Journey to Jail, part one

Stories are, occa­sion­ally, best begun at the end.

When this is true in the con­text of day-to-day per­sonal nar­ra­tive (um, blog­ging), it usu­ally means the sto­ry­teller doesn’t have time to build up to the punchline.

I get punched in the line Monday morn­ing at 8:00, so I’ll skip ahead to the end and start blath­er­ing about my excellentfantasticinterestinghilarious-and-vomitous trip with Katherine through Western Bolivia later this week.

I’m on parole.

Theoretically, I could be in a Bolivian jail tomor­row evening.

The story is a bit spoiled by not­ing that jail is entirely unlikely, I real­ize, but the note is nonethe­less fair.

Katherine and I took a double-decker bus from La Paz to Cochabamba on Friday night, leav­ing 10:30pm and arriv­ing 6:00am. We arrived in Cochabamba about 15 min­utes early, hopped down from the bus, col­lected our gear from below, and headed into the bus ter­mi­nal to look for my father who was set to pick us up.

Twenty  feet into the ter­mi­nal, Katherine was con­fronted by two indi­vid­u­als ask­ing for her iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. I was about ten feet behind, so I caught up to them and asked what was up. They were from Immigration Control and insisted on doc­u­men­ta­tion. We handed over a pho­to­copy of Katherine’s pass­port and my U.S. Missouri Driver’s License. We left Katherine’s phys­i­cal pass­port at our house in Cochabamba so as to not risk it get­ting stolen on the road.

My pass­port, how­ever, is some­where in the bow­els of the red tape tan­gle of Bolivia. I have not seen my pass­port since November 2007.

I arrived in Bolivia in February 2007 when no sig­nif­i­cant immi­gra­tion lim­i­ta­tions were placed on American tourists. An American could enter the coun­try with­out a visa and have 90 days, renew­able up to 180 days, to hang out. Dandy! At the 90 day mark I had deter­mined that I would be in Bolivia for about a year so I went to a local travel agency to start the process of a visa. I went to the agency to whom prac­ti­cally all of the local gringo mis­sion­ar­ies are rec­om­mended because they have this lit­tle lady, Rita, who just whizzes peo­ple right through the sys­tem of end­less paper­work. Hand over your cash and your pass­port, and she han­dles the rest. Just a few months later you have a shiny new ID card and a sticker in your passport.

My pass­port and cash, there­fore, went into Rita’s hands. Several months later when I needed a quick jaunt to the States for busi­ness in October 2007, I had to spend an after­noon star­ing at Rita’s office from out­side until she was will­ing to get up and go do the nec­es­sary steps to retrieve my pass­port from the mix of tramites — paper­work! — and pro­vide me with a slip of paper which proved that I had been in tramites in an attempt to get a visa. She did so, I went on my trip, and returned to put my pass­port right back into tramites just days before the Bolivian immi­gra­tion laws changed.

Moving on to August 2009, she still hasn’t given me a visa. The laws have changed, things are com­pli­cated, etc etc. I haven’t minded; as long as she sorts it out in the end, the delays have afforded me time in Bolivia that I’ve been able to use for good pur­poses. I should have been able to go in January 2010 with­out any sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems other than her putz­ing around with time.

Katherine and I went on our jaunt across Western Bolivia. We’d flash our pho­to­copies of our pass­ports when nec­es­sary or just use our U.S. driver’s licenses when some­one needed a photo ID with­out tax or travel ties. No seri­ous problems.

In La Paz we attempted to sched­ule a trip up to Lake Titicaca and Copacabana. What we learned, how­ever, was that an immi­gra­tion check­point has been opened on the way to Copacabana, and that the offi­cials wouldn’t be con­tent with our pho­to­copies, leav­ing us stuck hav­ing to give out­ra­geous cash bribes. We skipped the Lake and spent more time in La Paz instead.

Everything seemed dandy until we found our­selves faced with two immi­gra­tion offi­cers ten inches from our faces in the mid­dle of the bus ter­mi­nal back home in Cochabamba…