we have had quite a few unpleasant border crossings, all of them between argentina and chile, and none even close to this one.
every annoyance before has been about the length of time and the total inefficiency of some of the procedures down here (which definitely doesn´t end with border crossings… but customs sure does have a special way of highlighting them).
we left salta, argentina at around 7am and arrived at the argentine border town around 2pm. we had a train to uyuni, bolivia we hoped to catch at 3:30pm, very optimistically hoping that we could get across the border in an hour and a half.
for whatever reason you can´t cross the border by bus here. i don´t know if it´s just this specific crossing point or what, but our bus would only go to the northern argentine border and then we were all let out to walk across on our own.
first we had to get stamped out of argentina and then cross a little bridge by foot (a weird “where are we” feeling… we are out of argentina, but not in bolivia…). getting out of argentina involved one line waited in for about 1/2 hour. pretty standard and easy enough.
unfortunately, bolivia is a whole ´nother country and sometimes seems to be a whole ´nother planet. we got to their little guard house which was no bigger than a bedroom in which they´ve crammed three separate windows with three separate lines… which of course you can´t really keep separate in such a small space so everyone is everywhere.
we wait in the first line to find out that we need a visa! what?!
we somehow missed that information entirely. clearly we hadn´t cracked the ¨bolivia¨ section of our guidebook yet. oops.
luckily, they are issued on the spot and we were handed a few pages of paperwork that we had to get out of line to go fill out on a little table filled with other poeple that didn´t know they´d need a visa.
then we got back in line in window number 2 only to find out we had to pay $136 each to get our visa! $136US! that is a LOT down here. and wayyy more than we had on us. oh, and also, they wanted it in US dollars, which we haven´t even seen for over 2 months!
i asked where the heck we were supposed to get $272 US dollars and did we need to go back to argentina? and since we were already stamped out of argentina that would involve waiting in the entrance line, going to a bank, and then having to re-exit again!
but she said, “no, just go to the atm here.” she said it like it was obvious. like, “no, walk into the country you haven´t been cleared to enter, and go make a bank transaction…”
ummmm. okay.
so we walked into bolivia, no one there to stop us, and it was not at all obvious whether we had been cleared or not, which makes you wonder why we even needed to be cleared at all and pay for this very expensive visa.
now we had to find an ATM in villazon, bolivia which is not an ATM kinda place. but luckily there was one and after walking around (in the country we were not yet cleared to enter) for about a 1/2 hour, we found it and got out three very crisp, very new, very fake looking US $100 bills. i was really sure they were fake. they looked like monopoly money.
maybe it´s just because i haven´t seen US currency in a long time, or maybe because even when in the US, i don´t usually have hundred dollar bills in my possession, but i really thought they were fake!
now we had to get back to the border (not that anyone was there to make us… except we didn´t know how to explain we didn´t have a visa when we go to leave bolivia in a few weeks) and when we got there the dumb lines had all tripled!!
ughhhh.
we got back in line number two and finally handed over our $300 US dollars to pay for our $272 worth of visas and then she told us she didn´t have change! where exactly she thought we were going to get exactly $272 worth of US money in bolivia beats me! really dumb. after talking about it a minute more we realized she just didn´t have change in US money, but did have bolivianos. why she thought we wouldn´t be okay with getting change in bolivianos is weird. we were IN bolivia. why would we need US money? she´s the one that wanted US money to begin with, not us. but whatever – all of these things become more complicated when everything is done in my very, very basic spanish.
she put our visa stamps in our passports and sent us to line number 3 to get our entrance stamps. problem is, line number three was really, really long and the hut was really, really small and we didn´t want to be there anymore. plus we´d now missed our train and were none too happy about it.
we were probably a coin flip away from just saying forget about the stamp. we figured when we went to leave the country we could just play dumb. we could say, “but they gave us our visa… see, here it is… we didn´t know we needed another stamp!”
but we really didn´t want to be put in some bolivian jail. the customs hut seemed like jail enough, so we waited.
we finally, legitimately this time, crossed into their country hours later and now had no idea how to get where we had planned to be that night – uyuni.
the train had left and then we were told there were no more buses until the next morning. however, we could get to tupiza and from there (supposedly) we could get to uyuni, so we bought a ticket.
our bus was to leave at 6pm and though we were ready to leave right on time, they were not. we didn´t leave until 7:30pm althoughhhhhh, we came to find out – a full day later – we had actually left just a half hour later, not the hour and a half we thought, because there was an hour time change when we crossed into bolivia that, of course we didn´t know about because we didn´t READ OUR BOOK! aaaaaarrrrhhhhhhggg, again.
finally on the bus – one of the worst buses we´ve been on – and 5 hours later we were in tupiza and it was the middle of the night and lo and behold there is still no way to get to uyuni.
we took up some girl on a hostel she was pushing down the street, which turned out to be very nice. we were really looking forward to sleeping in after a very, very long day, but at almost midnight we were talked into agreeing to go on the hostel´s four day salt flat tour that was leaving the next morning at 8:30am.
and no, this wasn´t totally impulsive. we were planning on going on this 4 day tour, but thought we´d be leaving from uyuni. but really, leaving from tupiza was the best, best thing we did!
it was a really long go leading up to it – but we are SO glad everything worked out the way it did. the four days to the uyuni salt flat was awesome!
back with lots and lots of pictures and lots, lots, lots, less words tomorrow!
