Border crossings are seldom a picnic even under the best of conditions; and sometimes they can be rather harrowing. So you don’t need to try to jinx yourself by throwing a shoe into the process. Which is pretty much what we did when we came back to Cambodia this time around. Of course, we had some help in stacking the deck against us, namely the Kingdom Of Cambodia itself, which makes the visa application unnecessarily confusing.

The problem surfaced after we dropped off our passports and visas at the school in Phnom Penh where we’d be teaching, so they could take care of extending our visas and getting a work permit. The school administration is extremely helpful like that. Initially, when you enter Cambodia you get a visa for one month and then you can extend it — one more month if you’re a tourist, and up to a year (in two 6-month segments) if you’re staying to work, as we were.

It was a couple of days later that the school let us know something was amiss. It turned out that we had obtained the wrong type of visa, one for tourism only. Somehow we had made a mistake this time that we had avoided during our previous year of employment in Cambodia.

And it’s very easy to make such a mistake when you apply for a visa online in advance. The different visa types are designated by the letters: A, B, C, E, K and T. What we needed was the E-Visa, otherwise known as a business visa or ordinary visa. But here’s the thing: the label E-Visa is also applied to all visas you obtain online of any type. (Apparently the “E” stands for “electronic”.) So what we needed was an E-Visa that was also an E-Visa; what we somehow got instead was an E-Visa that was a T-Visa. (In our defense, the online portal seems to have been revamped since last time, and the wording wasn’t terribly clear.)

Well, no problem, eh? We’d just go to the Immigration Department or a travel agency and switch visas, right? Wrong. The only way to get a different type of visa is to enter the country all over again. And that meant we’d have to make a run for the border of either Thailand or, more conveniently, Vietnam — from which we’d just come. And that would entail getting new visas again for both countries.

But not to worry, this school administration is more helpful than helpful. And rather than leave us to our own devices to get to the border and back (about a 4 hour bus ride each way, probably requiring an overnight stay), they offered to, and indeed insisted on, delivering us in a school van. An offer we couldn’t refuse.

And so it was that we arrived at the school at 6:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning to meet the van driver and an English-speaking colleague who accompanied us on our mission. It took longer to get out of the city than we anticipated, because students were being registered at schools, so the traffic was quite sluggish, and we ended up taking an alternate and more scenic (i.e., winding and narrow) route out of town.

It was about 10:00 when we arrived in the border town of Bavet. Like other border towns in Cambodia, Bavet is lined with casinos, though you hardly ever see them elsewhere. We joked to our companions about their having a good place to spend the time while they waited for us.

We didn’t learn until later that casinos in some border towns, including Bavet, have been linked to organized crime, including online scams and human trafficking. Cambodia, it turns out, is an epicenter of cybercrime; and in several border communities, criminals have established large compounds where they live and work (such as it is), and hold other individuals prisoner and force them to commit online fraud. Recent reports are that the victims may number as high as 150,000.

(Flashing forward a few months, we began learning about this problem after the police conducted a massive raid in our own apartment building in search of cyber criminals — not those who are part of the cartel, but some working individually. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of police present, and they went to every apartment in our towering residence building, checking everyone’s passport and taking everyone’s photo. In the past year, or so, we learned, they have conducted such searches in about 4000 buildings in Phnom Penh.)

They dropped us off at the gate and went to find a parking space, and things were looking good. Almost no one was in line to exit Cambodia. When we came up to the border agents, they asked to see our visas to enter Vietnam. And we showed them. On our phones. Nope, they said. The visas had to be printed.

So then we had to go back out and call our companions to relate the news. They returned and picked us up, and then we went on the pursuit of an undomesticated waterfowl trying to find a print shop that could do the job. Finally we succeeded, and it was back to the gate. Well, not yet. Our companions wanted to pick up something for lunch first. So they scouted out a suitable place where they could pick up some grub to go. And it took a very long time.

By the time they dropped us at the gate again, a bit of a line had formed, but not a very long one. It only took us about 15 minutes to get through it, and then we were into No Man’s Land between borders. Once we crossed the line out of Cambodia, we no longer had phone service — we’d installed a Cambodia SIM card — so we were unable to communicate with our escorts and let them know how things were progressing. And how things were progressing was very very s…..l…o…w….l…..y.

Because the line to get into Vietnam was already at least 100 strong. And there was only one agent to process all of them (the others, it seems, were on a long lunch break). We ended up standing in line for two solid hours, which gave us plenty of time to watch a movie on our phones or some such, but otherwise it was pretty tedious. Especially since we were in front of about 5 guys jabbering loudly and obnoxiously in Russian. A couple of locals (from which country, we’re not sure) were going down the line offering to complete the process for us, much more quickly, for the fee of one buck. It sounded fishy to us, and we certainly didn’t want to turn our passports over to a stranger. But we saw one young woman do it, and from what we could tell, nothing went haywire.

Finally, we were in Vietnam again. And what did we do? Well, we turned right around and headed for the exit right next to the entry. Fortunately, this time there was no one at all in line, so we just breezed right through. Based upon our experience on this particular day, we might conclude that the whole world is dying to get into Vietnam, but once there, nobody wants to leave.

That left just one more of the four border crossings to be completed during the day. This one wasn’t as quick, but it only took about 15 minutes or so. And this time we were dang sure to fill out the correct form for the correct visa — which we did on some picnic tables outside a little kiosk where we turned them in to receive our visas. Quite a switch from the usual setup.

Well, all’s well that ends well. And we got a valuable lesson out of the deal. Which is, kiddies, to mind your P’s and Q’s when filling out paperwork. Especially visa applications. Especially especially in the confusing Kingdom Of Cambodia. This time, it only cost us about 100 dollars and a day of our time. It definitely could have been worse.