Dramas and Llamas

We seem to have hit a little hiccup in our plans over the past couple of days. On Saturday we wanted to cross the border from Chile to Peru and continue North along the coast. However our good friends "the Chilean Border Control" had other ideas and would not let us take the car through the border.

It would seem the mountains of paperwork you need in Chile in order to buy a car take a while to process, 30 days to be precise. Until those 30 days have passed and we can go to the Registro Civil to obtain our official registration document, we can't leave Chile with the temporary registration we have now.

So we thought we'd drive to the Bolivian border the next day to have a cheeky go there as it's a much smaller post. After driving (on the wrong side of the road) past a queue of lorries 2kms long waiting to cross the border, all the while dodging oncoming trucks, unfortunately the Chilean Border Control were having none of it and turned us around again.

Looking on the bright side though, it was an amazing drive up to the Bolivian border through the mountains, we saw lots of pretty breathtaking scenery and a lot of llamas. On the way back to Arica we stopped off at an Eco village run by harekrishnas for lunch which was pretty cool. Also, dealing with lots of Chilean officials and government authorities is definitely doing my spanish some good!

So now we've got about 10 days in Chile to kill before we can obtain our official padron (registration document). Think we're gonna head back down South a little bit and head inland to San Pedro, then fingers crossed to Bolivia from there in 10 days time, but might also try and get secure parking for the car for a couple of weeks and head to Northern Peru by bus. We'll make our minds up tomorrow.