Visa and Border Crossing: Piece of Fruitcake.

Road to La Quiaca

 

View of the Quebrada on the way to La Quiaca from Tilcara

joylani 130pxWe knew that for Bolivia we would need to pay a heafty visa, or reciprocity, fee.  The cost of a US tourist visa for citizens of many other countries is around $100-135USD, and many countries in South America charge a like fee for US passport holders to visit their countries, regardless of if an actual visa is needed.  Luckily for us, Bolivia is the only place we will visit in South America where we will have to pay this fee (we avoided the fee in Chile by entering via land crossing rather than flying into Santiago, and we just missed the start of the fee in Argentina, which will begin in 2009). A few days before we were to cross into Bolivia I checked their embassy website to be sure we had everything we would need to enter.  In addition to photos, passports, proof of a yellow fever vaccination, photocopy of our credit card, and a hotel reservation I found that the $135 fee was only if we applied for the visa on arrival.  If we got the visa ahead of time the cost would only be $100.  Luckily for us there is a Bolivian consulate in the Argentine border town of La Quiaca (there is also one in Salta as well as several others in Argentina, for any travelers heading up that way but who will reach the border on a weekend). 

As soon as we arrived in Quiaca, we headed to the consulate to secure our visa.  Saving $70 between the two of us would be great.  We easily found the consulate, staffed by three workers—a main guy, his assistant, and the assistant’s assistant who, in addition to making tea, was in charge of photocopies, etc.  Since we were the only “customers” at the consulate, things went relatively fast.  The only hitch was the hotel reservation, which we didn’t actually have.  The assistant sent us of to internet with a Bolivia tourism website and told us to make a reservation—La Paz, Villazon (the border town), it didn’t matter, she said.  Great, I thought, this is so arbitrary.  But we headed off to make a reservation anyways.  Upon arriving at the internet we found that it was not working anywhere in the whole town, so we returned to the consulate to report on our lack of reservation.  The assistant nodded her head and gave us a fax number for the consulate, telling us to have the hotel fax the reservation confirmation.  So we headed back out to the internet place, this time to use the phone.  I made a reservation at a guesthouse, and the woman agreed to fax a confirmation to the consulate.  We happily returned to the consulate for a third time, where the assistant told us matter-of-factly that their fax line was down.  I’m sure she could have told us this earlier, but perhaps this was a way to punish us for not having a reservation confirmation handy in the beginning, or maybe they just wanted to see some effort on our part.  Either way, she promptly stamped our papers and handed us back our passports, which already had the visas attached inside.  We shrugged, took our passports, and quickly left before they asked for anything else. 

            The next morning we woke up early (for breakfast I ate a slice of fruitcake which I regretted having bought the night before, but that actually turned out to be pretty tasty), and walked the short distance to the border.  The crossing was easy, no customs forms, no long lines (lines were longer coming into Argentina), and soon we found ourselves in the bustling town of Villazon.  I guess that for errands and the like, you can actually cross the border without requiring stamps on either side, even if you are an American citizen.  This is handy if you just want to go to Bolivia for the day, make transport reservations, or just pull out money from the ATM (US dollars are available in one of the ATMs on the Bolivian side, at the time of writing, foreign cards are not allowed to pull out USD from Argentinian ATMs).  Due to the differing economies, I guess it is much cheaper to buy products in Bolivia, so there are many shops lining the streets closest to the border, where as on the Argentine side there is nothing.  After crossing we stocked up on Bolivianos and USD since we wouldn’t be in a place with an ATM for almost a week, and headed to the bus station to catch a ride a couple hours north to the town of Tupiza. 

We snagged a couple of the last seats on the next bus about to leave.  Considering the location of the seats in the back row of the stuffy bottom deck of the bus between a man swatting flies and an old lady with a bunch of groceries, it wasn’t exactly a great catch, but we were just happy to be on our way north.  As the bus started rolling, the woman next to me started examining her groceries–a huge bag full of baguettes, another with fruitcakes and bread rolls, a bag with bell-peppers and tomatoes, and a fourth bag with raw beef which she proceeded to take out, examine, then carefully place back in the bag, and, finally, pick her nose all the while as I (with my phobia and olfactory sensitivity to raw meat) tried not to puke.  Thankfully the ride was only a couple of hours and not six or twelve or more, as so many of our journeys have been.  We passed through many dusty settlements along the way and finally arrived in Tupiza.  It is also a dusty little town, though bigger than the other places we passed through and set in the midst of beautiful little mountains.  We were happy to arrive.

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