A brief foray into smuggling
I’ve never been through a border crossing before. Not really.
I’ve driven to Canada a few times. I’ve gone through customs at Zurich airport. But none of these really count. The guards could barely muster the energy to glare. I’ve had more intimidating experiences at the security desk of a downtown office building.
The customs station at the Singapore / Malaysia border was something else entirely. You’re driving through farms and jungle. Verdant foliage crowds the highway and the windows fog as the humid outside fights the bus’s air conditioning. Suddenly, the roadsides open and erupt in bright yellow and red warning signs. Suddenly traffic slows down and everyone on the bus tenses with the expectation of imminent bureaucratic hassle. As you get off the bus, men in military uniforms shout instructions at you in the bored manner of those inured to dealing with masses of humanity. Warning signs in English, Malay, and Chinese occur every 10 feet.
I should have known that this was where I would be busted for smuggling.
I had looked forward to taking the famed overnight sleeper train from Malaysia to Singapore, but the railway company’s computer system was down for the weekend. Wailing crowds filled the terminals and no tickets were to be had. That meant the bus.
The bus was nice. Two stories, with large, padded seats and entertainment screens on the seat in front of you. There was a young attendant who brought around cold towels and hot tea once we were underway. Delightful. Not too long after, he brought around 6-inch Subway turkey subs. It was 8:23 am. In retrospect, this was excellent foreshadowing of the absurdity to come. I tucked the sandwich into the seat pocket in front of me and forgot about it.
A few hours later, we hit the Singaporean border. We piled off the sanctuary of the air-conditioned bus, retrieved our luggage and trooped towards customs. Ominous signs and guards where everywhere. I found it impossible not to think about Singapore’s reputation as an extremely polite dictatorship — how long ago had they caned that guy for spitting out gum? Soon my sweat was almost as much from nerves as from the tropical heat and humidity.
I got on line at immigration and started to calm down. I relaxed even more as I passed through passport control smoothly.
“Anything to declare?” they asked.
“Why nothing other than a love of travel,” I replied jauntily. (I didn’t actually say that because I’m not the worst).
I realized that this wasn’t anything I hadn’t done a million times before. By the time I tossed my bags onto the inspection conveyor belt I was already planning on which movie I would watch on the next leg of the ride. Maybe Terminator.
“Excuse me, I need to check your bag,” said a middle-aged woman in a jovial tone.
She was thin, with enormous glasses and a loud cackling laugh.
Despite her tone, fresh sweat sprung out from my armpits and back. What did I have in my bag? Had I forgotten to remove a charging cable or something that had shown up on the X-ray? Was there *anything* in the bag that wasn’t allowed? I didn’t have any drugs, did I?
She started tearing into my bag and grilling me about each item she found. She made each question into a joke, which may have been intended put me at ease. Frankly, it only made the whole thing more terrifying. People in the line moved past me with glances that mixed pity and annoyance.
“What are these?” she said, holding up a tin of Altoids.
“Breath mints… candy,” I stammered.
“Are you sure that’s ALL they are? Can I have one?” she said, cackling at her own joke. If they had been drugs, I’d be going straight to jail, but sure, joke away.
“Sssure… of course… go ahead,” I started to reply but she had already moved on.
“How many of these do you have,” she asked, pulling out a partly-smoked pack of cigarettes.
“Um, just those,” I said.
“Not supposed to have those, but it’s OK. You know THEY ARE VERY BAD FOR YOU,” she said, cackling again at her own apparent wit.
Suddenly, her laughter cut off as her eyes widened and she reached deep into my shoulder bag.
“What’s this?” she said, suddenly all business.
I had no idea what she could be talking about and was so nervous that even when I was looking right at it it took me a second to recognize the tiny object.
It was a nip. The tiny bottle of alcohol you find in hotel minibars. I had three others in my bag. Nips are below the size limit for bringing liquids onto planes, so my friends and I bring them when we travel in order to mix in-flight cocktails. It saves money and represents a nerdy form of joie de vivre.
She continued to rummage through my bag, and with my help found all four (Two bourbon, one vodka, and one gin, if you’re curious).
“Is this all?,” she said. “Are you SURE?” All of a sudden I would have given anything to hear her cackling laugh.
“If this is a problem, you can just throw them out. I don’t care,” I said, visibly panicked and conscious of the eyes of my fellow travelers on me as they made their way through security without incident.
“Oh it’s too late for that, you need to come with me,” she said, gesturing for her associates to come over.
One of my passions is old spy and crime novels. I have a stack of them 3 feet high next to my bed. And in every single one of those novels a character who hears “Oh it’s too late for that, you need to come with me” rarely survives more than another four pages.
In addition to being nervous, I was baffled. I’ve traveled before and in almost every country in the world you can bring in up to a liter of alcohol without having to declare anything. In most, it’s quite a bit more. I was certain I had read the same thing about Singapore.
I was led into a small waiting room where she handed my passport and the offending contraband to a young man in uniform. I repeated that if this was an issue they could just throw out the nips. This was met with a split second of consideration and quickly dismissed. At least he had the grace to look a little sheepish as he carried them over to his boss, who was sitting at one of the desks at the front of the room.
Besides the desks lining the front, the room also had several rows of chairs. Imagine a DMV, but with an undercurrent of creeping terror that you’re going to be throw into windowless cell when your number is called. My only companions were a half dozen middle-aged Bangladeshi men. Five minutes later, their issue was resolved and they left en masse with much chuckling. Bastards probably cut a deal.
At this point I had sweated through my shirt and was starting on my jacket. I clutched my bags and tried to look casual, nonplussed, and innocent. Finally a young man walked over.
“Mr. Gee, I need to you to come with me.”
I gathered up my bags and was led out across the main terminal and into a smaller room. It looked more like an office than a cell, and had a window looking out on the main terminal. They probably wouldn’t torture me here.
My escort left after telling me to sit. After a few more minutes, a young, officious woman, also in uniform, walked in carrying my passport and the nips. She was short, had close-cropped hair, and was very cute. If this had been a spy novel, this would have been my opportunity to charm my way out of it. Unable to think of an opening line I chose to sit there terrified as she ignored my existence for the first 10 minutes. She sat there and filled out paperwork. The only sounds were the scratching of her pen, the ruffling of paper, and my nervous breathing.
Suddenly, she turned and handed me a small pamphlet.
“Read this and explain back to me what it says,” she ordered.
I studied the pamphlet, which I could see was about various customs laws. It had three folds and four colored sections. I began to reply.
“Well it says you can’t bring in…”
“NO” she yelled, “Read the BLUE part.”
Shaken, sweating, and still unsure what the hell was going on, I tried again.
“If you are coming from abroad…”
“NO” she shouted again, “You are reading the purple part.”
I started to ask her to show me what to read and she snatched the pamphlet from my hand.
“If you are coming from another country, you can bring up to a liter of alcohol without declaring it,” she explained, angry at my stupidity. “Except if you are coming from Malaysia, where you need to declare and pay taxes on everything. EVERYTHING.”
I hadn’t declared and paid taxes on the nips. That’s what this was all about. I looked at the offending bottles, which collectively contained about 6 oz of alcohol; that’s about half the size of a can of Coke. I tried to imagine how much tax on them could possibly be: $0.03, maybe? I was too confused to be angry.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. So do you want me to pay taxes on these?”
“No,” she said in a tone that indicated she wasn’t sure how the United States had grown into a world power with citizens such as myself.
She turned and handed me another form to fill out.
“Sign this stating that you’re aware of the regulations. This could have been a big fine, up to $200,” she said gravely.
Confusion was giving way to anger, and I didn’t trust myself to reply. I reviewed and signed the form, handing it back to her.
“Now if this every happens again, we have on record that you understand the rules and you won’t be able to claim you don’t,” she said triumphantly and with more than a hint of menace.
Once again, I didn’t trust myself to answer. “Yup,” I thought. “Next time I take the bus from Kuala Lumpor to Singapore with four forgotten nips in my bag, you guys will have me.”
After all that, she handed me back the nips and I clumsily gathered up my belongings. She mercifully let me straight back through security and I realized the worse was yet to come. I’d been detained for almost an hour, and the rest of my bus had had to wait.
I walked up and saw the driver and attendant waiting. They sighed broadly and stubbed out cigarettes. As I climbed onto the bus a hundred sets of eyes drilled into me and a hundred faces said, “So this is the guy. What an asshole.”
Face flaming and eyes downcast, I shuffled to my seat in the last row. Heads turned; eyes glared.
“You OK mate?” said a middle-aged Indian man I had chatted with on line at a rest stop earlier in the trip.
“Yup, just an idiot”
“Yup, just an idiot,” I replied, sinking into my seat, putting my headphones in, and staring straight at the screen in front of me.
As the bus pulled away from the border, I reached into my bag. I pulled out the first tiny bottle my hand found, gin, and uncapped it. I pulled the untouched turkey sub out from the seat pocket in front of me.
It had been a close call but I had gotten away clean with the goods. Scary, but it’s this kind of danger and glamour that had drawn me into the lifestyle of an international smuggler. I took a swig of gin, chasing it with a bite of sandwich.
