Kafkaesque

Some days don’t work when you’re on the road. The past couple of days have been like that and we have been trapped in the sort of hell only bureaucracies can create.

When we approach a border we start looking for the blue “pet services” tag on the iOverlander app. Below you can see the purple line of the border between Brazil to the north and its village of Chui. To the south is Uruguay and the village of Chuy. The two villages are separated by a street that you can walk across freely. The pick up truck below is in Brazil in Chui, the car is in Uruguay in Chuy. Crazy isn’t it?

Brazilian customs don’t stop you as you drive in to town. If you want to stop and get your papers done you stop otherwise you are free to pass. We’ve passed through several times in our mad search for dog papers to cross to Uruguay officially. Uruguayan customs in the highway south stop all traffic for checks apparently so we can’t just drive into Uruguay. See below, the circles are customs and the red line is the border. :

So we drove three hours down the peninsula into Chui looking for one of two vet’s listed on iOverlander. That’s what we always do when we approach border: we find out what the requirements are for our dog. Then we look for a vet who has been listed by a satisfied overlander who preceded us. In Chui this whole plan fell apart.

We found a number for the vet and sent messages back and forth. She made three appointments and missed every single one. The other vet office was closed permanently and the agriculture office that reviews the paperwork was also closed and locked. We had nowhere to turn to. 

We were wondering if we had to go back three hours to Rio Grande where Layne went to the hospital. That plan fell through as we texted various vets and they had no idea how to prepare the paperwork for Rusty to enter Uruguay. 

Our final back up plan was to go back to Paraguay and enter Argentina to get around Uruguay and then drive to Buenos Aires to meet our friends. It seemed ridiculous  and we were severely bummed.

I started another round of studying iOverlander to find something we could try. And there it was, buried in another icon, a contact for a vet. Why they didn’t put a tag on the vet so everyone could see it if I don’t know and I have rectified that. But we now had a chance to get this miserable paperwork done. 

We had driven out a half hour to the next town of Santa Vitória which it turned out is a pretty little community of 30,000 people far removed from the dusty scrubby border mess that is Chuy. We parked by the plaza and waited for the vet to let us know where and when to meet. 

She never called us. That was when I started to hunt for an alternative and amazing to relate the second vet mentioned as an aside in iOverlander was six blocks away. 

We drive over to see what we might find  what we found was a German couple we hadn’t seen since Ecuador whom we’d first met outside Oaxaca in 2023. Mattias had noticed the same connection I had in iOverlander and he too had tried to get a vet to help in the big city and had obviously failed as we had. That was reassuring that we hadn’t missed anything.

To enter Uruguay the vet had to produce a health certificate as normal but then Uruguay requires leishmaniasis test. It’s a parasite infection caused by sand flea bites and can infect humans and dogs. Both Laila, Mattias and Silvia’s dog as well as Rusty came up negative. The vet sent our packages to the Agriculture office for approval by email and we paid $115. We should get a reply within 48 hours. What a relief. I took a wide angled shot of the action. 

Rusty never feels the vaccine needles but he did not like the blood draw. I told him he was going to be fine but he didn’t believe me even when I pointed out I’d be a basket case if he was dying. He looked scornful. 

His negative test result for leishmaniasis. The vet was incredibly patient and sweet. 

It’s funny how stressed he gets at the vet, it must be the smell of hospitals or sick dogs or something because he never reacts to treatment. I remember this every time I take him to the vet and I try to do the same for him as he did for me in 2018 after my accident. 

We left the vet relieved after 36 hours of stressful fretting. I told Layne it would be easy looking back but for a while we couldn’t figure out how to cross this damned border.

While we were at the vet I looked out the window and saw these kids staring at our travel stickers. Don’t speak English? I asked. They shook their heads. I told them in my awful Portuguese to get a van when they turn 18 and live their lives. They laughed at my attempt to subvert the dominant paradigm. 

Purcplan now is to wait for the papers. 

We’d like to get them Wednesday as we have a shop we want to visit in Uruguay.  It’s run by two German brothers and we need some of the work done in Brasilia checked out. 

The mechanic is gone from Friday through Monday on a long weekend. That means if we don’t get the papers until Thursday we won’t see him till next Tuesday. Not the end of the world but…

So last evening we drove some terrible streets suggested by Google Maps to get to a campground on the edge of town.

City streets? Oh Brazil. 

The campground is free until it isn’t. The employee told us it was free and then said her supervisor was charging us $17.  Not cheap for a parking spot in a union trade school offering hot showers and toilets. Complete with two stray dogs who got a massive dinner from us.  

A nice enough spot but I think we got charged a gringo tax. We decided it was worth it for a night after a long day.