The Day After

What a difference a day makes and after all that visa fiasco we are settled in a grassy campground, vast and empty out of season even on the weekend.

We left Salta Saturday morning just after eight and drove north to San Salvador (Saint Savior) de Jujuy (“hoo-hoo-eee”) the capital of the province of Jujuy. The reason for this backtracking was we need export papers to get Rusty back into Chile and iOverlander promised a vet who could get it done in this town two hours north of Salta.

We spent one night downtown and two nights slightly out of town in the camping area of a convention center and hotel in the suburb of Cerrilos. Thus we sadly missed the gruesome bouncy potholed streets of downtown Salta and took a circuitous bypass around the city. The forecast had a promise of rain and after the humidity we weren’t surprised. Don’t was pleasant to see a real in the clouds in our direction of travel. 

It was sunny in San Salvador de Jujuy, a large industrial city even more ugly than Salta but endowed according to iOverlander with a capable vet. 

Sure enough they do health certificates here as required by the Agricultural office whose permission is required to export Rusty. 

It was about $35 for the certificate and another $55 for the de-worming pills required to obtain the border pass. 

Happily young Rusty did not have to have a thermometer up his butt, and the stethoscope reported his heart is still in tip top condition. Also he’s passed on a couple of pounds to me since his last physical two months ago in Chile. 

We came out after an hour, part of which was consumed calling our banking Key West to get them to make our debit card work. We get a better exchange rate (1250 pesos to the dollar) if we use a card and the vet doesn’t brake credit cards. But the bank had blocked our debit card for some reason. You get used to occasional glitches when you travel. Compared to the Visa application this was nothing. First Stare Bank always has a live banker answer the phone which is pretty nice. Plus our debit card has a manatee on it. 

Oh and we were blocked in by double parking for a bit (above). That sorted itself out and off we went to lunch feeling pretty good about getting the health certificate at last. 

Layne had found a bit lace to have lunch near the campsite so we stopped there first. 

We got the trout which is often pink like salmon around here with a broccoli cream sauce. Delicious actually with home squeezed lemonade which they make much less sweet than in the US. $36 for the two of us which is a bargain in expensive Argentina. The owner loved our travels and said he’s got a touring motorcycle as he too wants to visit the southernmost city of Ushuaia. 

Then we paid for two nights, $26 all in which included hot water and electricity so we could rest for the weekend. On Monday we go early to the agriculture office in San Salvador and pay $40 to get the permit done instantly ($1 for three day turn around service…) and head south to the vineyards of Cafayate a long days drive south of here. 

Our next obstacle is Easter, which starts on Monday for Holy Week when all of Latin America shuts down and parties. Government offices close on Thursday so we want Rusty’s permit wrapped up so we can lose ourselves wild camping in the mountains near the border. 

Then on Monday we pop into Chile, buy some more fruit and head to the beach, where will camp fit a few days before meandering north to Perú. We may not get to see Bolivia but luckily they lost the War of the Pacific in 1879 and lost their access to the sea so we can just drive around them.  Antofagasta used to be in Bolivia after the Spanish left. 

Our splendid Chilean down converter making 220 volt electricity into 110 to charge our US lithium batteries. 

And Rusty keeping guard. As always. 

Cool, overcast, with the promise of rain. Good sleeping weather for elderly formerly busy overlanders. 

Kafka In Bolivia

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.