I had a bit of a melt down yesterday and stomped out of the Bolivian Consulate without a visa after three days of struggling to fulfill their absurd paperwork requirements.
There was a huge crowd on our last day and while we waited we fell into conversation with a student from Israel on the same quest as ourselves. We chatted about our travels and then he dropped the bombshell. “I’ve been waiting five days for a stamp. They’ve approved my visa but they have no stamps.” Huh? We’ve been struggling to get our visas by making mounds of copies, inventing itineraries, contacting hotel owners, filing paperwork online, spending hours at the Internet cafe down loading bank statements for the past six months and they can’t actually issue a visa? I got rather loud.
“Well,” she said after demanding color copies of our completed digital application form, “it may take a month for your visa to arrive.” We got the message. Give her credit it must be embarrassing to represent a country too poor and disorganized to be able to provide its own documents and receipts but she could have saved us the giant waste of time and effort. Why she gamed us I don’t know but she is a master diplomat, obstructive like only a trained bureaucrat can be. You think your state DMV is hard to negotiate?
We had to wait until the Bolivians had left to get her attention and then she said I need copies of your digital application. You have the documents on your desk I said, copies of the documents I’ve uploaded into the digital file for the foreign office.
Copies of my passport, my drivers license, my van registration, my declaration that this is the van I’ll drive in Bolivia, the hotel owners letter of invitation (slightly faked but she didn’t know I signed it), our itinerary (made up but believable), six months of bank statements, yellow fever vaccine certificate, my photograph, and I think that’s it. Yes she said but I need a copy for my files. Fine I said, I’ll email the digital application to you to add to the identical physical documents there on your desk. No she said I can’t print in color. I need the digital application in color. Fuck you (Chinga tu documentos) I said and walked out. Not my finest hour but really.
The stamps may be here on Tuesday, but your visa may not come for a month was her parting shot at my back. Then we had to call Konstantin and Julia in Paraguay and tell them the trip is off. I hope we see them in Chile before they go home to Seattle. The day did not end there. We now needed travel papers for Rusty to enter Chile on our revised itinerary. Off we went to the charming but useless Federal building in Salta.
I knocked on the door and found a bureaucrat on his cell phone. He signaled me to wait. 15 minutes later he approached me, a charming cheerful man. Oh he said doubtfully, we do that. Not as many pet export forms as they do in Buenos Aires but we do them too. I asked if I needed a form to take to the vet. Oh no he said they have the forms. We just fill out the export paperwork. But the vet said they need a form from you. He looked puzzled. Clearly the vet doesn’t have a clue I thought to myself. Par for the course in this messed up city.
On my way out I saw this chalk board with messages from the government workers union.
Not the sort of Spanish I have learned but I got the gist of it. Here’s the proper translation, a message that might not go amiss at home though this sort of disloyalty in the US gets you fired nowadays. Oh brave new world.
So to review the day so far: diplomacy failed, vet care failed, pet export papers failed. Our last best hope was laundry. That we did and cheap it was too. Ten bucks for this lot:
Argentina shuts down between one and five pm and reopens till dark so we had to park and wait for the laundry to reopen at five. We found a nearby lot and we barely squeezed our nine foot tall van in.
The homemade sunshade awnings hung low but he pushed them up with a broom. He was really helpful contrasting the helpful Argentina of the people with the rigid stupidity of officialdom. What a day.
Rusty showed me the way how to stay calm under pressure. I failed but I tried to emulate him.
We got to the campground barely before dark feeling defeated needing a solid nights sleep. Here are some street scenes I snagged as we went around town. Salta, the most irritating city with the most torn up streets so far.
No idea who this is and too tired to research it. That’s how bad the day was.
But thanks to an alert yet anonymous reader we have the story.
Mexican style street cones. With children’s toys!
Lunch. A respite. $14 for the two of us.
Tight parking.
Low roof parking. You need courage to try to get into these places. I’m ready to give it a go by now.
Abandoned road works everywhere.
Squeezing through double parking is normal. Speed bumps and random pedestrians thrown in for an added challenge.
The Salta municipal campground boasts the world’s largest freshwater pool. Only operational in January and February.
I found out by looking in a shop window a cute 150cc motorcycle like this that might cost as much as $3,000 for such a fancy off road model in Mexico costs more than $6,000 here, payable over 21 months.
