The Final Frontier
Poipet, Thai-Cambodian Border
January 5th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“This could be the last border crossing of Trabant Trek…if you make it in.”
MTP

MY PASSPORT wasn’t valid for entry into Cambodia.
It hadn’t expired, but there were only two months left on it, and to get into Cambodia you need a passport that is valid for six months.
I had already been warned at the Thai border.
And I was worried.

The chances of getting busted and not being able negotiate my way out of trouble weren’t high. But the penalty for getting busted was- I would have to go back to Bangkok, if they would even let me into Thailand, get a new passport, and try again. So I would almost certainly miss the end of Trabant Trek.
I didn’t like the thought of coming so far over the last six months and falling at the final border crossing.

The signs on arrival weren’t promising. OJ was filming quite blatantly, and the Thai border guards weren’t happy.
One guy was a real prick and seemed determined to give us shit. A shouty little man in an immaculate uniform that looked like it’d been picked up in an illegal French SS memorabilia eBay auction. Maybe the kit had rubbed off on him, he kept shouting: “Papers. Show papers.”
He looked through my passport, but I managed to divert his attention when he was on the expiration details. And for some reason he made me unpack a fold up chair in front of his cronies, but didn’t ask to look in the boot.
They spent half an hour questioning us, photocopying passports and poking around in the cars.

The only non-uniformed personnel who seemed to have the freedom to roam the border were the kids, ragged little urchins who tap on the car windows and ask for money. They looked sweet, but you wouldn’t want to leave your car unattended. Little tykes.



We attracted a lot of stares, large crowds pointing and laughing.
Watching is a big hobby around here.
Since we left Europe the rules on staring engagement have shifted more and more. It is now open stare warfare, with laser-guided looks constantly locking onto us.
I noticed the cultural differences when we parked the Trabbis on Khao San. The Westerners sidled up to the car, often adopting a blasé approach to conceal their interest. They’d fake a look at a nearby stall, then swivel and cast a glance at the car. You have to greet them to show it’s ok to come and have a look.
“How’s it going?” I’d break the ice.
“Oh, oh,” mock embarrassment, he wasn’t really looking at my car, “yes good thanks.”
“You recognise the car?”
And there we go, now they are free to explore.
But with your typical countryside East Asian there is no such façade. He will see the car from his perch in the shade, walk straight up to it, tap the hood, peer in through the window, push on the spare wheels, pluck at the wipers, then stare me up and down, sometimes laughing, sometimes looking troubled.
Maybe it’s because a lot of the places we visit are pretty light on entertainment- less computer games, cinemas, theatres, clubs, TVs, radios, music. So people take advantage of any form of fun they can get, and watching Westerners drag a brightly coloured plastic car down their High Street is about as good as the scheduling gets that week.
I’ve often wondered how much conversation we’ve caused on dinner tables across the world. Not that they use dinner tables in a lot of the places we’ve been.
At all those little villages we passed and caused a stir I'm sure people were talking about it afterwards.
“Hey did you see those stupid white people earlier? What was that all about?”
We’re probably victims of all sorts of speculation and gossip. The proud father boasting that he knew the name of the car, the grandfather claiming we were Russians, the old woman thinking Tony was from Pakistan.

After the Nazi was satisfied, and we’d got out stamps, the Thais waved us through and we drove down to the Cambodian side of the border.
The Thai’s and Cambodian’s have made full use of the 150m stretch of no-man’s-land between them. In the last few years this untaxed zone has become a haven for duty free trading, with people selling everything from clothes to blocks of ice, and a plush casino cashing in on the tax break- The Tropicana Resort.

Thankfully the Cambodian border guards were more friendly and less organised than their Thai counterparts.
We filled out our forms, paid our dues, got in line and….da da da…i got my stamp.
Elation.
But we didn’t have permission from Phnom Penh to bring cars into the country, so there was a small altercation at customs.
Luckily the official was easy going and let us in: “As long as I don’t get in trouble.”

The Cambodian border town of Poi Pet is not a pretty place. Its stinks of the decomposing rubbish that litters the streets, a treasure hunt for wild kids and wild dogs questing for morsels of food and money. The architecture is grubby and crumbling, the streets are unpaved, pot holed and dusty, and the 50km stretch of road out of the town is the worst we have driven since Mongolia.
But we’re in Cambodia.
Cambodia. Our 21st and last country. The final frontier. Six months and one day since I flew out of London, eight time-zones and 15,000 miles later, we are nearly there.

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Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org