Out Of Bolivia

As some of you may know, we were a little worried about what would happen when we tried to exit Bolivia given that we had overstayed our 90 day visa by 80 days!! It is a long story, but when we tried to get an extension while we were in Cochabamba they refused to give it to us, saying that we could stay up to 30 days more in the country and just pay a fine for every day over our 90 day visa. They threatened that if they "found" us in the country after the 30 days then they could deport us and give us a "special stamp" that wouldn't allow us to come back for as long as 10 years. Given the commitment we had already made to the children's homes, and our desire to travel more in Bolivia, we stretched the 30 day limit to 80 days (what is 50 days anyway!!).

When we arrived at the border we had enough money in Bolivianos to pay the fine for the 80 extra days we had stayed. They thankfully did not give us the promised "special stamp" and of course the threat of deportation becomes a rather mute point when you are standing at the border ready to leave. But unknown to us, they had raised the daily fine by almost fifty percent...it was even raised in the middle of our discussion...after a consultation with another border official who assured us that the first officer was confused. We didn't have the money in Bolivianos and thus after exchanging a rather large sum of dollars a horrible rate (only one money exchanger at the boarder who knew our situation), we were able to "escape" Bolivia.

BUT not before they had given us an "official" receipt for our payment...lest we think that they were corrupt and had pocketed part of the money. It was the perfect way to go out of Bolivia though...we wished we would have videotaped it. During this whole exchange the bus was waiting for us on the Peru side of the boarder and the bus employee with us was telling us to hurry up every 5 seconds and probably would have left us if we had delayed them much longer. We payed over 2000 Bolivianos in fines, but their receipts were pre-printed in the value of 70 Bolivianos. Thus the border official had to personally sign 32 separate receipts. As he signed the last one I about ripped them out of his hands, but he insisted that they needed to be pasted onto a sheet of paper before he could give them to us. We watched in horror as he carefully ripped off one receipt, took out a wet sponge, moistened the back of the receipt and pasted it carefully in the upper left hand corner of the page. After watching this process a second time and multiplying the time involved by 30 we (including the bus employee) did rip the receipts out of his hands and started licking and pasting as fast as we could. When we got the the bottom of the page he announced that he would have to look for another sheet of paper, we insisted (rather forcefully) that it would be OK to use the other side. After they were all officially pasted, he counted them three times to make sure he had the right amount (we helped with the math) and then stamped each one of them...reapplying ink after every four stamps and finally signing his name at the bottom of the page, taking some more time to think of what day it was...making it an official 33 signatures on one page of paper. Thus we exited Bolivia at a full run (literally) with our passports and a true Bolivian receipt clutched in our hands, ran into the Peruvian immigration office, got our stamp, and ran to the bus, apologizing profusely to all the waiting passengers. We asked another American on the bus how long they had all been waiting for us, and were relieved to find that they had only been waiting on the bus for 10 minutes. Above is a picture of us holding our visas and our "Bolivian Boarder Receipt".