h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This reminded of arriving at the Pan Am check in desk at Honolulu Airport only to find out the dirt cheap standby tickets to Sydney that two travel agents in the UK had assured me where available had been discontinued six months before. This meant I had to decide between the humiliation of returning prematurely to the UK having set out on a world tour having been to just one country, or purchase a ticket to Sydney so prohibitively expensive I would arrive in Australia without the sum of money required by the terms of my working holiday visa and risk a stay in a detention centre until someone from the British Consulate lent me the fare back to the UK, deportation and my passport number going on a world wide warning list for ten years.

The helpful guy on the Pan Am desk said he could arrange for me to go on a flight that arrived early in the morning just as customs and immigration were changing shifts so I could (hopefully) slip through undetected. Forty hours later having endured long anxious waits at Honolulu and Aukland and a terrifyingly turbulent flight over a cyclone I arrived at the predicted time; unfortunately my pack had split open - one of my boots went to Melborne - and by the time I had retrieved my scattered underpants, dirty socks ect. from the carousel everyone else from the flight had gone and it was just me and the toughest looking guardian of "the lucky country's" borders. Fotunately he mistook my stumbled answers and terror for extreme fatigue - I had been awake for more than two days - but I was certain my luck wouldn't hold. Then the gods of the road smiled on me and the bedraggled passengers from a flight from Bangkok began emerging from the baggage reclaim area - these were obviously of far greater interest to the immigration oker than a scuffy bushed pommie galah who had just arrived from the States. Even then it took several seconds for it to dawn on me that he had shoved my passport into my grubby hand, said "Welcome to Australia, mate" and turned his attention and rubber gloves onto far more likely prey
, and several minutes to realise, as I stumbled out into the brilliant sunlight, that he wasn't going to do to me what some English magistrate had done to his ancestors two hundred years before...........and all because of two travel agents who couldn't be bothered to check their facts.

What an amazing story. Not fun at the time, I imagine.

But what a story. Thanks for telling that one.

Gosh that is scary! I don't think that I would have been as resourceful as you were. I would have cried like a girl. Which probably not had such a good outcome.

Your crying worked on the Munich police, as you'll recall. They gave you the residence permit...

I guess they can't believe anyone who cries is a criminal. I wonder how many female con artists know this?

Most f the ones I've been out with

I hear you. Oldest trick in the book.

Hey, a request: you've inspired me to start a journal thread to collect border crossing stories. May I include yours in the inevitable Post article?