Illegal Tea

It looks like opium isn't the only thing being smuggled in Afghanistan. It sounds like the border guards tend to look the other way, which is probably a good thing. This also reminds me of an amusing vignette from my Jordan-Syria trip: When we were in Damascus, we decided to take a shared taxi back to Irbid, Jordan, where we were living, but the first few drivers we found were a bit reluctant to take what we felt was an appropriate fare. One of the drivers, however, had "a friend" who might be interested, and in fact was. There followed many incidents which need not detain us here. However, when we got to the border town of Dara'a, our driver began buying watermelons to smuggle across the border, where everything was more expensive. The trick was that tourists could transport such items, but locals couldn't. Anyway, we reached the border crossing with "our" watermelons, not sure what to make of the situation in which we found ourselves. However, in one of the great amusing moments of the trip, I looked around at all the other cars being inspected in front of us, and almost without exception the border guards were discovering watermelons in the trunk.