Top Ten Reasons Border Crossings Really, REALLY Suck

Namibia to South Africa Road Trip – Day #11 – Fish River Canyon to Springbok, South Africa

We weren’t airborne for more than a fraction of a second, but it seemed an eternity. When we landed with a tremendous mechanical bang, I was sure the dashboard was going to break off into our laps. It didn’t. I pulled over and gave our bakkie a once-over. Everything was fine. I assumed the plates we had in the back of the truck were broken. They weren’t.

A storm had ripped through the area around Fish River Canyon two days previous. The torrential rains had taken a chunk of the road with it downstream, replacing it with soft sand. The only way across the four meter gap was to cross it with sufficient speed, else we’d risk getting stuck in the sand. The alternative was to backtrack 80 miles. That wasn’t gonna happen.

I guess I was little overzealous taking the truck to 45 miles per hour, but teh truck was fine. And jumping the wash meant we were on track to get to the border by lunchtime, and arrive in Springbok, South Africa by early afternoon. We were also good for fuel, (I’d already learned my lessons regarding money, gas, and water.) Things seemed to be going our way for once!

It made me nervous. Clearly, the other shoe was gonna drop when we got to the border crossing.

Whether it’s a couple of grumpy Albanians with AKs or even grumpier U.S. Customs officials with attitudes – I’ve had so many bad experiences at border checkpoints, I drop to the floor in spasms at the thought of going through another one…

Border crossings, airport arrivals, bus and train stations, they’re all disorienting environments, and they’re potentially packed with predators, and incompetent or petty officials that will make your life miserable to line their pockets, compensate for personal inadequacies, or just kill time. I went mentally went through the endless list of things that could go wrong at the border crossing, and distilled it down to my top ten biggest fears of what awaited us:

10. The “Official” Helper – This is either a well-dressed guy, or a real idiot who claims to be “from the tourism board” and he’s there to help you. These “Helpers”are usually easy to spot,;I heard a laughable story of a “Helper” at Jo’burg airport who had a piss-poor laminated ID tied around his neck with a shoelace. But I got suckered once recently in Istanbul airport. The guy wore a jacket and had a fantastically huge laminated ID. Instead of taking me to a taxi stand, he took me to one of the many shuttle bus services that charge just as much as a taxi – if not more.

9. Pickpockets – Self-explanatory really. Bastards.

8. Paperwork not in Order – Everyone’s worst nightmare. Of course, you never really know if you’re paperworks in order, do you? It all depends on the uniformed mofo in front of you. Ultimately, they’re the ones that decide if you have the correct papers or not. Will he or won’t he stamp your passport? Is your car really allowed in their country or not? Play the waiting game and find out. The good news is everything’s negotiable, even if your paperwork really isn’t in order. The bad news: Maybe you have to pay for an additional “entry visa” (see Number 3 below).

7. Gypsy Cab Drivers – the lowest of the low, and a global plague. Whether it’s Kennedy Airport or a bus depot in rural Bulgaria, they will gouge the hell out of you on price, and literally take you for a ride. And, you’ll never get the smell of Eastern European tobacco out of your clothing, or that annoying song with the sitar that was on the radio out of your head – ever again.

6. Hotel Touts – irritating scum that they are, they’ll will harass you, aggravate you, and lie to you in order to get you to follow them to their hotel. When my wife was just another annoying backpacker in Asia, one tout looked her right in the eye and told her the hotel she’d booked had burned down, and his hotel was better. The hotel she’d booked was right behind him. Naturally, the “great hotel” they bring you to is usually on the far side of the island or miles from the city center, wedged in between the slaughterhouse and a safe house for Chinese Triads. And they’ll want a tip for bringing you there.

5. The Search for Luggage – The frantic attempt to reunite yourself with your belongings after a long trip. I don’t care if your flying Coconut Airways or British Airways, it’s a real act of faith giving your luggage away and believing you’ll see it again. (As I wrote earlier, I’d sooner trust my luggage to Coconut Airways than BA anyway.) The search is even more stressful if it’s a bus station and you’re busy fighting off touts, cab drivers, (see above), or the “Bum Rush” (see below).

4. The Luggage Search – a uniformed customs official (usualy really fat, and sometimes in mirror shades) rips open your luggage in hopes of finding a brick of hash, guns, the Beatles’ White Album, or perhaps your underwear. You can only grin and bear it … and be glad the condom of uncut Afghan Horse is tucked safely in your rectum.

3. The special fee for the “Entry Visa” – this is the unexpected fee that gringos and other clueless tourists have to pay that wasn’t mentioned in the guidebook and nobody ever told you about before you left. Usually never more than a few dollars (although it’s $20 in Turkey!), you usually receive a useless scrap of paper as evidence (although in Costa Rica and Turkey I got cool colorful paper stamps put into my passport).

2. The “Exit Visa” – see “Entry Visa” above. What’s that? Don’t want to pay? Then you can hang out in the seedy airport/bus terminal/ train station until you to, beyotch!

1. The “Bum Rush” – Hundreds of years before Public Enemy coined the term, small-time hoods used this technique of rushing the dumb-ass traveler who’s just stepped off the train/bus/aircraft/ship into a completely alien environment. At that magic moment you step onto the train platform, or walk through the bus terminal, you are so damn vulnerable. At a border crossing from Guatemala into El Salvador once, I dropped a $5 bill after having to pay an “Entry Visa” (see above) – it was gone before it even hit the ground. The worst incident I ever heard was a friend of mine in Gare du Nord in Paris: a gypsy women threw her baby at him ,forcing him to catch it, then she and her three other children expertly rifled his pockets, snatched the baby back, and were gone before he even knew what had happened.

Seeing this was a remote border crossing, my biggest fears were #1 through #3. Of course, #9 was a legitimate worry as well. Due to my wife’s Passport Problems (her passport was only valid for another 90 days, when the Namibians required six months), I wondered if we wouldn’t have to play a very long waiting game in order to be allowed to leave Namibia. Additionally, the gal at the car rental office said we’d have to pay an additional $400 to enter South Africa with a rental car. So I approached the border post fearing the worst.

The Namibian border official barely looked up from his football magazine as we lined up with the other drivers and dutifully filled out the important looking scraps of paper, signed the clipboard, and received the exit stamp.

The South African side of the border was nearly a mile down the road, and far better organized than most countries. A friendly official greeted us in our language of choice at the border, and gave us a processing documenting with room for three stamps. At station one (immigration), we received our first stamp on the processing document, and an exit stamp in our passport.

No one asked for the $400 for the rental truck.

At station two (customs) we had nothing to declare, so we quickly got another stamp on our processing document.

No one asked for the $400.

Station three was the South African Police Service. We chatted for a good ten minutes after they’d entered my driver’s license information into the computer. We got a friendly “welcome to South Africa” from them and a stern “please drive carefully”.

They didn’t ask for the $400 rental car free either.

We walked back to the truck, and handed our completed process document to the border officer that originally greeted us. She dutifully made notes on her clipboard whilst eyeballing the license plate and the registration sticker.

“Okay, you can go. Have a nice day.” She smiled.

As we slowly cruised through the border station to freedom, my wife turned and ask me, “shouldn’t we have asked to pay?”

“Uhm, not so much.”

I’ll never know if we really had to pay that $400. Maybe the girls at the rental office were wrong. Ultimately, it always comes down to number #8 above.

And remember: Everything’s negotiable

Flying Bricks of Fury: My Encounter with Intolerant Amsterdam

To quote ‘The 40 Year-old Virgin‘, “I had a WEEKEND.”

I suppose the title of this post is a bit misleading, as bricks and other bits of masonry only flew on Friday night, but damn, what a weekend.Friday night started off as a good night out. Some family and friends from various points abroad all converged on Amsterdam (where I currently reside) to get together. It was a great re-union/party, and it coincided nicely with the Amsterdam Dance Event, which meant there were tons of decent DJs to choose from.

Friday night a group of us went to dinner at Nomads. Nomads is the Middle Eastern cousin of the renowned Supper Club. Now, I hate the Supper Club: it’s pretentious, and people are unjustifiably way to into themselves. I say “ unjustifiably” because these forced attempts at exclusivity are a bit laughable, and I don’t think they pull it off well anymore. (Did they ever?) Nomads has the couches, the hookahs, the DJ, and an excellent list of very original cocktails. (My favorite was the “Dark and Stormy”, which involved Bacardi black, limes, and ginger beer.) The food was a bit of a divergence from traditional Arabic meze, but it was still very good. If you’re more than six people, you don’t get to choose the menu, but the three course presentation was excellent, and they had vegetarian options.

The tunes and general atmosphere were great, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt. The service was sometimes way too slow bringing the drinks to the table, and the masseuse was crap. There’s also a tarot card reader hanging about, although we ignored her. (I heard later she was also crap.) We all seemed to struggle drinking on the beds as well. (It can be forgiven, I suppose, since drinking in bed is something I didn’t plan to pick up until I was well into my 60s.) I think for every three drinks ordered, two were successfully consumed. We all knocked over at least one drink with an errant foot or ill-placed elbow, but the record was held by the masseuse – who knocked over a whole tray of cocktails, and the waiter – who took out the bottle of wine he’d just opened, plus the bottle we were still finishing. (The Dutch word for spaz is “Knoeier!“)

The masonry started flying when my sister and a friend went outside for some fresh air. Apparently, Nomads has a disco as well. The scene at the disco is way different from the lounge. This became clear very quickly, as the line to get into the disco was almost exclusively the under 21 crowd. A group of guys started harassing the two girls. Typical testosterone-fuelled bravado designed for a cheap laugh at some girl’s expense, right? What they didn’t count on was a face full of New York ‘ tude from a four foot eleven Korean-American, who isn’t one to back down from a confrontation, even when outnumbered five-to-one. That’s when the racial epithets started to fly (“kut chinees”, “chinees kutwijf”, etc.). My Dutch friend who was with her was too shocked to say anything. My sister backed off, and one of the punks actually kicked her in the ass with his boot.

They came back inside. My sister was pissed, and my Dutch friend was stunned, as she’d always bought into Amsterdam’s self-image as a City of Tolerance.

She’d just had a very rude awakening.

Sis told us what happened through gritted teeth. Once she told me she’d been hit, I began putting my shoes on. (You take off your shoes in a bed, right?) Her boyfriend and the other guys in our group did the same. We went outside and saw the huge line of people waiting to get into the disco.

“There he is!” My sister pointed with a black goth fingernail. “That’s the little sh*t who kicked me!”

And boy, was he a little sh*t alright. He was backed up by about five friends, which I figure is exactly why he’d felt the need to prove his “manliness” in the first place. All five of them had their best white sneakers, gold chains, and hooded puffy down jackets against the cold weather. Such stupid behavior from five aspiring gangstas was not surprising, but what did surprise me was that t the racial epithets came from five guys who were clearly Moroccan. Waitaminnit, I thought, aren’t these guys always the victims of discrimination around here?

The confrontation started, tempers flared, and then one of the punk’s friends rabbit punched me in the face. Before we knew it, the gang of five became a gang of 20, and I had three “Men of Middle Eastern Origin” climbing all over me. I decked two and quickly had a third in a headlock; I looked behind me, hoping to see my buddies backing me up. All I saw was my little sister – God bless her – delivering greetings from the Land of Beatings to the scrawny punk that kicked her.

My other friends were behind a wall of 16 other punks. We were cut off.

Ultimately, my friends waded in, and we actually beat them all back. I couldn’t believe it. They were all talk, and their mouths had clearly written checks their bodies couldn’t cash. Sounds like a win, right? WRONG.

The entire sidewalk was being rebuilt and there were stacks of bricks just laying about. In a desperate attempt to get the upper hand, three of the bastards grabbed bricks and waved them over at us, threatening to throw. One of them stood atop the pile a good five feet above us, waving the brick threateningly. At that point, a brick hit me in the back, and my situational awareness came back to me. I heard my buddy shouting “Get in! Get back in the door!” and saw the two bouncers (who’d done nothing to help my sister in the first place, and who’d not intervened at all when things escalated) were pulling down a metal shutter to seal themselves safely inside and me outside!

I grabbed my sister under my arm (still yelling and struggling to get at the scrawny punk who’d kicked her) and we little slid under the shutter Indiana Jones-style. More bricks smashed into the shutter with a terrific clang. The bouncer got in my face, and I got right back in his, shouting “ik ben een gast!” I wasn’t sure what was worse about this moment, the fact that this had even happened, or that it happened frequently enough that they obviously had some sort of drill worked out for what to do.

Our only injuries were back pain (not from the brick, but from trying not to fall down with three of the bastards crawling all over me), some bloody knuckles, and a black-and-blue toe on another friend from another brick that had been fired at us. We sat there laughing about it, but it was a real Assault on Precinct 13 moment – and I mean the original (“Cholo? Nobody said nothing about the Cholo!”), not the remake. Like the children of immigrants burning the banlieues of Paris, the teenage boys here run wild. It’s not as bad as Paris of course, but it now seems to be getting there.

As I write this, cars are probably being burned again for the third or fourth night in a row in Amsterdam West. They started burning cars after some nut named Bilal B. went into a police station and began stabbing a female police officer. Her colleague naturally shot the guy – dead. This was the spark for the latest “outrage”.We’d jumped into the confrontation rather casually – especially the guys that don’t live in Amsterdam. This is Holland: there’s no guns, very few knives, and street brawls seem limited only to football matches. But then I recalled the cars burning only a few blocks from us in Amsterdam West.

As I sat there in Nomads, I realized that a bunch of bored guys in their teens/early 20s aren’t just going to go away and call it a night. For them, this could mean SHOWTIME. It suddenly seemed very feasible to me that there might be 50 bored guys out there now, building up their outrage and their courage, and gather bricks.

I turned to the other guys. “We could have a problem here.”

No one believed me, of course. And in the end – it wasn’t a problem. The kids had actually scattered or backed off. Most of them – I suspect – put more value on getting into the club than getting into a fight again. We got into our taxis without seeing them again. I suppose there must have been a better way to handle the situation. It’s just that Amsterdam cops seem pretty useless, get no respect, have no mandate to enforce laws vigorously (as in New York), and are literally never ever around when you need them. I only feel bad because I just know that the jerk-offs have no realization of just how rotten and dangerous their behavior was, and are probably wearing any bruises we gave them as badges of honor. I’m also sure their version of the fight is being told and re-told in a completely different way, with the number of adversaries they faced doubling and tripling with each re-telling of their “victory”.

Nomads was good, and the fight is already (thankfully) a hilarious story. Saturday night was legendary. We’d rented a canal boat for a couple of hours for an evening tour of the canals of Amsterdam. The boat was tastefully appointed in dark, polished teak, with brass fittings, and the hull design was a classic Dutch canal boat. The friendly captain doubled as a tour guide. To top it off, we had buffet rijsttafel from an excellent local restaurant called Kantijl & de Tijger, and an open bar to keep the 30 of us happy. From there, we walked about 200 yards to the Odeon. I’d never been there before. It used to be just a club (and apparently a very exclusive one at that), but now it’s a multi-level restaurant/bar/club. It was fantastic. The crowd was a mix of trendy 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and ranged from “Happy Drunk” to “E’d Out of Their Mind”. We were all the way in top in balcony seating. Where we danced, jabbered, and laughed until 5 am. Hangovers and the Amsterdam City Marathon put the kibosh on a big brunch in the city center, so everyone who’d reserved evening flights home crashed in my living room, ate take out, and listlessly watched ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’. I don’t think we had anything left to prove at that point.

Like I said, we had a WEEEKEND.

Death Cab for Turkey

I just came back from a brief business trip to Istanbul, Turkey. And, brother, you can keep your roller coasters and any other adrenaline rides since they just don’t compare to a trip around Istanbul in a Turkish taxi. A ride in an Istanbul death cab is far more exciting, because death or maiming is only an arm’s length away…

How can I describe it? Your rectum puckers up every 30 seconds because your just about to die; your short of breath because the only thing between you and the groaning wheel of that 30 year-old bus a foot away from you is a dinky aluminum door made in South Korea. You only pray that your driver looks up long enough from texting his girlfriend (or boyfriend?) to apply the brakes. In accordance with the fundamental principles of physics, Istanbul drivers fill up any and every available space on the road, and get as close together as possible. Hence, two-lane roads become three; three-lane roads become four, and four-lane mergers become seven, like so:

Views from the terrace of the Mövenpick Hotel. In right hand photo, note how drivers are jumping the median to somehow “get ahead”

When the traffic light turns green, Turkish drivers are leaning on the horn in 0.5 seconds (a respectable 0.25 seconds faster than New Jersey drivers). When competing for a gap, Turkish death cabbies only occasionally look (and even signal) when changing lanes. The loser won’t blink and hit the brakes until the very last instant, even touching the gas just to see if the cabby is serious. More than once I sat in the back of a taxi, contemplating my mortality as I stared at the scarred fender of a fume-belching semi a foot away from my window…

I don’t know how many auto fatalities there are in Istanbul, but I saw two accidents in three days. I saw a taxi wedged in between a flatbed and a passenger car after the flatbed hit the brakes and the taxi driver didn’t. Maybe he was texting his girlfriend (too bad, because his engine was crushed under the flatbed). The other accident was self-inflicted – some schmuck blew his tire trying to parallel park on a very narrow two way street. The lanes were divided by a low concrete barrier that he forgot about. There was a tremendous BANG! And when everyone realized what happened, they all started calling out what I presumed was the Turkish equivalent of “Asssss-hole. Asssss-hole…” Sucks to be him, because the street (in a neighborhood called Bebek) is on the waterfront, lined with cafés and restaurants. You just know he was desperate to look cool.

I managed to see Topkapi the morning before heading to the airport. Pretty amazing.

Above: “Bab-üs Selam” the Gate of Salutation at Topkapi, the “Abode of Bliss”

After three hours, I still only saw probably half of it.

above: matchlock fortress guns in the sultan’s armory. These weapons spanned three centuries and were mostly flintlocks and the above large bore matchlocks although there was one intricately engraved bolt-action rifle.

It’s hard to imagine that generations upon generations of sultans lived, caroused, indulged, and died here. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be surrounded by the smells and sounds of a council in the Hall of the Divan, or during the ceremonial payment of the Janissaries. Well, this proved impossible to envisage, since the grounds were flooded with hordes of Japanese and Spanish tourists. Oh well, as loud as they were, at least they were too sawed-off to obstruct my view of anything.

I tried to visit Hagia Sophia as well, but the line was too long (Spaniards and Japanese again, plus Germans and Americans from cruise ships). I did take one snap of the outside though (yeah, I’m loving my new camera / phone).

All in all, a great place, and I would go back to see everything I missed. Oh, I also ate my weight in kebab. It should come as no surprise that there are about 15 kinds of kebab, including the skewered shish kebab we all know, döner (of course), and then things like adana kebab. I ate them all in one sitting to the shock and mortification of my genteel colleagues. (The Turks loved me though. And apart from a nasty pickled turnip juice they made me drink, I loved them too.)

Also interesting to note that Istanbul is full of women. HOT women. Hot women with long hair, sunglasses, and wearing belly shirts, tight denim, and do-me boots. (Sorry, no photos.) A lot of them apparently natural blondes, too. It’s strange, since in Germany and certainly Amsterdam, you see a lot of “Turkish” Turks – head covering, long coats covering huge fat stores for the Winter, big bushy moustaches (men and women), conservative religious views, plans to blow up Ramstein AFB , etc. – yet in Istanbul, they try so damned hard to be Western. Go figure. Of course, when you leave the (secular, rational, educated, economically and culturally buzzing) big cities in Turkey, you apparently only see the same conservative, religious, tradition-bound, rural types (kind of like George W. Bush’s America). I guess they’re the ones you see in Europe, since there’s little work in the mountains of Anatolia.

This brings me back to my original dilemma of these hot chicks in Istanbul – the same dilemma I experienced on my many adventures in Eastern Europe. These gorgeous gals are walking on the same streets as these 250 lb, waddling Turkish gorgons in head coverings. Are the gorgons now gorgons because life in the mountains was so hard for them, or are the Turkish babes – by some cruel twist of fate – genetically pre-disposed to one day have the shite beaten out of them by the ugly stick? If you married a gorgeous Turkish woman, will you some day suddenly wake up next to a bearded gorgon in a babushka? Oh well, guess I’ll never know …