Trip #10: The Final FrontierThis was the
Big One- the trip that we'd been working toward for a year and a half, and I'm happy to say that it all went according to plan. In fact, everything went so smoothly that I can hardly believe it myself....
Getting There Was Half The FunI flew the usual Seattle/Taipei/Phnom Penh route on EVA Air, leaving at the ungodly rude hour of 2:00am. I had company on this trip, however, as my friend Jack came along with me. A couple months earlier I had introduced Jack to one of my fiance's girlfriends and they hit it off really well. So well in fact that Jack decided to fly to Cambodia and get engaged.
Hey, life is short, right? I admire Jack for making his decision- like me, he's not the kind of guy to dither around endlessly deciding what to do, how to do it, when to do it, etc etc. He sees an opportunity, makes a "go/no go" decision and proceeds accordingly. His fiance is a genuinely sweet young lady, and when I say "young" I mean about half his age. Errrr,
almost half his age, that is. Also half his height and weight. More on his enagement adventure later.
I should mention that this was a 'back-to-back' trip for me, as I had just been to Cambodia a few weeks earlier. I returned sooner than normal because my fiance, Sakha, was *finally* having her visa interview and I wanted to be there for it. (I was going to be there for it no matter what, even if I had to swim to Cambodia.)
We're Baaaaaaaaaaaaack!Jack and I got in to Phnom Penh just before noon on the 18th and both of our fiances were waiting outside the baggage claim area, verrrrrrrrry happy to see us. Both Jack and I were pretty hammered from the long trip, so we grabbed our fiances and went to the New York Hotel in separate tuk-tuks.
My fiance's interview was scheduled to take place in two days, on the 20th at 7:00am, and we spent the next couple of days putting the final touches on the paperwork. Immigration paperwork is monstrous, complex, and involves a
LOT of different documents: police reports, tax records, schooling records, personal history, passports, pictures, medical exams, affidavits of support, etc etc etc.
A Few Fun PicsBefore anything else, here are a few pics of things that we saw along the way....
Transporting Explosive GasHere's a guy transporting a load of Liquid Propane gas. Looks safe, doesn't it?
What could possibly go wrong? Notice the fancy safety straps made from only the highest quality bungee cords.
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/transportinglpg1.jpg)
Transporting Gasoline The Easy WayAgain, what could go wrong? Yeah, this fellow is transporting about 20 gallons of gasoline in plastic jugs. He's basically
sandwiched between giant bottles of flammable liquid. Wooo!
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/transportgas01.jpg)
(//http:///cambodia/transportgas02.jpg)
I admit, I always wondered what would happen if the
Propane Gas guy and the
Liquid Gas guy collided...just one spark and I bet
you'd be able to see the fireball from 100 miles away. You Know You Want It - Scary Mannequins!
What trip would be complete without an installment of Scary Mannequins? Here you go...try not to look directly at them.
Is this Sinead O'Connor?? 
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/smannequi20.jpg)
"Calling the Zombie Squad, cleanup on aisle 2..."
Ummm, wait a second....the last time this one was
a BOY...and now he's wearing a dress?
Hello gender confusion....
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/smannequin21.jpg)
OMFG!!!
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/smannequin22.jpg)
A matched pair of what I like to call "screamers"
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/smannequin23.jpg)
This is what we call "Chocolate Hair" Disease
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/smannequin24.jpg)
On The JobElectrical workers in Phnom Penh have
really, really big balls.
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/electricalworker.jpg)
Life Expectancy: 2 to 4 minutes. For Whee Drive? 
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/forwheedrive.jpg)
I have no idea how this happened, what it means, or anything else.
Walky Shoes
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/walkyshoes.jpg)
Lets go walkies! I don't know why this was funny, it may have been exhaustion. *cough*
Okay, enough fooling around....let's get to the real deal...........the interview story!
First Of All, The Paperwork From HellAll the paperwork for immigration has to be perfect, 100% complete, and it has to be presented in the right order or it's an automatic "fail". Yes, they even specify
the order that the papers have to be in when you hand them in at the interview. The passport has to be on top, followed by two color passport-style photos, followed by a DS-156 form, then a DS-156K Supplemental Form, then a current police report no less than 90 days old, then the sealed medical report, and so on.
The passport-style photos have to meet some very exacting specifications- for example, the
eye height has to be between 1-1/8 inches to 1-3/8 inches (28 mm and 35 mm) from bottom of photo. The distance from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head has to be between 25 and 35 millimeters in height. The background has to be a neutral grey or off-white color. The picture has to have a matte finish, not glossy. No smiling is permitted- if you turn in a pic with a smile it's rejected and so is all of the other paperwork. I'm not making this up. There are a bunch of other requirements too, so
if you think you can just be-bop into Rite-Aid and get this kind of picture from them for $1.99, you're mistaken.
Anyway, we also got a current Cambodian police report for Sakha that went all the way back to 1981. Now,
she was only 2 years old in 1981 (!!) so I'm not sure just what sort of criminal enterprise she could have been involved in as a toddler, but they dutifully noted that she had "no criminal offenses listed" from age 3 up to the present. We amended the rest of the stuff, including "evidence of the relationship".
Regarding "
evidence of the relationship", let me just say, "
Oh. My. God." We had more friggen evidence than we could carry, I mean just tons of stuff collected over the past 18 months. Thousands of papers, receipts, pictures, chat logs, calls, hotel bills, plane tickets, etc etc etc. Plus ten, count 'em, ten trips to Cambodia.
It would have been twice as much work to fake all of this stuff than it was to just fly back and forth to Cambodia ten times and spend time with my fiance.
We had created a small packet for each trip for Sakha to carry in along with the official paperwork. It had the plane tickets for that trip, hotel bills, and other receipts specific to that trip. Since I wasn't allowed in to the interview the plan was for me to wait outside with all the other additional stuff we had (about 50 pounds of paper, no lie). I also gave Sakha my passport to take in to show the Visa Officer that I'd been to Cambodia a bazillion times. The passport carried a lot of weight, as it turned out. After perusing my passport the Visa Officer noted that I'd basically been 'living on the plane', lol.
The Interview - It's Showtime!The people waiting to be interviewed sit outside the embassy near one of the 'sally ports', which is basically an armored entrance with guards and a mantrap-style entrance complete with metal detectors and x-ray machines. The doors are about 8 inches thick and built to withstand a serious assault (which is probably a damn good idea for any US Embassy in southeast Asia, considering our track record there...).
We were the first people in line, having gotten there at 6:00am. At 7:00 they let Sakha in through the sally port and I went to wait across the street.
The Visa Officer sent Sakha out to me for additional paperwork twice. She wanted to see a few additional items like my 2007 tax return. I had all my tax returns from 2000 to 2006, but 2007 is still in process so I didn't have it. Doh. I asked Sakha to tell the Visa Officer that my taxes were still being done and that 2006 was the latest we had.
I mean, hell, I hand carried nearly 10 years of tax returns from the US to Cambodia, and they wanted the one friggen' year I didn't have? Shit! So yeah, I started worrying...
After about an hour in the embassy, Sakha came back out through the sally port with a huge and I do mean
huge smile on her face. She nailed it and had passed the interview. Eighteen months of preparation, 100,000 air miles and 90 katrillion dollars spent on plane tickets had paid off.
According to Sakha, the interview was practically a non-event- the Visa Officer asked Sakha just 3 questions, which she answered perfectly. The questions were:
1)
"How did you meet your fiance?"This was an easy one to answer, we met through a friend and we had some docs to support that.
2)
"Why do you love an old(er) man?"Ouch. I'm 24 years older than Sakha. She says the interviewer said "
old man" but I think she actually said "
older man". At least my fragile male ego hopes so.
(//http:///forums/richedit/smileys/Happy/14.gif)
Sakha answered this very simply; I'll put her response here more or less verbatim. She said, "
Young man no care about my heart, no care about love, just want to play, have 2nd wife, no good to my heart. No love me for real. Older man, he love my heart, take care of me, really love me, no want to play or hurt my heart."
I asked Sakha how the interviewer liked that answer and the conversation went something like this:
Fiance: "She said I am a lady and must leave."
Me: "What?"
Fiance: "I saw her thumb. I am the leaving lady."
Me: (
confused) "What?"
Fiance: "She show me her thumb, she said I am a girl!"
Me: (
really confused) "I don't understand..."
Fiance: (
exasperated with my denseness) "Her thumb! I am a going girl, she said it!"
Me: (
head explodes) "What the ?!?!"
Fiance: "Yes, that I am to go as a girl. With her thumb, she make a thumb to me!"
Me: (
writhing on ground) "What the...Oh god, I give up!!!"
After a little more head exploding and writhing and whatnot, I finally determined what happened. Sakha gave her answer, and the interviewer gave her the "thumbs up" and said "You go, Girl!"
3) The third question was whether or not Sakha had children. She said "No", but that we will probably have a child once she's in the USA and we're married.
The interviewer said "Okay", and that was it-
she had successfully passed. The end result of the interview was then given to Sakha: it's a "
visa voucher", a small blue square of cardboard with a case number and a date printed on it:
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/visavoucher.jpg)
That's it- the result of 18 months of hard work!The number referenced her particular immigration record and the date was when we were to come back and pick up the actual visa itself. My fiance did her interview on the 20th and was told to come back on the 23rd to get the visa.
This worked out perfectly, becaue my friend Jack (remember him?) was supposed to get engaged on the 22nd in a little place called Kompong Cham. So we could zoom up to Kompong Cham, watch the engagement, zoom back, and pick up the visa the next day. As soon as we had the visa in hand we could get plane tickets.
Jack Gets Engaged, Orange Pants Visible From Low Earth OrbitSo, Thursday the 22nd we went to Kompong Cham, but "zoom" is not the word I'd use to describe getting there or back. We went by bus and at a *cough* leisurely pace. Now, I don't want to say that Kompong Cham is out in the boonies, because it's not. It's nowhere
NEAR the boonies. I mean you'd have to backtrack quite a ways to get to the boonies.
Lets just say that Kompong Cham is so far out that they have to truck the sunlight in. You can hardly get there from here, you almost have to go around. And by "around", I mean around the world and sneak up on it from behind. It's waaaaaay out there.
So we get there and watch my friend Jack put on a succession of ceremonial costumes, including the famous Orange Pants. These are the "
King Of Cambodia" pants, and they're a really, really bright orange color. Think "
Search And Rescue Orange". They also look funny- they're these baggy pantaloon kind of things that are absolutely hilarious as long as someone else is wearing them. If you're wearing them, well, it's not nearly as funny. It's embarassing. Navy jets will use your pants to line up their vectors for a carrier landing, that's how friggin' bright they are.
I would post pics of Jack in the
Orange Pants but he threatened to kill me if I did (actually it was more of a promise than a threat). They really are pretty embarassing. I know this for a fact because I wore the same
Orange Pants costume during my engagement, and I threatened to kill anyone who published pics of me in them. So, I can't post them here (but if you write me privately and offer me money, I might send you copies. Damn, I hope Jack doesn't read this.).
I will however post a pic or two of them from the ceremony. Jack's fiance (I'll call her "Pam") is
waaaaaaaay to cute for him, the lucky bastard. And the best part is that Pam is really, really nice, too. I don't know, maybe Jack was very very good in a past life or something and this is his reward.
"
She used to do the pony, she used to do the stroll...I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll!"
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/engagement23.jpg)
Isn't she lovely? 
(http://discoverseattle.net/forums/richedit/smileys/Love/3.gif)
The happy couple..........
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/engagement22.jpg)
Skulls...Lots And Lots Of Skulls 
(http://discoverseattle.net/forums/richedit/smileys/Sad/10.gif)
On the way back frm Kompong Cham we stopped off at some sort of park. It had a small building that was a shrine to honor the people who were murdered by Pol Pot's regime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot).
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/skullmemorial.jpg)
Insde the shrine building was a large "bowl", about 8 or 9 feet across...
and inside the bowl was a mound of skulls, victims of Pol Pot's insane attempt to "cleanse" the country. Each one of those skulls belonged to a living, breathng person who was rounded up and executed simply because they had some knowledge.
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/bowlofskulls.jpg)
If you knew anything, you were marked for death. For example, if you were a doctor, lawyer, plumber, electrician, librarian, or office worker, you were deemed incompatible with the "new society" that Pol Pot was trying to build, and you were executed. If you wore glasses, you were killed. If you could read, you were killed. If you spoke ANY foreign language, you were killed. Anyone with any knowledge above the level of a farmer was put to death.
By the time Pol Pot was forced to flee Cambodia there were only 40 doctors left alive in the entire country. (And they were in hiding, which was the only reason they survived.) Anyone who had knowledge was killed, period.
Sakha's parents were put in one of Pol Pots death camps, but they managed to escape. That's another story, but the fact is they barely made it out alive and that's no exaggeration. Everyone her parents knew ended up being put to death or dying from malnutrition in the death camps. What Pol Pot did is one of the worst examples of a leader gone insane while the rest of the world just sat by and watched the horror unfold.
---------------------------
The 23rd we went back to the embassy at 3:00 and got the visa. They also gave us a sealed packet of papers that were to be hand-carried and given to the receiving immigration officer in Seattle. On the 24th we went to EVA Air and booked the first available set of seats back to the US. The first available seats were on May 25th, which also happened to be the same flight that Jack was going back to the US on.
Dude, Where's My Dress?We also went to pick up Sakha's wedding dress, which was finally ready.
Wow, what a dream dress. It's made from this beautiful electric
blue silk with an intricate pattern printed through it and the top part (the blouse) has this amazing silk lace material over it with little beads and things woven into it. It's truly stunning, and it was
all hand-cut and hand-sewn. It took almost a month for them to do it and the dress is just incredible. This is the dress shop early in the morning before anyone arrives for work:
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/dreesshop1.jpg)
When we got back to the hotel we realized they'd actually given us someone else's dress, a red dress that was nice, but it wasn't ours. Time was getting really short so we turned around and blasted back to the sewing shop. We asked for *our* dress and we all had a good nervous laugh over the idea of flying back to Seattle with the wrong wedding dress in our luggage. Ha ha! Too funny. Waaaaaaaay too &#%^*! funny. We could imagine the owner of the red dress pulling it out on her wedding day and going "
WHAT THE ****!".
Tearful GoodbyesSakha's entire family had gathered at the airport to say goodbye. The only person missing was her father, who had passed away very suddenly a couple of months ago. I didn't mention that in the last trip log because it was just too sad to write about. He had a stroke, passed away very suddenly, and was buried in Vietnam. "Sambat" was truly a great man and a wonderful father. He was loved by everyone who knew him, and we miss him every day.
(http://discoverseattle.net/forums/richedit/smileys/Sad/10.gif)
As we got ready to go into the terminal Sakha's sisters started crying- I think it finally hit home that she was actually leaving and wouldn't be back for a long time, possibly several years.
After a year and a half of getting ready, the actual leaving only took seconds...and I think it was kind of a shock to them. But it was time to go....
This was Sakha's first plane trip ever and she got a real kick out of it. The initial flight from Phnom Penh to Taipei was only 4 hours, so it was fun and new and didn't drag on forever (like the flight from Taipei to Seattle did, lol).
Let's Have Us A Plane Crash, Woo Hoo!To make a long story short, we flew back uneventfully, passing through Taipei and then on to Seattle. Actually there is one thing worth mentioning- on our final approach to Seattle we got lower and lower and lower, and then
about 30 feet from touchdown the pilot suddenly rammed the throttles to max and we shot back up into the sky like a rocket. I gotta tell you- when you max out the engines on a Boeing 777, that f*cking plane MOVES like a demon. It's really peppy, with 220,000 pounds of thrust from a pair of General Electric GE90-115B turbofans cranking at full power.
It felt like we were climbing straight up. The pilot came on a few minutes later and said that due to a "mis-vectoring", a Mexican Airlines plane was in the "wrong position" relative to us and so we had to do a go-around. Ooopsie.
In other words,
we almost landed on top of another f*cking jumbo jet because some dumb ass put them on our runway too early. I can imagine the enormous goddamn fireball that would have resulted from that little boo-boo. That would have been a pretty f*cked up ending to an otherwise perfect trip. Oy.
The Last Obstacle: US Customs & ImmigrationWhen we finally landed in Seattle we went to the Visitor Immigration section and handed in our sealed packet. Fifteen minutes later we were cleared through and went to Customs. The Customs officer just waived us through. That was a big surprise; I figured they'd tear our stuff apart for sure since it was Sakha's first visit.
I had even cleverly "declared" Sakha by listing her on the customs declaration form as "28 year old Fiance" with a street value of $1,000,000 (one million dollars). But no, they just waived us through. Damn. Another good opportunity to mess with a Customs Officer's head wasted.
(http://discoverseattle.net/cambodia/customsdec1.jpg)
Notice how I cleverly hid her real value by putting it in the middle of a bunch of lower-priced stuff? And it worked- I didn't have to pay any Customs or Import fees on my fiance!The Finish Line My friend Chris had driven my truck down to meet us at the airport. We loaded up our luggage, drove up I5 and dropped off Jack, then backtracked a bit and dropped off Chris and headed for home. We made it to our place at about 9:00pm, and I walked Sakha in the front door of our place for the first time.
We were finally home!We had done it. We had successfully fought our way through the
State Department, the
California Immigration Service Center, the
National Visa Center in Vermont, the
Department of Homeland Security investigators, the
Phnom Penh Police Department and
Cambodian Records Center, the
Cambodian Emmigration Authority, the
United States Embassy in Phnom Penh,
US Immigration Services, and finally the
US Customs & Border Protection.
Are we done? Not quite. Once we're married we'll need to file for an "Adjustment Of Status" so Sakha can become a permanent resident, but basically the hard part is over and we're finally together at last in the same time zone, hemisphere, and country.
I hope you all have enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing (and experiencing) it.
Last but not least, Sakha and I would like to send out a big "
thank you" to all of the folks who supported us in various ways throughout this one-and-a-half year long journey.
We couldn't have done it without you!Waylon & Sakha
