of my nice burgundy coloured EU ex-PP, now corner clipped and cancelled, I come upon a long expired Cambodian visa. A Proustian moment, vivid memories awakened. I’m taken back to a pre-retirement visa time and the ‘visa run’. For me not a long mini-van journey from Pattaya but a short 30 km drive from my Ban Somboon home to the border at Chong Sa-Ngaam. It was at the height of the rainy season.
Here’s how I described the experience to my blog readers:
In the monsoon rains, Chong Sa-Ngaam feels an alien and even slightly scary spot. This remote, little used border crossing straddling the kingdoms of Thailand and Cambodia is for me the nearest and most convenient place to leave Thailand, enter and exit Cambodia, then come back into Thailand to renew my 90 day Thai visa,
The road to Chong Sa-Ngaam is no major highway just a country road pitted with deep and hazardous pot holes. At the frontier nothing appears permanent. It consists entirely of ‘portacabins’ and temporary looking huts dotted along a dusty unsurfaced track. In the rainy season, which is now, the dust is turned to heavy oozing Isaan mud.
The scene here could be straight out of one of those Indochina war films churned out by the dozen in the 1970s and 80s. Slit trenches and sand bags add to the vaguely military feel. Frontier hopping locals stagger under the weight of huge bundles of mysterious merchandise, others trundle heavily laden carts. All is rain, mud and heat tinged with an intangible tension. An atmosphere effortlessly evoked by writers such as John Le Carré and Graham Greene.
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Even the most seasoned travellers, and I now count myself among them, feel a mix of anxiety and excitement in situations of this sort, alien and just a little intimidating. You are stepping literally into no-man’s land, for a few metres one country has ended and another has yet to begin.
Under a gun metal sky and jagged black storm clouds the rain teems relentlessly down beating a drum tattoo on tin roofs. Thunder rumbles moodily in the distance. Huddled under my umbrella, I fumble for passport and papers on the Thai side. A friendly enough official gives my passport a cursory glance and stamps it, in a manner that fully projects his authority. Now I have officially left Thailand. But, as yet, I am nowhere else.
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The few seconds it takes to cross the 20 or so yards, through rain and mud, to the Cambodian hut on the other side of the track are, for those of a sensitive disposition such as me, anxious moments. I have to admit I have never cared much for Cambodia. I find the country a touch intimidating. Its recent history is wretched. The ghosts of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seem even now to poison the atmosphere more than 30 years after the ending of that era of evil that inflicted a reign of terror and atrocity probably unmatched since the time of Stalin. Atrocities for the most part carried out with relish by 14 and 15-year-old Khmer Rouge cadres who must by now be middle-aged citizens.
This perceived scariness is encouraged by something I was told some time ago. Khmer operatives, I was informed, are the Bangkok Mafia’s preferred personnel for any dirty work to be done, intimidation, assassination etc. On completion of their assignment they conveniently slip back across the border and disappear into the hinterland.
Maybe an over-developed sensitivity to atmosphere colours my perception at Chong Sa-Ngaam, or the lingering memory of TV news footage, but as I cross the 100 metres or so of no-man’s land into Cambodia my febrile imagination conjures up a scene of helicopter gunships hovering on the horizon.
Local border hoppers with their bundles and carts turn into refugees either fleeing the Khmer Rouge or rushing to join. I can almost see those squads of youths in red-check scarves and rubber tyre sandals, that brought terror and death to millions. Indelible images of turmoil and war stretching, in this part of the world, back to the 1950s.
Reality forces an abrupt descent from my flight of fantasy. I find myself standing at a leaky roofed open air counter. Across the counter inside the hut’s well roofed interior a stony faced Cambodian official faces me, wearing a tightly tailored and well-pressed uniform embellished with badges.
“In – out? One thousand Baht,” he barks. Trying ineptly to hold onto my umbrella, it’s still teeming, I hastily and clumsily try to gather together money and documents without exposing them to the relentless downpour, or dropping them in the oozing mud at my feet. This gets stressful.
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Stress worsens my deafness, which always embarrasses me and irritates others. Arms and hands full I am faced with the challenge of filling in forms. An old ‘post office’ type Biro on a string nailed to the counter is provided for the purpose. I fill in the documents on the grained and grubby wooden surface while raindrops drip heavily and steadily turning the flimsy slips of paper to pulp.
There are the usual unanswerable questions. Arrival flight number or name of vessel? Address in Cambodia? Eventual destination? And, of course, the thing you can never remember – passport number? I have to ask the official for it back for the elusive number. He hands it to me with a look of exasperated resignation. This is obviously something he has to put up with countless times a day! Everything has to be completed twice. Once for arrival, the other for departure. Both procedures are accomplished within minutes of each other. One moment you’re in Cambodia, the next you’re gone again.
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Just 300 Baht please, for services rendered.
The trudge back to the Thai side is altogether calmer although there a repeat performance of form filling and rubber stamping. And there it is, I’m now here legally for another 90 days.
