We just got back from yet another trip to the border town of Macará. It was the final leg of our year-long journey to obtain my resident visa. I have written a little about this process in previous posts, including the one about our trip to Quito last July and another about our trip to Peru last January. Well, last month, the migration office in Quito finally stamped my passport and I am now a permanent, legal resident of Ecuador. But, since I had originally entered the country as a tourist, I was now required to leave and re-enter again so that they could register me as a resident in the computer system (apparently that can only be done at the border, not in Quito). And, I was told, if I waited until after my old tourist visa expired (April 11) I would end up having to pay another $200 fine the next time I tried to leave the country. So we decided that a quick trip to Macará wouldn't be a bad idea (good thing it is only a 4 hour drive away).
I was a little worried about taking the trip because we are in the middle of the rainy season and landslides are quite common. A bad one can block the roads for several days. Luckily, the day we chose to drive down it did not rain and all the landslides from the previous weeks rain had been cleared. It was the first time that I had been in that area during the rainy season and the change was amazing. All the trees had green leaves and there were flowers and new plant growth everywhere. The hills, which I'm used to seeing as dry and brown, were green and exuberant. It looked a lot more like the tropical rainforest than the bosque seco (dry forest).
On the way down to Macará, discussed how to handle the border crossing. I needed to get a stamp from both the Ecuadorian side as well as the Peruvian side. We had heard that officially I was supposed to spend at least 24 hours outside of the country, but neither of us wanted to do that again. Everyone had given us advice on what to do; we should drive to the nearest city in Peru and eat lunch and then go back; we should cross the border and then walk back to Macará, spend the night in a hotel, and then walk back over the border the next day and act like we were coming from Peru; we should bribe the guards; etc. We couldn't decide what was best, so we decided to just go to the border and see what happened. We had brought some money with us to bribe the border guards if necessary, even though Lucho admited that he was not very good at doing that kind of stuff.
The first official we spoke to, on the Ecuadorian side, was typically unfriendly and unhelpful, but after Lucho asked if his boss was in town he seemed to lighten up a little (probably wondering if we knew him or not) and told us that he could help us so long as we were able to get the stamp from the Peruvian side. So we crossed the international bridge over the Macará river (which was brown and swollen due to the rains - I held on to Christina's hand very tightly) and made our way to the Peruvian border office. Lucho did all the talking while Christina and I watched the angry river below. Lucho asked the guard if he would stamp my passport with an entrance and exit at the same time. Then he pulled out a $10 Peruvian sole note (worth about $3) and told the guy that he was welcome to keep it for his trouble. The guy looked at it and asked, "Don't you have one of those, but in dollars?" Luckily, we did. So he gave us the needed stamps, and we headed over to the Ecuadorian side. The official there stamped my passport and we gave him $5 for his trouble (we were going to give him the $10 bill, but we had already given it to the Peruvian guy so he was out of luck on that one). Success!!!
We ended up buying a 100 pound bag of rice from them for $30. The rice from Macará is very good and now we have enough to supply us, and the rest of Lucho's family, for several months.
It felt great to get all that paperwork out of the way. But when I looked at my U.S. Passport the next day I realized that it expires this August (I had forgotten all about it while I was working on my Ecuadorian paperwork). So now we're planning a trip to visit the U.S. Consulate in Guayaquil. I guess it will never end...