A very quick dash across the border.

Just over a week ago Marion and I were discussing why a friend of ours in Ayacucho was travelling to Lima when we realised that he had to organise the renewal of his Peruvian visa.
Within seconds we both realised that our ninety day visas would expire on 9th March, about eight days time! We were having so much fun we had both completely forgotten to think of our visas - until then!
On searching the internet to see if we would be jailed, expelled from the country or simply fined we discovered that when we initially entered Peru we could have requested a longer tourist visa of one hundred and eighty-three days and that would have been fine for the time we were staying in the country.
After the initial panic it was off the tourist agency to book flights to Lima for one day, tickets to Tacna on the border of Peru and Chile the next day and then a flight back to Lima the day after! All for an extra ninety day stay in Peru.



On arrival at the Tacna airport you are immediately surrounded by taxi operators all seeking your business. We chose Juan Carlos for no other reason that he was first to begin the negotiations. He collected our passports, completed all the relevant paper work, drove us the thirty kilometres to the border, escorted us through the Peruvian immigration centre, drove us another kilometre to the Chilean immigration centre, organised our papers to be adjusted to enter their country. We then had all our hand luggage searched, drug smuggling across the border is a massive problem and definitely not tolerated by the Chilean authorities. Juan Carlos then drove us down the Pan American Sur highway a few hundred meters, did a U-turn and carried out the above procedure in reverse! It seems that there is no possible way the countries would get together and combine the process into one; they must carry out their own immigration and emigration procedures.
He finally delivered us back to a very acceptable hotel in Tacna for the agreed price of $70.00 US.
The total time from the airport and back to the hotel was about one hour. Thank heavens the traffic across the border in the middle of the day is normally very quiet.

This photo was taken on the Peruvian side of the ‘frontera’, you can even see the Chilean flag in the distance. The actual ‘frontera’ is half way between the two immigration buildings.

Actually leaving Peru…

and now returning ten minutes later.

Every time that Juan Carlos takes passengers across the border you have to realise that he also has to check his vehicle across both borders even though he is a registered driver on this route. On most occasions he would be ferrying passengers from Tacna to Arica or vice versa and staying overnight. He was delighted to be able to take us only to the border and then return to his home for the night.



And to make his journey even more enjoyable these are some of the scenes that he enjoys day after day. In fact most of the Pan American Sur from Lima to Santiago is very similar to this, the entire two and a half thousand kilometres.