Lost in Interrogation

While police checks are made everywhere across the world for various reasons, travelling from the Laos border into and onto the China border, these long night buses involved a very heavy amount of stopping to question passengers and to very thoroughly check all forms of luggage/packages (particularly boxed food items - where police would need to re-package each box. That's a lot of work). Heavy, heavy checking!

The bus stops. The police jump on in serious, demanding and over-confident manner, checks each passenger’s identification and from what I could understand a pile of high and mighty questions, i.e. interrogation. “Where are you from?”, “Why are you going there?”, “What do you do?”, “How long will you be there for?”…This is a jist of what I could understand. Responses are to be immediate, short and honest. I’d usually present my passport and not wanting to show embarrassment and damage their senior ego, they would hover on past and neglect any form of interrogation/spoken interaction with the “foreigner”.


..an awkward moment
Only once did a policeman carry out his duty and question me “Where are you going?”. That’s about all I could understand. My response was a quiet and a half-asleep “Kunming”, of which he then went on to ask another question which to me, sounded the same as the first question… “Kunming”, be my next repeated answer; this time with certainty engulfed in my response. This rhythmic questioning and answering repeated a couple more confusing times. His expression and tone daren’t change but I could feel his embarrassment and in the corner of my eye witnessed other passengers getting a laugh out of this mini entertainment; smirking and giggling at our lost in translation “serious” communication. As I unleashed a smirk and muttered “err..Kunming, Kunming, huh?”, he confidently and sharply gave up and turned his head onto the next passenger. Umm. Awkward. Haha. Sorry, dear.



rest stop?
Anyhow, this long overnight bus journey turned out to be extra long as it turns out that all buses heading to Kunming stopped at a bus station (or so I’d like to think it was a bus station) for at least three hours at early hours of the morning (perhaps, 2am) and we’d sleep on this motionless bus in darkness. I couldn’t tell you why. Not only was it strange, it felt eerie & dreamy since it wasn’t exactly warm, but in contrast, its surreal-ness was kinda cool. I tried my best to count the number of buses waiting but my sleepiness allowed me to give up. Let’s say around 25 buses were waiting. Odd!