No nos gusta la oficina de migración aquí

So... our trip to Guarayos has been delayed a bit due to the water level in the wells being too low. I am not sure why that delayed our trip, but the fact remains that we are still in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Thinking that it would be our second last day in the city, we decided to take Monday to extend our visas before we left because they would expire while we were out in the countryside. Monday also happened to be little Janaki´s 22nd birthday.

We arrived at immigration on a hot, sunny (like usual) day and were welcomed at the immigration office by a line-up that literally went around the block. Luckily we met up with Alejandro, who guided us to a much shorter line that was meant for foreigners (The long line was for people who are waiting to obtain passports to leave the country).

Long story short, with Alejandro´s help we were able to talk to an immigration official after about a 5 hour wait. After I went to great lengths to explain our situation (she was not very patient with my attempts to understand and speak Spanish) she gave us a list of requirements to obtain a special 30 day visa, which we would need to obtain the yearlong visa that we actually require... I pause here to note that we talked several times to the Bolivian embassy and consulate in Canada and determined that the best course of action would be to purchase a $100 Visa Radicatoria before we left, and then go to immigration in Bolivia to extend it to a 1 year Special Purpose Visa with a letter from our organization stating what we would be doing. Simple enough, right?
Not when the immigration officer ignores the visa that we already had in our passports (even when I said ´look we already have a 30 day visa´) and instead gives a regular 30 day tourist visa.

Needless to say, this was not a good way for us to spend Janaki´s birthday... although we made up for it somewhat by going out for dinner and ridiculously cheap (and good) ice cream in the evening.

Anyway, they kept our passports overnight so that the immigration directors could sign them... we had to wait 4 hours on Tuesday for me to get my passport back, and try to give a letter from Germán to the immigration officer to get our special 30 day visa... she redirected us to a guy named Pablo who spoke some english (who we later found out was some kind of immigration lawyer) who informed us that to get our desired visa we will need to get a notarized letter from a lawyer, a better letter from Germán, a full phyisical from an accredited doctor, blood work, and police checks from two different police agencies. Meanwhile, he found out that the immigration officer had made a mistake in giving us a tourist visa, because it was actually a step back in the process since we already had a Visa Radicatoria. To make matters worse, they kept Janaki´s passport for another night.

so we returned today... got the passport, found out through another guy who spoke some broken english that our new tourist visas had nullified our more useful visa radicatorias, so we will probably have to pay another $100 dollars each to get an equivalent visa, and then move on to try to extend to one year. We will have to try to use Alejandro´s connection to the vice-mayor of the city to try to sort this mess out once we return from the village.

The take home message form all of this is that trying to navigate through government beaurocracy when you are still learning the language and don´t understand the whole process is a pain in the ass!! We have much more respect for what people must have to go through trying to get into Canada after going through this process so far.

Please note: we have some pics up now! Please go to old blog entries to view them.