We left Arequipa and drove all day to the border crossing at Tacna. We stopped for a late lunch in Moquegua and narrowly avoided being stopped by police for doing an illegal u-turn. We could see one of the officers talking to his colleague and gesturing like a u-turn, as if to ask if he had seen us do it as well. "Quick! Before they stop us!" I yelled to Paul, and we were off down the Pan-American highway.
At the Peruvian side of the border, we parked up to go through immigration but it was unclear exactly where we needed to go. So we went where most people seemed to be going and queued for windows marked 'EXIT'. But when we got to the front, the woman asked for a form we didn't have and was very unhelpful when we asked her where to get one.
After a bit of going backwards and forwards, an officer from a group who appeared to be on a break directed us to two security guards who gave us four copies of the same form, all to be filled in with exactly the same information about who was in our vehicle (when will they get duplicate forms?!) Now that we had the ball rolling, the process was easier. We were stamped out of Peru, handed back three of the forms and sent around the corner to 'CIT' to have the van checked out of Peru.
The dude there did a more thorough check than when we last left Peru, checking the number plate and needing to look at the steering wheel to verify it was a Fiat. He eventually asked to see the van's registration document, at which point I realised that I had lost the real document. Eek!! Cue some frantic rifling through reams of paper, then retracing of steps to human immigration. Thankfully, the woman there knew exactly what I was talking about when I said I'd lost a little slip of paper - it had been handed in to the two security guards. They wanted me to recite what was on it before they handed it over. This was not long after I'd written out the van's chassis number four times, so I was able to reel that off!
By this time, the dude checking the van out of Peru had decided he didn't need to see the registration document, so we drove over to Chile, miraculously losing two hours in the 20 seconds it took to reach the immigration booths.
When we got stamped in, the immigration officer obligingly stamped the penultimate clean page in my passport. We then moved the van in to a queue to be searched for contraband organic produce such as dairy and fruit & veg.
We had already purged the van of most things, but had a bag containing milk, eggs, mayonnaise and dulce de leche to hand in. We were surprised when we were allowed to keep the mayo and dulce, as well as the Argentinian maté that Paul had kept hold of in hope. The van was searched more thoroughly than before, but we still could have smuggled stuff in, for example in the cupboards containing our clothes, which they just opened and shut when they saw what was in them. A second officer did a quick search, but he looked like he was just having a nose around, more than anything!
At the customs window to get the van in to Chile, all we had to do was in hand the final copy of the passenger inventory form. "The van's Chilean, right?" asked the woman. "Yes." "Ok, you can go." Didn't realise it was going to be that easy!! I had been practising in my head explaining how hard it was to get a replacement windscreen, expecting it to be an issue. But that was it. Final border done!