British Brothers Buggered on the Bolivian Border
Posted on: March 08, 2008Copyright © 2008 Sticky Pen
My brother Peter was a year older than me. He had taken a gap year before starting at university, and had been working on an urban support project in Chile. I intended to go straight to uni from school, so we would both start together. That summer I flew out to Santiago as we had made plans to tour Chile, Peru and Bolivia. We kept well off the tourist route, traveling by local trains and busses, staying at cheap hotels and hostels. After going north along the coast we crossed into Peru, eventually arriving at Lima. We left the Peruvian capital and turned east, traveling on ramshackle trains and buses towards the Bolivian border. We intended to cross into Bolivia at a small border crossing that closed at night, and planned to arrive there about an hour before the checkpoint closed. However, our bus decided to overheat and we had to wait while the driver carried out repairs to the cooling hose and refilled the system with water. This put us nearly two hours behind schedule, and upon arriving at the border point we found it closed for the night. Pete was confidant that if we just ducked under the barrier we could enter Bolivia without any trouble. The buildings on both sides of the border looked deserted, so I agreed to take a chance. What we didn't notice was that on the Bolivian side of the border there were two sentry boxes, and each one was occupied by an armed ...
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