Despite the relatively small distance between El Calafate in Argentina and Torres del Paine in Chile, our next destination, the journey proved to be a long one. The six and a half hour trip was partly down to geography (the road has to get around some large Andean mountains to find a crossing point) and partly caused by the political relationship between the two countries. It turns out that sharing such a long border gives almost endless opportunities to argue about where the frontier is and who owns the valuable sources of fresh water that lie in the Southern Patagonia Ice Field.
The first three hours was by road in Argentina through the semi-desert where only small bushes grow in the constant and freezing wind. It was 7 degrees and felt colder due to the wind despite this being summer. We stopped for a coffee at a roadhouse at Esperanza, which means "hope" in Spanish. Whoever decided to call it hope was either an optimist or having a laugh!
We continued along a well surfaced main road, seeing only a handful of other vehicles, running parallel with the border until suddenly our driver turned onto a gravel track signed only to a local estancia. This turned out to be the road to Chile which the Argentinians clearly don't want you to find. We then spent nearly an hour queueing to get in to a small bleak building in the company of a few other tourists and under the watchful eyes of a flock of sheep who seemed even more bored than the tourists and the customs officials. What they did with the travel documents that took so long will have to remain a mystery.
Finally we were off on the 8km journey across no-sheep's land to a similar building on the Chilean side. The Chileans have a reputation for greater efficiency than the Argentians so, rather than simply waste time by being slow, they adopted a more complex process. This time the luggage got to come out of the car too. We joined an orderly queue to have our documents inspected having declared that we were not carrying any apples, cheese or other banned substances. Then we went back to the luggage and put it through the x-ray machine. This was all very odd. Nobody checked the car to see if we had any other bags. Neither did anyone watch to see if all the bags went through nor put a sticker on them to say that they have been checked. They didn't open any bags while we were there perhaps because the 7 year old boy who was entrusted with watching the scanner screen (really - I'm not making this up) had not yet been fully trained.
Once this charade was over we returned to the car and sat at the barrier for more than ten minutes until a bored looking man walked slowly over and unlocked the padlock to open the gate. Our driver was then able to drive us about 100 metres to a cafe on the Chilean side where he passed us and our luggage over to representatives from our next hotel. As we moved on to the last leg of our journey we wished him luck as he left us to drive the 100 metres back to the border to get back to his own country and presumably negotiate another two sets of unnecessary bureaucracy. I wonder what time he got home!
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