Customs

The eleven hours on the red eye to Santiago did not pass easily. I kept my eyes shut tightly, hoping to sleep, but it never worked. I tried making some headway on my travel novel, but soon found myself reading the same line over and over and over again. I became too tired to read, and too uncomfortable to sleep. Fortunately, there was a decent selection of movies on demand. I fired up the little screen on the back of the headrest in front of me.

Half a day later, weary would be putting the tone of our group lightly. We were dragging. All a hundred-and-some-odd-number of us shuffled over to the reciprocity counter. Chile requires Americans to pay $100 when entering the country, a measure taken to counter-act the hefty price of U.S. visas.

I handed my passport to the Abercrombie & Kent agent. He was well dressed, wearing a jacket, khakis and a bright yellow tie. He handed the passport to the reciprocity agent, who stapled a slip of paper into my document to identify me as having paid the reciprocity. The A&K agent then handed me a passport and pointed toward customs.

With a respectful nonchalance, I walked up to the man in the glass box and placed the passport on his counter. He set it in front of him, made three quick stamps, and slid the documents right back.

After having passed through customs, I cracked open my passport to check that everything was in order. There, next to the stamped travel slip, was a photo of a wide smiling Korean – American boy. I recognized the photo as Paul, a classmate and friend.

Laughter gave way to fear. Would they take me to some dark concrete interrogation room for this? Could Paul appear to be me? I turned around and spoke Spanish to the woman in the closest glass box. At first, she yelled at me, telling me to keep moving, but when I told her that I was not Korean and showed her the photo, she opened the glass door and marched over to the man who had let me into Chile.

I tried not to listen, but she read him the riot act. From what I gathered, the offense would have been forgivable if the person in the passport photo bore a certain resemblance, but there was absolutely no mistaking Paul for me.

It was funny. Yet, I still felt badly for the man. He sits in a glass box stamping away at official documents all day. This could have been a first and only mistake and it was partly my fault for assuming that I had my passport. I was humbled by the possibility of such massive human error of a process I had always considered exacting.

But, I hold a sense of pride in being the only person I know who has successfully entered a country with someone else’s passport.

Written by Bernardo Urquieta '09 on 12/28/08