In The Bag

It’s not like there were strap-ons in there, but still, when the customs official in Dar es Salaam opened my duffel bag filled with a thousand condoms and a stack of plastic gloves I couldn’t help but shiver in the Indian Ocean heat. It would not have been so bad, had the woman not proceeded to pull the items out of the bag, while a line full of Tanzanian onlookers gazed curiously at the items being taken through the checkpoint, onto the ferry to Zanzibar.

It was my third hour in the country and I was already embarrassed. Even though the merchandise was part of a donation I was carrying to Mozambique, the people who where all around me bulged their eyes and looked me up and down. Who knows what they were thinking, I tried to stay calm, hoping the little booklet on HIV education would catch their eyes and they’d know that this was not my personal stash of travel latex. Then I remembered those booklets were in my other suitcase.

The customs official refilled my luggage, zipped it up and tossed it to the side with a huff. I pretended I did not know who the bag belonged to, but since I was the only foreigner in the huddle, it was pretty obvious. Granted, there are worse objects a traveler could be caught with. Like whips, weapons, drugs, sex slaves or mail order brides.

At the Berkeley Public Library, where I used to work, there was a librarian who had a mail order bride. He worked at a different branch, though I had seen him on a few occasions from afar. Word in the stacks was that he had acquired a girl 30 years younger than him from Uzbekistan.
I don’t believe that she was actually sent to him through the mail. It used to be that lonely men would select their perfect brides through a catalog, but in this day and age of Match.com, E-Harmony and the like, it’s usually done online. I wonder what the internet has done to the Mail-order Bride Industry? Furthermore, is there such a thing as a mail-order groom? Hmm, I like to shop…

Then again, if one had acquired a significant other abroad, this would not be known to customs officials upon crossing the border if one did not want to give up this information. But drugs, that’s another story. About a year before the film Maria Full of Grace came out, I traveled to Argentina with a classmate from Cal who ran in a circle of mules in Buenos Aires. She claimed not to be one herself, though she told me stories of one guy who was practicing swallowing large capsules for a run to Belgium. He was a young Paraguayan father-to-be and had taken up the opportunity to make some money. I don’t think he actually made it though, having thrown up a half million pesos worth of merchandise on the ride to the airport.

I could never be a smuggler, because every time I go through customs, I get nervous. It’s always the same questions, “What were you dong in Brazil? Did anyone help you pack your bags in Portugal? How long did you stay in Kenya? Are you carrying any weapons? What do you study?” Even so, it’s the way they say it that gets me to thinking, “Wait, am I carrying any weapons? Did I purchase a pack of crack and forget about it? Am I smuggling emeralds in my tampon box?” The customs officials are almost always serious, and for some reason they always put the fear of god in me. Then I remember, breathe, I didn’t actually break any laws.

Another time in Argentina, I was on the border of Paraguay and Brazil with a friend from Colorado. She had been in country for three months and needed to reenter the country to get another 90 days. There was a little hut on the edge of the river Paraná with a customs official in the post during office hours. We found a fisherman who agreed to row us across the river to Paraguay for 10 pesos. It was nearing 5 pm, and we assumed that an hour would be time enough to cross the river, sink our toes into the Paraguayan soil, and float back to Iguazú before closing time. We were wrong.

We presented our passports to man in the wooden box, who stamped our exit visas and bid us adios. After making the mark in our passports, the Aduana official informed us we had to spend the night in the other country before returning to Argentina. This might not have been a problem, had we had luggage and money with us. Our items were stored in our lodge in the city, and the fisherman had agreed to send us ashore in the semi-tropical jungle. The closest Paraguayan city, Ciudad del Este, was a few dozen miles from there.

After some angry greetings in Castellano, pleas and tears, the customs official agreed to give us a reentry permit with the promise that we didn’t come and bother him again. Isn’t it weird to go to another country for an hour?

Even when I went to Tijuana, I stayed for a few days. Okay, so I once went to Spain for 20 minutes, but I went back the next day and spent the night. Even stranger to me, is to go to another country and not tell anyone.

The friend I mentioned from Cal, was one such person. While in Buenos Aires, she complained about not having enough funds to leave the capital, and thus she opted not to join me on the trip to Iguazú. She also said she hated London, didn’t like the way they treated her people. After my six -week stay in South America, I returned to Berkeley to relax before the new semester. My friend, who had stayed on for another 6 weeks had not contacted me in awhile. When I finally heard from her, she was in London, accompanying her friend, who I know is a master mule. Not that I thought she was smuggling items across continents, but it was a bit fishy. Later that year she told me that she had also gone to South Africa before returning to Argentina. I still don’t know what she is into, but one really has to check their travel partners at the door, even if they are students at the best university in the nation.

The mules my friend ran with once mentioned that if I accidently lost my passport and they found it, they might be inclined to offer me 6000 dollars if I let them keep it. 6000 USD in cash was a lot of money at a time when I was down to my last hundred. I thought about it for a minute, and even though it would have been exciting to earn that much money for losing my passport, I opted to earn my dollars the honest way. When my passport was actually stolen last year at a club in San Francisco, I didn’t earn any money. Although it enraged me to shell out another hundred bucks for a fresh booklet, I learned my lesson. I also realized that when carrying questionable objects abroad, as long as it’s legal, there is, as they say in Brazil, No Stress.