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

I have an idea: Let's write a group travel story in honour of Earth Day.

See, I'm working on articles for the Post for 22 April. Which happens to be Earth Day. Create happens to be working on a month of challenge to write travel stories. I've been including some travel Stuff in each issue this month:

We started with a poem, 'Notes from a Far Country':A87789451

This week, we've got my story of travel experience, '1983: The Greatest Travel Year': A87790332

Come Sunday, you'll get to play the Travel Board Game. (It's printable, or you can flatten out your laptop.)

Look at the bottom of A87790332. tucuxii was reminded of a wonderfully hairy adventure he had at an airport.

So how about it? Earth gets travelled on. Create needs our help.

I'll write it all up in an article if you'll each contribute ONE story. A SHORT one. Really short - a paragraph or two or three.

Answer this question:

What has been your most bizarre border-crossing experience?

I will guarantee that every one of you has crossed SOME kind of border - state, city, national - in your life. And something weird or funny has happened.

Tell us about it. Then I'll make MVP give you all a badge for helping.

oooh a badge, a paragraph, I think I can do this one , although it will it have to be my second most bizarre crossings,because the first might incriminate me on the account of my passport not being entirely honest at the time shall we say

and technically not across borders, it was within Yugoslavia which was trying to work out its internal borders at the time, would that count?

Absolutely. I can't wait.

well, it not that exciting, it is just a paragraph, a badge, at last something I contribute too

It was Begining of June 1991. I got a ticket from Amsterdam to Athens. I admit to being out of touch with the news for a while. Long trip that took us through Yugoslavia. It was mainly back packers at the back of the bus, a guy from Israel, AWOL from national service and another from Greece also not keen to do his.

As the pickups went on, it became a mix of families, older people, all from various ethic, cultural and national backrounds.

It was an annoyance that on such a long trip that the loo was 'out of order' particulary as scheduled stops with facilities were ad hoc

The reason for this became more clear as we passed through Yugoslavia, there were stops that armed men would would flag us down on the main road with home made placards, board the bus, glare at passports, question people and these stops weren't without some tension. The bus driver would then have a conversation with them and after retriving a stash of Marlboro from the loo and we would continue on our way.

Bizarrely the driver keep chiding us for not getting our stash out and partying as it was after all the 'magic bus', tut, youth of today



Sorry Dmitri, I can't make it paragraph

That's a good story, thanks! No, It's just fine.

I love the driver saying 'youth of today'. Magic bus, indeed...

Love it Peanut! Ahh, the Magic Bus. Now I remember everything. . That's a really evocative piece of writing, took me there, a lot of textures, from scary to funny.

Now you do one.

Ooh I've got a few actually, but here's one to be starting with. It's from about 1986, when I was 12 or so. The whole family was going on an exciting trip to visit my uncle, who was in the army in West Berlin. So we took the boat to Hamburg, very civilised, almost a cruise, and then set off down into Germany. At some point we went through the border, and headed off into East Germany. Now the deal with the motorway was that you had to do the section to West Berlin in not less than two hours (speeding) and not more than three hours (spying!). So my Dad drives down the Autobahn, very carefully, but gets there a bit early, cue some quite slow driving, mild panic, anyway we end up by arriving at the border post.

The border post is staffed by Russian guards, very exciting. We'd been told if we got stopped to ask for a Russian officer, so we were almost reassured. My Dad gets out the car, I remember the soldier saluted so my Dad did too, too many years in a military school. We lads sit inside trying to look solemn. And there's a bit of a delay, the soldier walks round the car, looking Inside. And then he calls my Dad over - slightly more panic - have we got forbidden goods, are we off to the Gulag - if I'd have known I'd have brought warmer socks - that kind of thing. He's pointing at something in the car, and saying a word in Russian, but our Russian isn't much cop. And then it clicks - he wants the football magazines on the back shelf! Much relief, magazines handed over, we get passports stamped and off we go into West Berlin. My brother got over the loss without too much grief, and the soldier (who couldn't have been older than about 18) got to read about Bryan Robson when he got off duty.

The epilogue is that we went through Checkpoint Charlie on that trip, but I can't remember a thing. But I'll never forget the great football magazine confiscating incident.

Cheers,

sprout

Great, thanks. I knew Checkpoint Charlie. And those Berlin border guards, funny lot. I went across at Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof once - they made me so nervous, I wrote down the wrong birthdate.

Feel free to share more, but this is the one I'll use.

I used to have to go over the Russian border on a regular basis. I still twitch when I think about it. The queues at the airport. The... queues. The QUEUES. The fact that everybody else I knew had got shaken down while doing the annual visa renewal pilgrimage to Talinn. The anticipation of waiting for my turn! Fun times.

Actually, my most fraught experience was the first time I left Moscow. At that time, which would have been '96 or '97, you had to go through passport control to leave, as well as enter the country, and you needed, or at least I needed, a special exit visa stamp. So I've checked in, and I've stood in the passport control queue for a looong time, and the flight time is getting nearer, and then I get to the front, and the woman in the booth looks at me, looks at my passport, looks at me and then asks if I speak Russian.

Which I don't. At all. Even after ten months (don't judge me).

Well, the border guards didn't speak English either, but getting escorted past all the curious foreigners in the queue into a little room to the side by unsmiling Russian people doesn't actually need any words.

It turned out that the stamp I was supposed to have was the wrong stamp, or the non existent stamp, or something (I translate roughly from the fluent gestures employed by the official in the room). I was to wait for the man who had the right stamp to come and service me. And so I sit. And sit. And sit a bit more. And eventually I am so worried I will miss my flight that I actually try out my Russian, liberally backed up by the use of mime. Yes, I did stand there in a little room with a bunch of Russian border guards doing plane impressions.

They weren't impressed, but the man with the stamp did eventually arrive, do his thing and I was fast tracked through passport control.

I sprinted off to the gate. There was another queue. I was so rattled that I, the Brit, brazenly queue-jumped. The shame.

And then realised that not only had most of these people witnessed me being taken in for questioning, but that I had worried needlessly and all of them were getting on the same plane as me anyway.

OK, that's needlessly long, but hey, I HATE travelling.

I also have a checkpoint charlie story. It's much shorter. The punchline is, 'and my rosin melted!'

I can imagine this.

Thanks - this article is getting long, but we won't worry - it will make fascinating reading.

Since I'm including one of mine, I'll drop it in here:

Never fall asleep in Budapest.

I did - the train was stopped for an hour - and I woke up to 'occupat?', which is Romanian for 'is this seat taken?' I woke up enough to mumble 'ne occupat', and sat up more politely as my previously empty compartment filled with happy, pretty young girls who were on their way home from a holiday in Hungary. We chattered all the way, and they recommended a hotel in Arad for me.

As we neared the border, there was frenetic activity. They had contraband: hair dryers and such from hedonistic Budapest. Would I please, pretty please with sugar on top (you can say that in Romanian, and it sounds very nice), hide these things in my luggage, which they would not dare to search? Feeling nervous but gallant, I did so. Sure enough, the man at the border wasn't interested in my luggage – except, of course, for my guitar, for which I needed a receipt. Something about a ban on the exportation of musical instruments. The shock came when the lady showed up to exchange currency for me.

The year before, a film had come out, called 'Love at First Bite'. It was a silly farce about Dracula, and it had offended my Romanian professor no end. He swore there was no resemblance between the Communist country portrayed in that film - in which they confiscate Dracula's castle for a home for gymnasts - and his beloved homeland. But here, right in front of me, was proof that truth was stranger than fiction.

The woman exchanging money was the same one in the film. I swear: she had the same suit, shoes, and eyeglasses. I could just hear her saying, 'Next week, Comrade Count, we come with trampolines and Nadia Comeneci!' I managed to stay calm, but after a 30-hour train ride, my sense of reality was a bit loose.

It didn't help AT ALL when I got to Sighisoara, the birthplace of Count Dracula. It seemed his castle had been turned into a training home…for gymnasts…

I think the oddest border crossing was when I was trying to take a lot of sausages out of Germany, and the woman in the airport wouldn't let me. Which is fair enough - the rules are the rules. But then she switched to English, and got bossy and stroppy, so I calmly and slowly ate them all on the spot instead of putting them in her wee bin. Pride is a terrible thing! I left with my stubbornness intact, which is more than I could say for my digestion.

That's a good one.

Through The Iron Curtain
------------------------
I had recently migrated from West Germany to Denmark when I went to West Berlin in 1974 to visit a former school mate who studied there in order primarily to dodge military service. I took the Copenhagen-Berlin Express from my new home town Nykøbing Falster to Gedser and the train ferry from there to Warnemünde in the German Democratic Republic. This was the first time I passed through the iron curtain.

In Warnemünde everybody had to leave the train and walk to a kind of shed where a border patrol officer studied our passports at great length. Since I belong to the Danish minority I have always been a Danish citizen with a Danish passport. It took him some time to work out that I was a Dane born in Germany with a Danish Father and a Danish Mother who used to be German - even if her family was more Danish than that of my father. What can I say? I don't blame him.

But I was only 21 years old and according to my passport I was an "Arbeiter" (worker) so of course I was welcomed in the "Arbeiter-, Bauern- und Soldaten-Staat" (in reality I was studying to become a journalist). So he finally returned my passport. I then politely asked him where I could find the train to Berlin (Warnemünde's train station is pretty massive). He looked at me as if I had just pulled a prank on him, but I may have looked as sincere to him as I actually was so he pointed in the general direction and I went and boarded my train.

The trip from Warnemünde to Berlin was fairly eventless. Except: At one point three police officers went through the train, one carrying the biggest pistol I have ever seen in a special holster on his back. I believe this was the first time I saw a weapon outside a museum and I didn't like it. I was sat between locals as well as passengers from Denmark. Everybody ignored the patrol.

What I liked even less was misundertanding the message from the loudspeakers when we arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Berlin Central): "Alle Passagiere müssen jetzt den Zug verlassen!" (All passengers must now leave this train). I didn't realize this only meant the locals. Not us "transit travellers". The curse of understanding German!

So there I was, stranded in the GDR while my train continued to Bahnhof am Zoo in West Berlin, where my fried waited for me and didn't know nor understand what had happened and where I was. This was decades before mobile phones after all.

I asked a hot dog vendor: "How do I get to West Berlin from here?" He looked like he didn't know if he should laugh or cry. Poor man. He didn't know how to help me either.

Then I saw a man in uniform and thought "this guy must know!" He didn't. He answered in russian and must at least have been a major or a captain or something (I have no idea, never joined the armed forces myself).

Finally somebody told me how to take the S-Zug to Bahnhof am Zoo and things started moving again.

But before I could leave the station I had to face another East German border patrol. An officer went through my belongings thoroughly and found a paper and a copy of "Der Spiegel" (German weekly magazine pendant to Newsweek - sort of).

"Haben Sie Porno?" (do you have any porn?). Of course I didn't and I was thinking to myself: "Sorry, comrade, can't help you there".

Then he found my medicine...

I patiently explained to him what it was for (or against, as it were), but when I explained the hay fever pills he became very suspicious: "Heufieber - im Januar?") (hay fever - in January?). Well, Sir, maybe not exactly hay fever but allergy anyway.

Finally he let me go and I went outside. This was West Berlin alright. Ever heard of a book and film called "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" (Us Kids from Bahnhof Zoo)? I could hardly find a path through all the bodies of junkies and alcoholics.

But I finally found my friend and spent some nice days on Kreuzberg before driving with him though the GDR to our former common home town of Flensburg.

I don't have a funny border crossing story. You know why? Because I'm British. My passport is so much more than an identity document. It mandates Johnny Foreigner to not only allow me through without let or hindrance, but informs them that they are personally responsible to Her Majesty the Queen for my safety throughout my visit.

Tell that to Kim Jung-un

Thanks, Pierce - another great story about the East Bloc. I'm getting close to having to split this report in two - which is just fine. The Post is grateful.

The Post is also grateful for your contribution, Icy, which will be published exactly as you wrote it - with suitably impressed commentary.

I knew I should've answered this when I saw this this morning--mine's rather boring in comparison. But I had to get ready to go to work

Tom and I got married when he was 19 and I was 23. Now, he'd been to Canada before with his parents, but I'd never been north of Seattle (or south of the Bay Area, for that matter). So we had decided to visit the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia for our honeymoon. We'd had these plans for months (we were engaged for about a year and a half). Four days before the wedding, my stepdad took me to pick up my wedding dress from the drycleaner's, as well as some other errands (I can't remember at this point whether they were wedding-related or not). When I got home, I didn't have my wallet. It wasn't on the floor of the car (I didn't carry a in those days--denim jackets had pockets large enough to hold paperbacks, much less a wallet!) and it wasn't on the ground next to the car. Nowhere we'd been had had a wallet turned in, nor was it in any of the parking lots. I was much more upset about the fact that I had cash in there for Tom and my first apartment than about the loss of my ID--I didn't have a driver's license, so that wasn't an issue, and my name was going to be different in less than a week anyway, so applying for new ID would be a waste of money, since I couldn't get one in my soon-to-be new name until it was my actual new name. So I went on and had a busy rest of the week, got married, went to the 2nd reception Tom's parents insisted on having out at their place, and drove in a Chevy Luv along the coasts of Oregon and Washington to Port Angeles, where we were going to board a ferry to take us to British Columbia. There, I was told I couldn't leave the US, because I didn't have any ID. Neither of us had thought we'd have any problems--as I said, I'd never been near a national border, and Tom had been 14, so his parents had taken care of that sort of thing. I did end up crossing a border that trip, though--we ended up going on a whale-watching trip that left from the San Juan Islands, and the orcas were all in Canadian waters

My grandparents went through Checkpoint Charlie about a week before the wall came down.



Most of my border crossings have been pretty uneventful. On the bus from Dublin to Belfast, you can, if you pay very close attention, spot the border (the paint on the side of the road changes from yellow to white). It wasn't always like that. I remember being in the family car, heading to the north for a camping holiday (we went up to the Giant's Causeway, and did a bit of hillwalking). The IRA ceasefire was announced on the radio as we were driving up. It would take affect at midnight. I asked my parents to wait till then to cross the border (they didn't).



On the night train from Paris to Venice, they take your passports in the evening and give them back to you in the morning: very civillised. On the night train from Thessolaniki to Istanbul, by contrast, they wake you up at 4 a.m., and you have to get off the train and queue up at the border crossing. I remember the train crossing a bridge very very slowly, and I think I recall the Greek and Turkish flags both painted in the middle of the bridge, but I can't be certain. The train was a second-hand French one, and still had the SNCF logo in the frosted glass of the door window. I took a photo of its shadow on the opposite wall.

That was on my second InterRail trip; the time I travelled alone.



On my first InterRail trip, the time I went with my brother and a friend, we went to Morocco. (Morocco isn't in InterRail any more.) That border crossing was uneventful (as I recall, all the formalities were on the boat). Crossing back from Spain into France at Latour de Carole, there were no checks at all. In Cherbourg, a few weeks later, the border guards saw three young lads with Moroccan stamps in our passports and assumed we had drugs with us. We had to unpack our bags ourselves, under their eyes (probably so we couldn't claim anything found had been planted on us). The little marble chess set we'd bought as a present had been broken in transit, which we lamented over. What I really remember was how horribly rude they were. (They didn't find anything, of course. None of us were the slightest bit interested in drugs.)

TRiG.