The Road to Bolivia is Paved With Red Tape

It’s been really great here in Asuncion, but soon we will be moving on. Tuesday we are taking a five hour bus ride that leaves at midnight to Iguazu Falls. We’ll spend the day there and then take the bus back to Asuncion and arrive around 11:30 that night. Then, on Friday the 18th, we will fly to Santa Cruz Bolivia. We probably would have stayed through the weekend, but Seth informed us that he couldn’t possibly tolerate another weekend with us.

Actually, there is an election on the 20th and for the first time in a long time the Colorado party might actually lose. This could lead to events unforeseen such as the closing of Paraguayan borders if the people take to the streets to protest the opposition. Or, if the Colorado party wins again, there is actually enough support for the opposition that they might take to the streets. Somehow, I don’t think that a stolen election and recounts are handled as calmly here as they are in the US. So anyway, in case the borders get shut down or the place goes into riot mode after the election, we are going to skip town before all of that goes down. While it would be interesting to witness, we don’t want to be stuck here for an indefinite amount of time.

As of about four months ago, Bolivia is requiring US citizens to obtain a visa to enter Bolivia. It sucks that we have to pay another $100 bucks that we weren’t planning on, but it seems fair enough considering the fact that the US makes Bolivians pay to come to the USA. What seems odd about the whole thing are all of the hoops you have to jump through to get the visa. There is the typical application to fill out and passport photo. Then we have to show proof of a place to stay, proof of financial ability to support ourselves while in the country and proof of continuing on out of the country. Do they really think that a couple of American tourists are going to show up in Bolivia to live on the streets and become a drain on their society, suckling at the Bolivian welfare teet? We do have a hostel reserved for when we arrive and I can print out a copy of my bank statement, but we don’t have plans yet for how to get out of Bolivia. We are hoping that showing our flight info out of Rio in July will be enough. If not, I guess my dreams of becoming a coke dealer on the streets of La Paz will have to be put on hold while I figure out another way to sneak in and take jobs away from the locals by working for less wages at jobs nobody wants anyways. I’m sure they are just copying similar requirements from the US visa process, but the whole thing seems a bit unnecessary to me. Hopefully they won’t scrutinize our application too much and will just be happy to have some more tourists spending money there.

We are flying to Bolivia, which is nice. I would not be looking forward to a long bus ride to get there even though I’m sure we will have more of those after we get to Bolivia. We have to fly because it is just too dangerous to travel there by land from Paraguay. The western half of Paraguay, an area known as the Chaco, is ruled by drug traffickers and militant groups. I guess the odds are pretty good that we wouldn’t make it through there in one piece, so we’ll just fly over it. We’ll run into similar situations going from Ecuador to Colombia and possibly in areas of Peru, which means more flights and less bus rides.