Traveler Sense Tingling ...

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I never thought any further about this but I believe I spot a pattern here.
Way back in Phnom Phen I met two women from KL, Malaysia who were very talkative, just chatting me up in the central market. They asked where I was from and on hearing Germany they became excited and one wanted to introduce me her sister or niece who was going to Germany to work. That niece/sister relative was very nervous she said and it would be good for her to hear about Germany first hand from a local. I agreed and they wanted to go straight away but at the time be it out of wariness, be it because of other plans I declined. We agreed to meet later but in the evening I couldn't find them at the agreed place.
I never really gave it another thought until this afternoon a woman offered me help with directions and also started to chat. Germany - she had a sister going to Germany to work. It began the same way. Come to think of it, the two women even looked similar, were of similar age. This struck me as strange. I didn't really want to continue the conversation and left before finding out what it was about. There's something fishy about this coincidence. Maybe next time I'll indulge her purely for reasons of curiosity. I now really want to find out what this stuff is about. Anybody heard of this before?

Checkpoint Nowhere

Cambodia

This has got to be the most deserted, God-forsaken border check point on this trip. A truck took me and a bunch of people from Ban Nakasang near the 4000 Islands to the border. I had booked a trip all the way through to Kratie in Cambodia.
"Book all the way", the ticket seller at the travel shop/book shop/internet cafe on Don Det had said. "At the border it will be very difficult to find a car."
I had thought it was a sales trick. Even on the Laos side of the Chinese border checkpoint there had been a number of tuktuks waiting. Only the general consensus of several travellers made me agree to buy the ticket.
Turns out it hadn't been a trick. The place where the truck dropped us off at around mid-day was in the middle of the jungle or some kind of plantation. There was the road, a house and a booth on the Laos side, a house and a desk on the Cambodian side and a barrier across the road. That was the whole setup. There were no other vehicles - no bus, no tuktuk, not even a bicycle. After unloading our backpacks the Laos truck also took off. For some absurd reason I had assumed we'd go on in that truck. Now that he was gone it was beginning to sink in that there was only one way to go now, so this prior arrangement had better work.
The checkpoint officer greeted us and made us fill in the usual paperwork. Please hand in your filled-in forms and one US dollar. Of course, we all knew where that was going. It was a common story among backpackers. Still, I couldn't help myself.
What was the dollar for, I asked him. He even had small change.
"Office fee", came the smooth reply. You had to hand it to him, he was prepared. You don't pay, you don't get the stamp, so you can't leave the country. Besides, it's not something you want to argue about in the middle of nowhere like here.
Smiling Laos border guards bade us farewell.
The procedure on the Cambodian side was similar. Here, the "office fee" had just been factored into the exchange rate. The visa fee is 30 US dollars. Could we pay in Kip and use up our remaining change? Sure, but at the border the rate is not 8000-something to the dollar but a round 10,000. Sigh. We had no more use for the wad of notes anyway. In Cambodia it'll be easier to calculate again, numbers are not so huge.
Eventually, even the little minivan arrived roughly as arranged (just the promised air-con meant opening the windows). And after waiting a long time for a local guy who appeared from the bushes, dropped some exceedingly heavy sacks (sand?) in the back and sat on the roof for most of the trip we were on our way.