Adventures With Mr T.
He wasn’t exactly the guardian angel of my visions.
This little man with a ripped t-shirt, Colgate smile, and a cigarette dangling precariously from his battered lips had certainly caught my attention as he offered his services as I entered the border checkpoint.
Unfortunately, as happens everywhere, judgements are hastily made and worsened by constant hassling from true hustlers, and I felt like I’d seen his type more times than I could count. A Mr-let-me-solve-everything-for-small-price that preys on desperate Westerners. A “favour” that turns into a heist of epic proportions. With this in mind, I walked straight past him and headed for the brown uniforms with the fat watches that signalled corrupt border officials.
First hiccup was the passport.
Having been in Vietnam nearing a month now, my visa had a day’s validity left. Therefore, my exit was simple. Stamp, stamp, goodbye. Maia, however, had another two weeks, and she was leaving the county with a valid visa and re-entering the next day on the same visa. Sounds simple enough. But these gold-clad jarheads couldn’t quite put it all together.
Eventually, an officer with a semblance of a personality emerged and let us both through – though not without some serious thrashing of Google Translate.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of the Ha Tien border crossing, it’s one for the ages. Those with transport have probably paid far too much for it in some shanty travel agency in the main town. The shop owners are still laughing at you as they add another “deluxe” and “express” to their border crossing services sign.
However, those without are required to walk the 1-kilometer no-man’s land between the two countries, where a conglomeration of nefarious trucks packing even more nefarious items sit parked on each side of the road.
Having made it to the Cambodian border, we entered the dilapidated building to find three men with beautiful green military uniforms, more military regalia than sense, and even nicer watches than their Vietnamese counterparts.
Yes – Cambodia, you can smell the corruption.
The official here was nice enough. Here, I will refer to him as Tony. Tony explained that we were not allowed to enter without the entire visa money in USD cash. There was no Eftpos machine, and they refused to accept their own national currency. A notable point that would have been handy to know before arriving at a checkpoint with no ATM and certainly no USD anywhere in the Vicinity.
(Note for travellers: this seems to actually be rather common practice and a nationwide hustle, and while Cambodian money is sometimes allowed at these points, USD, for obvious reasons, is preferred and usually stressed by those capable of enforcing it).
Now we were really in the shit.
Stuck in a wasteland at the edge of a heavily corrupt country with no visa, no money, no ATMs, no Wi-Fi, and no idea what was going on.
After heated deliberation with one of Tony’s smug mates, Tony suggested the only possibility was to walk back to Vietnam, leave my passport with the officials there, and get a ride into town to procure some of those fine United States dollars. An absurd idea but apparently commonplace in Tony’s wonderfully bureaucratic everything-is-fixable-perspective.
I squeezed Maia, kissed her goodbye, and re-entered no man’s land. Round two. Having remembered me, the official ushered me to his window, and the Google Translate dance began. Immediately, he seemed unfazed by my request. A good sign, and one that Tony hadn’t been lying. Whilst certainly not routine, my proposition wasn’t insane.
Seeing his fat, rubied fingers take my passport from under the glass, I walked into Vietnam, officially an alien without documents.
Re-insert Mr T.
The man with the Colgate smile had been waiting by the passport window, listening to the entire operation. In fact, too preoccupied with the translation and ensuring my passport wouldn’t end up in the hands of a Vietnamese opium smuggler, I had ignored the fact that Colgate had been talking to me the entire time, explaining that he could drive me to an ATM in town.
Christ, I thought, this motherfucker again…
Ready to dismiss him for the second time in an hour, I assessed my options, and boy, were they slim.
I weighed him up. There was a purity in his eyes, a softness. At this point, I would rather have been wedged against him on the back of his bike for a few bucks than any of my other suitors I saw lurking outside the doors, waiting to pounce.
Five minutes later, we’re flying through the Vietnamese streets on a bike without a speedometer and a man who speaks a rather exceptional strain of English he’d learned fighting the Viet Kong alongside Australian soldiers in the Vietnamese jungles.
Within 10 minutes, I am waiting for my cash at an ATM, watching the smoke of my driver's cigarette coil gently in the midday sun.
As I resumed my place behind him, a wad of USD in my pocket and euphoria building, he flicked me his business card as he finished his cigarette joyously, and the motor started to purr.
Mr. T.
Tour guide.
I froze.
I had been searching for Mr T. endlessly for days now at the advice of numerous online threads advising tourists on the infamous Ha Tien border run.
Maia and I had travelled through the sweaty streets of that shitty border town looking for the travel shop that he supposedly worked at. To no avail.
In fact, it was only after having no luck finding the mysterious T earlier that morning that we decided to wing it and head straight to the border.
Naturally, the synchronicity of the very man that had evaded me arriving like this was astounding, and the questions manically ensued as we raced back to the border.
Mr T had been working at the travel shop for years, but it had closed down during COVID, and the owner “Andy” had been diagnosed with cancer.
Since then, he’d been out of work and forced to sit daily at the border in the hope of finding tourists who wanted tours around southern Vietnam and Cambodia.
His days were long and typically fruitless. He’d been living the dream with Andy, and it had all vanished overnight.
Mr T said he knew every border officer in the area through his years of making crossings, and he wasn’t lying. Riding in with T was a different experience. He drove me straight through security to collect my passport, and then straight out of Vietnam easier than if we’d been leaving a supermarket.
Speeding between worlds, I laughed uncontrollably as he waved and muttered some words at the guards that had previously demanded my passport, and he dropped me back to a tear-filled Maia before offering to drive us into Cambodia, taking me to a money changer next to a casino at the nearest border town, and putting us in a tuk-tuk to Kep. All for under 10 dollars.
Fast-forward 24 hours, and we are back at the god-awful border after a night by the beach in Kep. Having tried and seemingly failed to contact Mr T, we once again had no choice but to wing it, arriving at the border by mid-morning to catch a mid-day ferry back to our bizarre and beloved island, Phu Quoc.
Miraculously, T was waiting at the Cambodian border. Having been contacted that morning by his ex-boss Andy, whose email I had reached, he had arrived with a friend to drive us through the checkpoints and to the ferry.
For the second time in two days, Mr T’s presence was beyond synchronistic. We speechlessly hurried through both checkpoints on the back of their bikes, laughing hysterically as we sped into Ha Tien and arrived at the ticket office next to the ferry within minutes of its departure.
Mr T made a nightmare of a situation a breeze.
The timing of his presence felt otherworldly. Something we still sit and ponder occasionally. It was one of those rare moments of sublimity where you feel life is moving through you. That you are the current, and the bounds of cause and effect are effortlessly malleable.
It's characters like Mr T that make travel so rewarding, and moments like these that remind you of the mysterious forces operating in our universe that we can only rarely harness and fumblingly seek to name but never truly understand.
