I knew it was going to be risky traveling during COVID. I just expected to, you know, catch it and get hung up from that. Instead, I got mangled by Chilean bureaucracy.

It’s a pity, because things were going swimmingly for quite a while. I arrived in Cusco with my friend — Cusco being the Incan administrative center — and spent some time visiting the Sacred Valley. We were kind of exhausted after landing from Colombia and while I had intended to book transportation and tickets and the like once we arrived I ended up just throwing a bunch of money at a tour guide¹ and having them figure it out. We spent one day traveling around to a number of smaller Incan sites, then ended up visiting Machu Picchu the next.

It’s been illuminating traveling from the lands of the Mayans to the lands of the Aztecs through to the lands of the Incans. It’s easy to kind of vaguely lump them all together — great pre-Columbian empires — and efface all their differences. And when what remains architecturally of those societies are piles of bleached stone² which makes it easy to imagine a certain lack of sophistication among the former residents.³

They’re changing the way they present Machu Picchu, though — they’re restoring some of the buildings and replacing the thatched roofs to help preserve the site.⁴ It makes the buildings look remarkably more recent to modern eyes, more like stone cottages from Ye Olde Merry England.⁵ There was a technology gap — horses being a particularly good military technology — but that doesn’t mean you should imagine the locals were backwoods hicks. It’s an easy trap to fall into.

After that we went to Cusco and kind of collapsed for a day. The altitude was getting to us both⁶ and all the tromping around Incan sites for two days meant we were a little burned out.⁷ We then flew to Lima for what was supposed to be just a couple days. Peru is known as a gastronomic destination; it’s got an abundance of local food⁸ and dozens of regional cuisines and a huge multicultural influence. So it made sense to start with a food tour, where we got to tour a local market and try a lot of local specialties,⁹ then went to a fancy restaurant in the evening.¹⁰ And that’s about the time everything went south.

The first sign we would have problems getting into Chile was on Saturday, two days before our flight. The requirements were annoying, but straightforward: a negative PCR test 72 hours before arrival, a traveler’s affidavit 48 hours before arrival, two doses of an approved vaccine, and another PCR test to be completed when you arrive. So my friend and I both had a negative PCR test in hand and had registered our vaccines in their online portal months ago.

But for some reason, between December when we registered our vaccines and February when we attempted to fill out the travel’s affidavit, something changed. In the online portal it now says our vaccine applications are no longer valid, and helpfully instructs us to finish the application — even though when we go there it says our vaccines are complete and accepted. So we can’t fill out the travel’s affidavit without a special exemption from the government.

This is where the Chilean bureaucracy screws us over: there’s nobody who can explain what’s going on, here. We tried calling all the phone numbers we found, but they either don’t work, nobody picks up, or you go on hold and then they hang up on you after ten minutes. We sent dozens of emails which are still unanswered. We used the WhatsApp contact service¹¹ only to get responses in Spanish.¹² They mostly seemed to be telling us to call additional phone numbers which don’t work.

LATAM, the Chilean airline where we booked our tickets, was equally useless. They couldn’t tell us what was going on, couldn’t tell us if we’d be let on the plane, couldn’t tell us what would happen if we landed without the affidavit.¹³ They also decided that the travel problem wasn’t COVID related, so it didn’t qualify for their travel protection guarantee. They did helpfully offer to reschedule our flights to Chile, which we still can’t get into, for $400. We declined.¹⁴

I feel like I had a reasonable grasp on the risks of COVID, and had accepted them as a part of travel. I figured I’d get Omicron at some point and be stuck somewhere for 10 days. I was prepared for that, had even built contingency plans. I was even prepared for unreasonable policies. But I had totally failed to account for the incompetence of governmental bureaucracies. And that’s particularly galling. If I fail to get in somewhere because I misunderstood the requirements, or even because some immigration official is having a bad bad and takes it out on me, that’s one thing. To get rejected for reasons that were not explained, were not made clear, and as far as I can tell don’t even apply to me is something entirely different. We couldn’t travel to Chile not because someone made a judgement call. We can’t travel because Chile either can’t code a website worth a damn or can’t actually articulate what their requirements are. I don’t even know which it is, since they can’t competently run an information line.

So this all put a noticeable pall over our remaining time in Lima. We spent Saturday afternoon getting progressively more worried, then spent Sunday morning trying to figure out what the hell was going on to no avail. Eventually we gave up and watched the Superbowl.¹⁵ Our flight left without us on Monday.

The last few days have kind of been in limbo — I didn’t want to book flights without being sure I was going to pass a PCR test, but at the same time I didn’t want to pay through the nose for a last-minute flight. Not having a place to go and the anxiety of booking last-minute flights and navigating a bunch of COVID restrictions really killed the vibe for Lima. It’s already kind of a sprawling city, spread out like Los Angeles with disjointed neighborhoods, and while there were dozens of museums and beaches and restaurants we could have explored, we mostly cocooned and stressed out.

I ended up doing some research, realized that virtually all the semi-affordable flights went through São Paulo, and targeted some flights late in the week. We got PCR tests Tuesday morning, and by Tuesday night, with negative results in our hands, ended up booking flights for Wednesday. We could have booked a single flight through São Paulo to Buenos Aires, but booking each leg separately gives us a 36-hour layover in Brazil for about the same money.

We’re now at the airport, assuming we qualify for entry into Brazil and subsequently entry into Argentina. It’s not where we expected to be right now, but it’s where we’re at. I’m just grateful we’re moving again.

Next: São Paulo (GRU) to Buenos Aires (EZE)
Prev: Bogatá (BOG) to Cusco (CUZ)

Footnotes

¹ Dramatically overpaying, no doubt. But having checked some of the train tickets and entrance costs for Machu Picchu, maybe not as dramatically as I had feared.

² The preservation of potentially historic sites not really weighing on anybody’s mind at the time.

³ The conquistadors certainly thought so, although they weren’t exactly disinterested observers.

⁴ Although they’re using straw, not the banana leaves the Incas used.

⁵ Shakespeare was alive when the Incan Empire fell.

⁶ Me especially. Machu Picchu is about at the same altitude as Bogatá which isn’t that bad but Cusco is at 3,400 meters, a full 750 meters higher and that is well above the official cutoff for altitude sickness.

Our hotel provided coca leaves and hot water to brew tea and I highly recommend it if you’re there. It helps.

⁷ In my case, literally. Peru is close to the equator and when you’re that far up in the Andes there’s not a lot of atmosphere to absorb radiation. My hair isn’t really thin but it is rather fine and all I can say is if you’re unprepared to burn your scalp you should wear a hat.

⁸ 4,000 different varieties of potatoes, as they will constantly remind you. My friend has a deep and abiding love for sweet potatoes and spent most of our time in Peru looking for them, since they’re completely unavailable in Russia.

⁹ Lúcuma ice cream tastes amazing, by the way, although you really should try the granadilla.

Oh, and if you’re into soda the local specialty is Inca Cola, a lemon-verbena-flavored soda similar to cream soda that was outselling Coke so decisively that Coca Cola bought 49% of the company. It’s delicious.

¹⁰ Astrid y Gastón, reputedly one of the best restaurants in Latin America, and it was … okay. Disappointingly okay, really. If it hadn’t been ranked 1^st in the best Latin American restaurants in 2013 it would have just been a very nice, mostly unremarkable restaurant.

But everything was just a little off. They couldn’t accommodate the tasting menu if you hadn’t ordered ahead. Then they said they could, then they said they couldn’t since I was a vegetarian. They only had a single vegetarian appetizer and a single vegetarian entrée. The restaurant is apparently quite innovative with Peruvian food. I wouldn’t know; I had the risotto.

My friend had the seafood fideuà, which is a kind of Valencian paella with pasta instead of rice, and the seafood was reportedly amazing but the pasta was stiff and crunchy and burned to the bottom of the pan. And yes, the pasta in fideuà is supposed to be dry, but maybe not that dry.

A few days later we ended up in Papachos, Gastón Acurio’s chain burger restaurant (imagine a Peruvian Shake Shack) and it was great: extensive menu, clever and inventive fusions of different cuisines, plenty of vegetarian options. Maybe that’s where Gastón’s heart is these days.

¹¹ Only active Monday to Friday, so they helpfully opened up after we had already missed our flight.

¹² This was a little unexpected, since the service was advertised on their English tourism website, and WhatsApp has an incredibly stupid “security” feature that prevents you from copying their response into a translation program so you could actually understand what someone is trying to say.

¹³ They helpfully provided a checklist of what you needed to enter Chile — which we relied on in booking the tickets — and when I pointed it out they told me that wasn’t supposed to be relied on; you always have to check the official guidelines. I started asking why they provided information when they themselves were advising people not to use it, which still seems a pretty reasonable question to me.

¹⁴ And I disputed the charges with my credit card, which probably won’t go anywhere, but who knows?

¹⁵ When we were in Cabo we passed one of dozens of street-side bars playing one of the NFL playoff games and my Russian friend — like many Russians I’ve known, somewhat fascinated by US customs in a way that was never really reciprocated by the people I know in the United States — discovered a deep and abiding love of NFL football. So we went to an sports bar to watch the Superbowl.

As I expected, a sports bar playing the Superbowl is a sports bar playing the Superbowl the world over. It was filled with a lot of US expats — lot of conservatives who would rail against BLM and mask mandates given the chance — and I still consider it something of a miracle I tested negative for COVID a couple days after having many people rant directly in my face about or music or politics from one bar stool over.

Nachos were had. Beer was drunk. My friend adored it.