Crossing the Border

The line on the Argentine side, maybe about an hour into waiting.  Everyone looks pissed because they are.  The guy sitting on the fence was Argentine, and got so fed up he finally just walked in without an entry stamp.  The guy on the left was a Boca fan and really nice.  He claimed he could tell I studied literature by looking at me, and his Peruvian wife gave me a million recommendations for modern Peruvian literature I should read. 

I left Tupiza, Bolivia at 10 am yesterday for Jujuy, Argentina, and arrived at 10 pm last night. The twelve hours in between are a lesson in international politics, the lasting effects of colonialism, and what not to do while traveling.

I arrived in Tupiza on Thursday afternoon and set about trying to figure out how to get to the border with Argentina. Every company in the bus station advertised a bus to Villazon, the border town. And every bus company, when I asked, said they didn't have a bus there until midafternoon the next day. Since I needed to get to Jujuy by early evening to figure out how to get to the farm where I would be volunteering for the next week, that wasn't an option. Finally I found what I thought was the office for Bault, a reputable Argentine bus company. It would cost 250 bolivianos, a small fortune by any standard, but I would leave at 10 am the following day and get to Jujuy by early evening, the woman on duty told me.

It wasn't until I had paid that the woman told me I had to get my ticket to Jujuy at the border. She handed me a ticket for a minibus to Villazon, which I knew was worth about 20 bolivianos, max. I could ask for Jorge Lindu there, and he would help me.

Except I got to Villazon, and the office where he should have been was closed. At that point I realized that I hadn't bought a ticket from Balut at all. I had bought the vague promise of a ticket from Balut Tours, which shared only its name with the actual legitimate bus company. I finally managed to get someone from the company on the phone. He said he was at lunch, but if I went to Mikaela in La Quiaca, the town on the Argentine side of the border, she would get me a ticket.

With no other choice, I went to the border crossing. There was a short line on the Bolivian side. After ascertaining that I didn't need any more paperwork than my passport, I joined the queue and waited.

And waited. There weren't more than twenty people in front of me, but the line did not move. After maybe forty-five minutes, a German couple in frony of me paid off the border guards - twenty bolivianos, or just under $3 USD - and jumped the line. I kept waiting with another group of travelers that had clustered together in the way that travelers do in a situation they don't understand, an Irish couple and an English woman who was also travelling solo. Maybe 30 minutes after that, when there were only a dozen people in front of us, an immigration official approached our group.

"Are you travelling by bus?" It was a weird question. Everyone was travelling by bus. There was no other way to get anywhere on either side of the border, unless you had someone waiting for you. We nodded yes, and he led us to the front of the line, ignoring the protests of people who had been waiting for longer than we had. It became clear almost immediately that it was because we weren't Bolivian. The lines were for them. We were just caught in the crossfire.

With our Bolivian exit stamps in hand, we crossed to Argentina, where we were confronted with a longer line that moved just as slowly as the one on the Bolivian side. It took two hours to get to the front. The actual review of my passport took about a minute and ten seconds - ten seconds for the stamp, and a minute of good-natured grilling about my soccer partisanship. (River or Boca?) Once through we ran into another Irish guy.

"Did you guys have to wait in all that?" he asked. We all nodded grumpily.

"One of the Argentine border guys got me out of line and just led me to the front," he said. "He said the line is for the Bolivians. He said they don't like Bolivians here and they make it hard for them on purpose. Then he just stamped my passport and waved me through. I guess I just got lucky."

The five of us trudged up the hill to the La Quiaca bus station, where I set about trying to find Mikaela. After I had worked out my bus ticket, I figured I would change some money and call the family that runs the farm where I'd be staying to figure out transportation.

It turned out that finding Mikaela was easy.

"You're going to Jujuy?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Get on that bus," she said, pointing to a bus leaving the station. "RUN!"

So I did. It wasn't until I was about five minutes out of the terminal that I realized how dumb that had been. First of all, the bus wasn't the Balut semi-cama with food and wine, like I had been promised. It was a rickety Bolivian-style bus run by the company Arco Iris, with dirty floors and no bathroom and a stop every fifteen minutes to pick people up from the side of the road. The ride was worth probably about $15 USD, meaning I had paid $35 for a $17 journey. I had not a cent of Argentine money, and by the time I would arrive in Jujuy, it would be 9:30 pm at the earliest - way too late to go to a casa de cambio. And I hadn't called the farm, which I had promised in no uncertain terms to do. But it wasn't like I could get off now.

So I waited, praying there would be no delays. About an hour into the ride, the gods of travel spat in my face. Two soldiers got on the bus and began searching through people's bags with long plastic wands. After about ten minutes they left and another one boarded.

"We're going to have to check all of your luggage," he said. "We apologize for the inconvenience. Everyone please get off the bus and claim your bags. It will only take a minute."

Right. We piled off the bus and claimed our things. I only had my backpack, but most people had several sacks filled with cheap things from Bolivia, to give as presents or resell - blankets, boullion cubes, pots and pans, knockoff Barbie dolls. One woman had an entire side of beef that she had to take out of its wrappings and lay by the side of the dusty highway. Since it was the cheap bus, the passengers were mostly country people of indigenous descent - Bolivians and the Argentine equivalent of cholitas. The people in front of me had their bags torn apart as the gendarmes looked for cocaine; I saw one soldier squeeze out a tube of toothpaste and sniff its contents suspiciously. I showed my American passport and didn't even have to unzip my backpack.

The whole thing took about an hour. We re-boarded the bus and continued on our way. There was one more drug checkpoint, but blessedly, the gendarme just boarded, poked around for a couple of minutes, and left.

We finally arrived in Jujuy just past ten. There were no money-changing stations at the bus station. When I asked for one I was pointed to an ATM, which of course didn't help at all, me having lost my debit card. With the help of my bus driver, I eventually found some random guy who changed fifty dollars for me into pesos, promising me a horrendous rate of 3.8 pesos to the dollar and actually giving me only 160 pesos, which is closer to 3:1. I was too panicked and eager to find a phone to put up a convincing fight. It was not a day of good financial decisions. No one at the farm picked up the phone when I called, which is why I'm not there now (and why I still have internet access - I won't, at all, for the week that I'm there).

And now I'm safely at a hostel in Jujuy, having confirmed that I'll be heading to the farm tomorrow. I changed some more money, including my leftover bolivianos, at a great rate. Things are looking up. But Jesus Christ. Next time I'm taking a fucking plane.

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