Hadley Hooper for The Wall Street Journal. Would there be an overpass? An underpass? An endless stream of hilarious traffic accidents?
The Wall Street Journal
By KEN JENNINGS
Even as a child, I loved maps. At the tender age of 8, I saved up for months to buy a mammoth Hammond World Atlas, which I placed every night beside my pillow, where a less odd child might have kept a security blanket or a teddy bear.
The most underrated bits of a map, I decided, were the borders. A "world without borders" might sound like a wonderful thing in a beauty pageant speech or "Star Trek" episode, but a world map with no borders is a dull, dull thing—a green-and-beige mass lined with mountain ranges that were always, unaccountably, purple. It's impossible to look at one without imagining a matronly 1950s schoolteacher pulling it down in front of a chalkboard.
I always skipped past the relief maps in my atlas to admire the crisp mosaics of the political maps. State and national borders were more capricious than coastlines—they could be geometrically precise lines in one stretch and undulating river-squiggles the next. As a result, I became obsessed with borders in real life as well. On summer car trips, I would brace myself for the exact moment, on a bridge over the Columbia River, when our 1979 Mercury Zephyr would pass between Washington and Oregon. Later, my family moved to Seoul and my greatest triumph was a visit to the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Tiptoeing over to the North Korean side of a neutral conference room there, I experienced the strange, liminal thrill of crossing into someplace new and forbidden. Also, I left a piece of gum under their side of the conference table.
Recently, my wife Mindy and I were in Bangkok, and decided to take a side trip to the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. The Thai airline with a monopoly on this route gouges on tickets for the hour-long flight, so we made the 250-mile trip over land.
Beyond miserliness, I also had a secret agenda. All my life, I had dreamed of glimpsing that most exotic of international borders: one where a drives-on-the-right country (like Cambodia) meets a drives-on-the-left one (Thailand). I just couldn't visualize the Möbius strip of roads that would be required to make the lanes meet up. Would there be an overpass? An underpass? An endless stream of hilarious traffic entanglements?
The bus to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet was modern and air-conditioned—not, alas, a charming developing-world bus from a movie, with people and poultry hanging out of every hole. But given the bumpy ride and the driver's unnerving habit of sticking to the exact center of the road unless he needed to avoid a head-on collision, we were relieved to make it to the town bus station with our skins and breakfasts intact.
There we hopped on a three-wheel auto-rickshaw. (Mindy, who speaks French, informed me that these are called remorques in French-colonized Cambodia, and I made a note to fit in as many "remorque and Mindy" jokes as possible.) I'd found a website where an old Cambodia hand warned of the dozens of scams run on tourists at the border, and sure enough, our driver took us not to the border, but to an official-looking building where, he said, we needed to get our visas.
"Just take us to the border," I said cheerfully, backed by the full faith and credit of some guy on the Internet.
Instead he pulled into a nearby parking lot, which he claimed was the "Cambodian consulate." Two rough confederates tried again to extract "visa money" from us.
"Nope, just take us to the border," I insisted.
"Are you nervous? I'm nervous," said Mindy as our annoyed driver pulled away.
"This is exactly what the website said would happen," I reassured her.
"That's easy for you to say. You're not going to be the 'and wife' in the 'Jeopardy! Champ and Wife Beheaded in Cambodia' headline."
We made it to the border, and three slow lines and one small bribe later, we were in Poipet, Cambodia. This is it, I thought: finally, a chance to see the perplexing border in action. But the crossing was almost deserted. I watched as a Thai truck was waved through the dusty border zone into Cambodia. A few minutes later, a Cambodian truck was ushered through into Thailand. Disappointed, I put my camera away. There just wasn't enough traffic at this crossing for any topologically impossible roads.
But I haven't given up. Wikipedia makes it look like the Lotus Bridge between Macau and China has a nice, crazy cloverleaf. Or maybe the Takutu River Bridge between Brazil and Guyana. If you're a border connoisseur like I am, maybe I'll see you there. As Bob Dylan once sang, "We'll meet on edges soon."
—Mr. Jennings is the author of "Maphead," which will be published next week. He holds the record for the longest winning streak on the television game show "Jeopardy!"
The most underrated bits of a map, I decided, were the borders. A "world without borders" might sound like a wonderful thing in a beauty pageant speech or "Star Trek" episode, but a world map with no borders is a dull, dull thing—a green-and-beige mass lined with mountain ranges that were always, unaccountably, purple. It's impossible to look at one without imagining a matronly 1950s schoolteacher pulling it down in front of a chalkboard.
I always skipped past the relief maps in my atlas to admire the crisp mosaics of the political maps. State and national borders were more capricious than coastlines—they could be geometrically precise lines in one stretch and undulating river-squiggles the next. As a result, I became obsessed with borders in real life as well. On summer car trips, I would brace myself for the exact moment, on a bridge over the Columbia River, when our 1979 Mercury Zephyr would pass between Washington and Oregon. Later, my family moved to Seoul and my greatest triumph was a visit to the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Tiptoeing over to the North Korean side of a neutral conference room there, I experienced the strange, liminal thrill of crossing into someplace new and forbidden. Also, I left a piece of gum under their side of the conference table.
Recently, my wife Mindy and I were in Bangkok, and decided to take a side trip to the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. The Thai airline with a monopoly on this route gouges on tickets for the hour-long flight, so we made the 250-mile trip over land.
Beyond miserliness, I also had a secret agenda. All my life, I had dreamed of glimpsing that most exotic of international borders: one where a drives-on-the-right country (like Cambodia) meets a drives-on-the-left one (Thailand). I just couldn't visualize the Möbius strip of roads that would be required to make the lanes meet up. Would there be an overpass? An underpass? An endless stream of hilarious traffic entanglements?
The bus to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet was modern and air-conditioned—not, alas, a charming developing-world bus from a movie, with people and poultry hanging out of every hole. But given the bumpy ride and the driver's unnerving habit of sticking to the exact center of the road unless he needed to avoid a head-on collision, we were relieved to make it to the town bus station with our skins and breakfasts intact.
There we hopped on a three-wheel auto-rickshaw. (Mindy, who speaks French, informed me that these are called remorques in French-colonized Cambodia, and I made a note to fit in as many "remorque and Mindy" jokes as possible.) I'd found a website where an old Cambodia hand warned of the dozens of scams run on tourists at the border, and sure enough, our driver took us not to the border, but to an official-looking building where, he said, we needed to get our visas.
"Just take us to the border," I said cheerfully, backed by the full faith and credit of some guy on the Internet.
Instead he pulled into a nearby parking lot, which he claimed was the "Cambodian consulate." Two rough confederates tried again to extract "visa money" from us.
"Nope, just take us to the border," I insisted.
"Are you nervous? I'm nervous," said Mindy as our annoyed driver pulled away.
"This is exactly what the website said would happen," I reassured her.
"That's easy for you to say. You're not going to be the 'and wife' in the 'Jeopardy! Champ and Wife Beheaded in Cambodia' headline."
We made it to the border, and three slow lines and one small bribe later, we were in Poipet, Cambodia. This is it, I thought: finally, a chance to see the perplexing border in action. But the crossing was almost deserted. I watched as a Thai truck was waved through the dusty border zone into Cambodia. A few minutes later, a Cambodian truck was ushered through into Thailand. Disappointed, I put my camera away. There just wasn't enough traffic at this crossing for any topologically impossible roads.
But I haven't given up. Wikipedia makes it look like the Lotus Bridge between Macau and China has a nice, crazy cloverleaf. Or maybe the Takutu River Bridge between Brazil and Guyana. If you're a border connoisseur like I am, maybe I'll see you there. As Bob Dylan once sang, "We'll meet on edges soon."
—Mr. Jennings is the author of "Maphead," which will be published next week. He holds the record for the longest winning streak on the television game show "Jeopardy!"
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