Rivers, Ruins and Scavenger Hunts

There is something satisfying in traveling with a mission and it was with that of crossing the river Parana that I showed up in the bus station at Posadas. This satisfaction was replaced pretty quickly by that now familiar feeling of "now what" that comes from traeling alone without much planning. I just had an address and a bus number (the latter turned out to be wrong) and an empty stomach as I stepped out into the cold and rainy street . After a half an hour of waiting and crossing the street to get the right bus, I was on my way to the hostel, chewing on the baked good I bought from a street vendor (called a chipa) rendered barely palatable by the rain.

But I instantly fell in love with the hostel, which overlooked the river Paraná and had a view of the country on the other side. This is fortunate as I would spend another five days staring across that river in the bureaucratic labyrinth that followed…

My first order of business was finding the consulate which took me a while for reasons that should be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with my navigating skills. The difficulty in finding the place was compounded by the fact that the consulate is a tiny little building which you’d never peg as a government building from the way it looked from the outside. When I finally got there (I believe it was a Friday) I discovered that the place wasn’t going to be open until Monday.

Still, the wandering around provided me with a great excuse to explore and the consulate not being open gave me a reason to stay in Posadas for longer than I would have otherwise. I got a call from my friend Sam, another student from the study abroad program who was in Puerto Iguazu at the time and was also planning on going to Paraguay, albeit on the way to Salta (one of Argentina’s Northern provinces on the other side of Paraguay). I told him the hostel where I was staying and how to get there and we arranged to meet up in a few days when he got there. This a good display of the amount of planning that had gone into my traveling—the two of us were going to all the same places and yet we’d managed to construct a travel plan wherein we only saw each other for about a week out of our nearly a month of traveling.

The day after Sam showed up we went to the consulate to complete a process we figured would just be a matter of hours. We were sadly mistaken. Here are the things we wound up needing:
Three (3) passport-style photos
Three copies of different parts of our passports
45 American Dollars (which were more difficult to obtain than you might think)

When we showed up at the office it was already siesta (the afternoon nap not observed in Buenos Aires, but in most of the rest of the country). But at 4 o’clock, when siesta was over the office was going to be closed. This meant a catch-22, we could get the required items during the day, but we would have to come in the next day in order to actually get the visa processed. We resolved that we would come in early the next day to do just that, which would leave us with plenty of time, to make it to Asunción (which was only 5 hours away).

So the next day we got up bright and early and headed down to the consulate, letting them process our visas while we went to the bank to exchange for American dollars (how ironic). After a long wait in line we came back with our dollars only to have them tell us that the dollars weren’t good enough—the consulate required only dollars in pristine physical condition, and one of our five dollar bills had a small tear in the upper left corner. Seriously?

And then came a hurdle that was more interesting still: apparently my tourist visa had expired the day before. I was an illegal alien!

Just to clarify a little bit what this all means, I’ll have to explain something of the visa process. For those of you who have been reading this a while, you may recall the long arduous process of getting my visa. In reality, it was not a visa I was applying for, but rather a student residency, one that lets me live in the country, study and even have a state ID, but not work (in theory at least). I had however not brought these residency papers with me, getting around just with my passport.

This is usually fine—you don’t need a student resident to get around the country (although it helps for getting student discounts, I’ve got a college ID from UCA that sometimes works too). For a while anyway, 90 days to be exact, you can get around with a tourist visa. Obviously I’d been in Argentina for longer than 90 days, but the visa renews every time you reenter the country. In my case (Sam’s too but he brought his residency papers) that latest entry to the country had happened exactly 91 days prior when I reentered Argentina from Chile.

So I was in a pickle. The nice folks at the consulate explained to me that I would need to pay a fine of 250 pesos (almost a hundred dollars) on top of what I was already paying for the visa before I could get the visa processed. And not to them because I owed money not to Paraguay but to the Republic of Argentina. This implied getting down to the bridge between the two countries and paying the fine to the Argentine customs officer, at which point I would cross back over and pick up my visa with my newly stamped passport.

At this point I started to get cold feet. It was a lot of money—my travel budget as a whole was just under 500 dollars. Meanwhile the consulate insisted that I would have to pay the fine at some point anyway, as I was in the country illegal and risked harsher penalties if I was caught in transit on my way back home. I wasn’t sure how likely this was, but I decided to do it anyway, and resigned myself to losing an absolutely absurd amount of money.

We took a taxi to the bridge and the driver waited for us while I sidled up to the customs officer and explained that I was here to pay a fine (probably one of the stranger pronouncements he’s heard on the fine). As I told him what I was paying the fine for, he kindly explained to me that it would be cheaper to just apply for a residency, which I could do in Buenos Aires. I explained to him that it would indeed be cheaper if I could magically stop by Buenos Aires because there I had my residency papers in my apartment, with which I wouldn’t need to pay a fine. “Oh” he says and then takes my passport and disappears into the office.

Meanwhile Sam and I stand outside looking at each other wondering if this is a good sign or not. Then I see the guy pull out a stamp and start to get hopeful. A few minutes later he emerges from the office with a piece of paper with my picture on it and lots of helpful information such as where I am from and where I live in Buenos Aires. A copy of my residency!

Of course it hadn’t occurred to us that the Argentine government might have a digitized system with all this information in it. Certainly the consulate couldn’t have done this for us, they’re Paraguayan and so wouldn’t have access to Argentine legal documents. And so, feeling somewhat foolish but extremely relieved we shuttled back to the consulate got our visas stamped into our passports and picked up a bus to Paraguay.

All in all, the bureaucratic nightmare was really sort of its own adventure and Sam and I managed to get a few laughs out of it after our thousands of gripes. It was also an excuse to stay a few more days in what was a really fantastic (if cold) hostel and meet lots of cool people, which it now occurs to me I have written next to nothing about. And although there might not have been anything particularly noteworthy about those experiences (nothing compares to the excitement of international bureaucracy!) the days I spent in Posadas, a city which isn’t known for its touristic attraction, were some of the happiest of my trip.