Equipo Williams

Bolivia is proving to be a bit more exciting that any of the other countries we’ve driven through so far.

It started at the border.  I had vaguely known two things: that the border was closed for roughly two hours at lunch and that Bolivia does not observe summer time and is an hour behind Chile despite being to the east of Chile.  What I did not do is put these facts together, meaning that after clearing Chilean immigration and customs we ended up waiting in front of the Bolivian border office for an hour and a half.  It was very romantic for the first ten minutes, lingering with locals in a dusty frontier border post in the high desert, but then it was kind of a drag. 

When they opened, there were about 30 people waiting to take two mini buses across the border.  As usual, they were processed first.  Our situation was a little more complicated anyway, as American citizens have to get a visa for Bolivia, but it can be obtained at the border.

Allegedly.

The border police officer was somewhat surprised at our request, but got out the forms and started to process us.  In theory, we’re supposed to prove a bunch of stuff, but when we got out our itinerary, proof of onward travel, and hotel reservation, he just glanced at them, copied some, and then ignored the rest.  Ok, no prob.

While all this was going on, he told me to clear customs while he figured out other paper work.  This was kind of weird, because customs wanted me to be admitted to Bolivia first, but it was a small border post so they spoke amongst themselves in Spanish and then the customs guy went with me to inspect the car.  This was a bit more involved than previous borders: they wanted to look inside the tent and box with sleeping bags (once I started to open the tent they lost interest, so I didn’t have to fully open it).  Then he looked in the box of sleeping bags which involves climbing on the running boards and standing on tiptoes.  Then he wanted all the luggage scanned inside.  So far, ok.  Then he wanted to see the VIN engraved on the chassis.  Well that’s a problem: American cars don’t have an engraved VIN.  We have it on the windscreen and on a sticker on the door, but it isn’t engraved on the chassis.  We went back and forth on this and he insisted it had to be on the chassis, and only relented when I showed him the owner’s manual page showing the locations of the numbers.  

Temporary import permit in hand (the car was at this point legally in Bolivia, but I was not), I went back to immigration where, after another half hour of filling out forms, it was time to get a visa.  

There are several requirements for the visa, but the most important one is that it is $160 USD per person, payable in cash, as long as the bills are immaculate.  We had a stash of money for this purpose, and handed over our $640.  It was counted several times, paperclipped, and put… somewhere.  Cool, almost done…

Then the police officer explained that he was issuing ME a visa, but Jessie and the kids would need to present themselves at the immigration office in Uyuni the next morning for their visas.  They had entry stamps, but no visas.  Wait what?  We tried to ask why but our Spanish was insufficient to understand the answer.  The best we could make out was that they only had one visa sticker left, but we’re not sure.  Anyway, there was a flurry of explanations, I got the WhatsApp contacts for both Sergento Daniel in Uyuni and Judy at the border posts.  Having already paid, we were mostly nervous about the finances of this: the visa is its own receipt, so we had no evidence that we had paid other than these guys telling us all was going to be fine. At this point we had been at the border nearly four hours, and one of the cardinal rules of overlanding is “don’t drive after dark”, so we headed out.  We were over a barrel anyway: what else could we do?  We left, and made it to Uyuni four hours later. 

The next morning we were laying in bed at about half past seven when my phone rang.  It was Judy from the border, telling me that I needed to be at immigration by 8:30.  We threw on clothes and went to the address but found no immigration office.  There was a guy leaning out of a second story window who was gesturing to us, and when I asked if he was Sargento Daniel he responded in the affirmative and waved us up.  It turns out the office was closed on Saturdays and they were opening it just for us.  It further transpired that Sargento Daniel was merely our police liaison for getting the visa: he had to wait for his friend to come and actually issue us the visas.  We sat in his office waiting for about 45 minutes while Daniel told us all about the Bolivian Police, Interpol, what he does in a typical day, staff rotations among the various border posts and headquarters in La Paz, and travel tips for Bolivia.  His friend finally arrived, and after much explaining, Jessie and the kids had 10-year Bolivian visas.

Our next big Bolivian adventure started when we were sitting in a restaurant in Potosi having lunch on Wednesday.   There was a television playing the news and the lead story was about the “Censo”.  The president was addressing the nation, saying he expected compliance with the regulations and no problems in the upcoming week.  Cool cool, always good to hear that. And what exactly was he talking about?  Out come the phones, and after a bit of Googling, we learned that Bolivia was conducting their census on Saturday, March 23 and that the method was to confine everyone to their homes for the day while the census takers went door-to-door.  There was to be no internal travel, schools were to be closed on Friday to prepare, and all businesses were to be shut on the 23rd.  Wait, what?  There was no mention of this anywhere, at immigration, on the embassy websites, anywhere.  We couldn’t quite believe it, so we asked the waitress who said “Si, todo es cerrado”.  Ok… time for a day of rest.

We had planned to spend the weekend in Sucre, so when we got there I asked our Airbnb hostess what would happen.  She basically said “yeah, on Saturday you have to stay here.  When they come to the door just tell them you’re American tourists.”  Ok…

We had a lovely Friday exploring Sucre (more on that in a minute), and stocked up for Saturday.  Saturday rolled around, we got up to a quiet city, and at 8:30 the doorbell rang.  Outside was a lady, probably a student, in her census taker’s vest with her stack of forms.  I explained to her that we were tourists, we had arrived in Bolivia in the previous week and we were planning on staying another two weeks, hoping that would be the end of it.  She smiled patiently, and then said that even tourists had to do the census.  Ok…

I asked permission to grab my phone for translations, then spent half an hour answering her questions, stopping every five minutes to reiterate that we did not live here and were only tourists.  Every time, she acknowledged this with a smile, and carried on with her job.  Who am I to argue with an agent carrying out the will of the Plurinational State of Bolivia?

The census done, we went back to schoolwork and chores, then spent the afternoon relaxing in the apartment.

Finally, back to Friday. A fun fact about Bolivia is that along with Paraguay, it is one of the two landlocked countries of South America.  The Paraguayans seem to be ok with this; the Bolivians most certainly are not.  Bolivia used to have a coast and they lost it to Chile in the War of the Pacific, 1879-1883.  They have not gotten over this.  They maintain a Navy, which, besides patrolling Lake Titicaca and various tributaries of the Amazon, exists to be ready if they get their coast back.  

To keep the hope alive, March 23rd is Dia del Mar (Day of the Sea) in landlocked Bolivia.  It’s a holiday, there are parades, school kids make models of old rigged sailing ships (although if this means anything, it might imply that if Bolivia ever gets the coast back they plan to have a navy of 18th century galleons).

Because of the census, the holiday was moved to Friday. Friday was also Sydney’s birthday, so after a breakfast of pancakes and Nutella we headed out to see the city. As we got to the central plaza, we found a military parade for Dia Del Mar, and what better present for a ten-year-old boy than a parade full of soldiers carrying guns?