Stuck between Borders
Remember the movie ‘The Terminal’? I can now relate myself to Tom Hanks or atleast to some portion of his surreal experience. Unlike the movie, I didn’t have to go to the extent of finding myself a job and a girl. Tom Hanks did have a decent toilet and a roof over his head while stuck at the JFK airport, compared to that, this is what I had:
The red shack on the right hand side of the picture is Cambodian passport control. No kidding. Let’s take a step back to see how I landed myself into this scenario.
The Grand Plan was to visit a few cities across Cambodia, cross over to Laos and spend some time on the beautiful 4000 Islands, come back to Cambodia to catch the flight back to Oslo.
I needed a multiple entry visa to Cambodia and a single entry to Laos. To my (and now your) surprise the concept of multiple entry visa apparently doesn’t exist for Cambodia. I then considered getting two entry visas for Cambodia. However, I was told that it is not possible and that I should just get a second visa on arrival at the border. Given that Bangladeshi passport holders are not eligible for visa on arrival in Cambodia, I was puzzled on how that would work. If I were eligible for a visa on arrival, why on earth would I have to get the first visa in advance. The officers at the embassy gave me some assurance that as long as I have a confirmed return ticket back home, I will get a visa on arrival. I got a single entry visa to Laos in advance, since I was not eligible for visa on arrival there as well.
I now had a single entry visa for both Cambodia and Laos.
Sticking to plan, I made my way from Cambodia to Laos and was now prepared for the final leg of the journey back to Cambodia. The bus journey was pretty smooth apart from the anxious thought that rolled at the back of my head; would I really get a visa on arrival?
At the Cambodian border, I showed my passport and they flat out rejected to give me a visa on arrival.
I conveyed the message their embassy told me and showed them my confirmed flight tickets. They didn’t seem to care, what the embassy said and demanded that I show USD 5000 worth of cash. I could not have withdrawn that amount of cash from an ATM even if I wanted to because of withdrawal limit. Needless to say, there was no ATM nearby as well. After a lot of haggling back and forth, the officer called his supervisor but they stood by their decision of not giving me the visa and yelled (yes they yelled!) that I go back to Laos and fly from there. They were not willing to understand, let alone empathize the fact that I could no longer go back to Laos. Rather they seemed pretty annoyed and till date I wonder whether it was my face, or they were just cranky.
A travel agent named Jamie J Love (no laughing guys, that was his name) who was processing visas for the tourists came to my aid. He knew the language, so he talked to the police officers at the Laos border and explained the situation and convinced them to reinstate my exit stamp. Apparently this is a supported scenario. They literally stapled a pink sticky note on top of the visa page and wrote something on it - my best guess: “Visa Valid”.
That at least ended the agony of me being stuck in no man’s land. For the curious elite of you, it took me 56+ hours to reach home, and the return route looked something like this:
Pakse, Laos — Vientiane, Laos — Bangkok,Thailand — Phnom Penh, Cambodia — Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — Dubai, UAE — Oslo, Norway
Never have I ever been happier to be back home!
I take this opportunity to thank my friend, Manolis Platakis, who put through the same experience to accompany me, even though his Greek passport had no such exciting issues.
If this was entertaining, you might also want to read the pretext of how I got the single entry visa for Cambodia: “In pursuit of a Cambodian Visa”
