The procedure for leaving Bolivia was surprisingly simple by South American standards. Simply hand in your immigration slip, get your passport stamped and away you go. Similarly for the van the exit procedure only required us to hand in the form we had been given when we entered Bolivia and we were free to go, no waiting around and no photocopying of documents in triplicate. The only unusual thing was that we had to manually open the border gates ourselves to get out!
We were hoping for a similar slick experience on the Peruvian side but we should have heeded the omens when the last thing Christine did before leaving Bolivia was bang her head on the rear view mirror and knock it off its mounting and then, as if to underline the bad portents, I managed to crack the windscreen in my overenthusiastic attempt to reattach it! We already needed a new windscreen to pass the Chilean MOT because of a chip but it was still annoying.
We got a feel for how things were to progress when the Peruvian passport office told us we needed to check the vehicle in with Aduana (customs) first and then Aduana told us they couldn't do anything until we had our passport stamped! We eventually persuaded the passport office to back down and both humans were officially accepted into Peru.
Next we went back over the road to the Aduana and smugly presented our vehicle documents and stamped passports, thinking we had cleverly solved the riddle they had presented. Never be smug to a Peruvian border official. After studying the documents for at least 20 seconds they declared they were not acceptable. As most of you already know, being avid readers of this blog, when we first bought the van the Chilean civil service was on strike and so we were unable to register it in our name. Instead we got a notarised letter from the previous owner giving us permission to take the vehicle out of the country. Whilst this was fine for Argentina and Bolivia, apparently Peru is too special to accept notarised documents.
So, what to do next? We were stuck at the border, our Bolivian SIM card had decided to stop working, we had no Bolivian or Peruvian money, and we were feeling pretty low! Then we remembered we had a few emergency dollars in the safe and luckily the only place open at the border was a currency exchange.
We knew you could print out the Chilean registration documents online (although only if you had a Chilean bank account to pay the fee) so using our newly acquired Soles we hired a mototaxi (like a Thai tuk-tuk) into the nearest town and found an internet cafe. From here we managed to contact our Santiago airBnB host, Javi, who kindly agreed to try to get the document for us. Unfortunately there was a problem with the website which wasn't likely to be fixed until the following day so we had to return to the van empty handed. We spent the night parked in the no man's land between the two countries.
The next day Javi got in touch to say that the registration change was still pending so the document wasn't in my name yet...oh shit!
Time for some lateral thinking. We tried contacting the previous owner to see if he could speed up the transfer...nope. We tried bribing the Aduana officer...surprisingly for Peru, not interested. We considered crossing the border in the dead of the night when it wasn't manned...too chicken. We thought about forging the registration documents...but didn't have the means. We ran out of things to try. We argued a bit.
The next morning, to preserve our sanity, we decided to head back into Bolivia. The weather had improved so we decided to go to the Isla del Sol and very nice it was too. Christine also contacted one of her friends to see if they could doctor the old Chilean registration document and put it in my name. I'll not mention who this was in case they don't want to be associated with forged documents online but I will say that they produced a faultless forgery in a very short time.
So two days later, greatly refreshed and with fresh suntans, we attempted the border again. The Aduana officer spent a good deal of time examining our forged document and comparing it to the rest of our documentation. He also spent a lot of time on the phone, presumably speaking to his boss. There were a few tricky questions about the dates on the documents but we managed to blag some answers that satisfied him. We finally realised he was going to let us in when he stopped angrily asking us questions and started to smile. He even gave us advice about some blockades which were happening further into Peru.
So now we are in Peru! But we couldn't have done it without the help of Javi, or our mystery Frank Abagnale...thank you both. We love you!
