Today, I fucked up... by illegally (and accidentally) crossing the Malaysia/Singapore boarder
So this happened yesterday, not today.
I am a junior in college doing a study abroad program in Singapore for 4 months. This past weekend, me and some of my friends in the program attended a music festival in Malaysia for 3 days. Had I not spent a fat chunk of my study abroad budget at overpriced American fast food chains in Asia all the time (Did you guess I was American yet?), then maybe I would’ve been more willing to pay for a flight to Malaysia for the music festival like everyone else in my group. Instead, I took the bus.
To preface a little bit, I woke up at around 5:30am Monday morning to catch the bus home while my friends slept off their hangovers for another few hours before their flight. You can imagine I’m feeling pretty beat up at this point, but I still manage to drag my (rather nauseated) self to the bus station. I board and we hit the road back to Singapore while I begin what seemed like a well deserved nap. Wrong.
About five hours into the drive we hit customs. Everyone is required to get off the bus and go inside to show their passports to the Malaysian customs officers (there are two separate borders you need to pass–one for leaving Malaysia and one to enter Singapore. This was the first one.) As I’m walking off the bus, I reach for my passport in my jacket pocket and notice that it’s missing. Hoping that somehow in my hazy, morning state I managed to slip my passport into my duffle bag, I asked the bus driver, who appeared to be a Malaysian native and couldn’t have been older than 18, to open the bag compartment situated underneath the bus.
It’s important to note that this bag compartment was not at floor level. It was about 7ft x 11ft and about five feet off the ground, which required me to physically lift my body up into the compartment and crawl my way to the very back where my bag was situated. I zip open my backpack and wah-lah! The passport is there and I can nearly taste the sensation of liberation when I noticed the door of the bus compartment slowly closing. My first thought was–“this bus didn’t even have air conditioning, why on earth does it have automated bag compartment doors?” But, my second thought was “Fuck.” I try crawling back to the door before it closes (this was seriously some Indiana Jones shit), but I’m slowed down too much by the weight of all the bags of people successfully crossing the border at that very moment. I’m now stuck in a pitch black space, with my knees on the ground and my head pushed up against the ceiling.
“Play it cool. Those doors are going to open up at any moment” I thought. I yelled, cursed and even threw up a little bit in my mouth at one point (not sure if from nerves or hangover. or both. definitely both), but the door did not open. I think you can guess what happened next.
The fucking bus started moving. The people going inside began exiting on the other side of the building (and technically the opposite side of the Malaysian border) so the bus began crossing the border to let the passengers get back on and continue. I’ve been in this bag compartment for about three minutes at this point. The bus stopped momentarily, presumably to speak with the customs officer, then continued on. At this point, I’m starting to think maybe the smart thing to do is just stay quiet. I don’t speak Malay so jumping out of the bag compartment on the other side of the border at this point just wasn’t something I thought was a good idea. Welp–that’s exactly what happened.
Once the bus came to a standstill, the doors began opening again while other passengers returned to the bus. Before the doors even managed to fully open, I sprawled out of the compartment and landed on all fours. I lift my head up to find none other than about 30 very confused and frightened foreign bus passengers gathered around that are now all screaming for what I presume was help. About 30 feet away I can see a divide in the crowd taking place as a Malaysian customs officer is charging in my direction and yelling for his colleagues. I am about to shit my pants at this point and honestly just wish I had pulled the trigger earlier that day so that I could have felt less hungover and more mentally prepared for this moment. I was still struggling to process what had happened in the past few minutes and in an attempt to avoid getting tackled to the ground (by a man I must admit was really only about 5'7") I closed my eyes and put up my arms. With the customs officer only about 10 feet away, ready to take my white ass down, to my rescue came none other than…the 18 year old Malaysian bus driver!
But, in that moment, he was not an 18 year old, scrawny teenage boy that had locked me in the bus compartment. He was an 18 year old, scrawny teenage boy that had locked me in the bus compartment AND spoke Malay! He stopped the customs officer dead in his tracks and made up for the problem he created in the first place. At this point, he must have realized that he trapped me under there and was able to explain the situation.
After getting driven back to the other side and being required to go through customs the right way this time, I successfully and legally crossed the Malaysian border. Walking back to my seat, the bus driver offered me an extra rice & chicken microwavable dinner for the ride back as a gesture for the whole “I forgot you were underneath the bus so I closed the doors” thing. Apology accepted. I walked to my seat in the back of the bus with mixed reactions from the other passengers who had front row seats to the show. I sit down in my aisle seat and stare at the back of the seat in front of me for about five long seconds before the man next to me turns and says, “That was great. You were really…in there”
Tl;dr - My bus driver accidentally trapped me in the bag compartment while crossing Malaysian/Singapore customs.
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