I had a little bit of a soften down yesterday and stomped out of the Bolivian Consulate and not using a visa after three days of struggling to meet their absurd paperwork necessities.
There was an enormous crowd on our final day and whereas we waited we fell into dialog with a scholar from Israel on the identical quest as ourselves. We chatted about our travels after which he dropped the bombshell. “I’ve been ready 5 days for a stamp. They’ve authorized my visa however they don’t have any stamps.” Huh? We’ve been struggling to get our visas by making mounds of copies, inventing itineraries, contacting lodge house owners, submitting paperwork on-line, spending hours on the Web cafe down loading financial institution statements for the previous six months they usually can’t really problem a visa? I received fairly loud.
“Properly,” she mentioned after demanding coloration copies of our accomplished digital software kind, “it might take a month in your visa to reach.” We received the message. Give her credit score it have to be embarrassing to characterize a rustic too poor and disorganized to have the ability to present its personal paperwork and receipts however she may have saved us the enormous waste of effort and time. Why she gamed us I don’t know however she is a grasp diplomat, obstructive like solely a skilled bureaucrat will be. You assume your state DMV is difficult to barter?
We needed to wait till the Bolivians had left to get her consideration after which she mentioned I want copies of your digital software. You’ve the paperwork in your desk I mentioned, copies of the paperwork I’ve uploaded into the digital file for the overseas workplace.
Copies of my passport, my drivers license, my van registration, my declaration that that is the van I’ll drive in Bolivia, the lodge house owners a call for participation (barely faked however she didn’t know I signed it), our itinerary (made up however plausible), six months of financial institution statements, yellow fever vaccine certificates, my {photograph}, and I believe that’s it. Sure she mentioned however I want a replica for my information. Tremendous I mentioned, I’ll e mail the digital software to you so as to add to the an identical bodily paperwork there in your desk. No she mentioned I can’t print in coloration. I want the digital software in coloration. Fuck you (Chinga tu documentos) I mentioned and walked out. Not my most interesting hour however actually.
The stamps could also be right here on Tuesday, however your visa might not come for a month was her parting shot at my again. Then we needed to name Konstantin and Julia in Paraguay and inform them the journey is off. I hope we see them in Chile earlier than they go house to Seattle. The day didn’t finish there. We now wanted journey papers for Rusty to enter Chile on our revised itinerary. Off we went to the charming however ineffective Federal constructing in Salta.
I knocked on the door and located a bureaucrat on his cellular phone. He signaled me to attend. quarter-hour later he approached me, a captivating cheerful man. Oh he mentioned doubtfully, we do this. Not as many pet export kinds as they do in Buenos Aires however we do them too. I requested if I wanted a kind to take to the vet. Oh no he mentioned they’ve the kinds. We simply fill out the export paperwork. However the vet mentioned they want a kind from you. He regarded puzzled. Clearly the vet doesn’t have a clue I believed to myself. Par for the course on this tousled metropolis.
On my means out I noticed this chalk board with messages from the federal government employees union.
Not the form of Spanish I’ve discovered however I received the gist of it. Hets the correct translation, a message that may not go amiss at house although this form of disloyalty within the US will get you fired these days. Oh courageous new world.
So to overview the day to date: diplomacy failed, vet care failed, pet export papers failed. Our final finest hope was laundry. That we did and low-cost it was too. Ten bucks for this lot:
Argentina shuts down between one and 5 pm and reopens until darkish so we needed to park and look forward to the laundry to reopen at 5. We discovered a close-by lot and we barely squeezed our 9 foot tall van in.
The home made sunshade awnings hung low however he pushed them up with a brush. He was actually useful contrasting the useful Argentina of the folks with the inflexible stupidity of officialdom. What a day.
Rusty confirmed me the way in which how you can keep calm below stress. I failed however I attempted to emulate him.
We received to the campground barely earlier than darkish feeling defeated needing a strong nights sleep. Listed below are some road scenes I snagged as we went round city. Salta, essentially the most irritating metropolis with essentially the most torn up streets to date.
No thought who that is and too drained to analysis it. That’s how dangerous the day was.
Mexican model road cones. With youngsters’s toys!
Lunch. A respite. $14 for the 2 of us.
Tight parking.
Low roof parking. You want braveness to attempt to get into these locations. I’m prepared to offer it a go by now.
Deserted highway works in all places.
Squeezing by means of double parking is regular. Pace bumps and random pedestrians thrown in for an added problem.
The Salta municipal campground boasts the world’s largest freshwater pool. Solely operational in January and February.
I came upon by wanting in a store window a cute 150cc bike like this that may value as a lot as $3,000 for such a elaborate off highway mannequin in Mexico prices greater than $6,000 right here, payable over 21 months.
