The Most Difficult Frontera of them All

We reach the bus terminal in Ipiales around one thirty in the afternoon. A scrappy, rough around the edges little highland town, most of the buildings brown-colored brick, green pastured hills all around. There is a crispness from the elevation and rain clouds overhead. I look around the terminal for a colectivo to Rumicacha, the actual border about eight kilometers away, and finally ask a uniformed transito officer on the curb. He tells me that there aren’t any colectivos; the border is closed today. I am aware that it has been closed for almost seventy hours, to “ensure order” for the national elections.

But a nearby man disagrees with the officer, says the border opens at 4, which was also the information I had. They discuss this for a couple minutes, back and forth, and then the officer concedes he doesn’t know. I say I’m going to go see. But how do I get there? Como llego ahí?

The officer points to a bus right across the street, saying it’s a free bus to the border. He could have just said that three minutes ago. I cross over and find sixty people with all kinds of luggage waiting to board. This is my first taste of what’s to come that day. The bus driver fills the back few rows with as many suitcases and bags as can be stacked, then the bus with as many people who can possibly fit. I am one of the last ones on, right by the door, when he says dos mas and then five or six more people climb in. One of these last boarders bumps hard into me, with various suitcases and luggages all around my feet, and I stumble and fall helpless down the steps onto two people who sheepishly catch me with the whole bus watching.

There are various perdons and lo sientos all around, people obviously feel bad about this occurrence. They pull me up, and with nothing to hold onto, I tenuously brace myself with my legs as we pull out. Thankfully it is a short ride and I stay on my feet. We get down to the security checkpoint somewhere above the actual border fifteen minutes later, and it is a scene. There are hundreds of people milling about in the road, sitting on hillsides, sleeping on blankets in the grass, backed up traffic for miles. It takes me some time to figure out where in this mess I’m supposed to be.

Eventually I see that there’s a thick line of people running up a different road than we came in on, and I start walking, following it uphill. There are about as many people out of the line as in, sitting along the roadside. It becomes clear to me that these are almost all Venezuelans. There must be ten thousand people waiting to cross this border. My God.

It takes me thirty minutes to walk to the end of the line, carrying my bags a long way uphill. I find my place next to a couple of guys with big suitcases, and quickly there are a hundred people behind me. It’s a somewhat festive atmosphere, people eating chicken and arepas out of paper bags, drinking beer and coca-cola, locals walking up the line selling cafe. It’s almost more like we’re waiting in line for a concert than a border crossing.

I meet the guys I’m standing next to, Hebert and Eric, city guys from Caracas in their mid 30s. They’ve been on buses for six straight days, on their way to Peru to try to find work. Hebert is the one who mostly talks to me, pale green eyes and green tips on his braces. He looks deeply tired, his face has a slight tinge of grey, wants to know about the US, about Trump, New Orleans, racial issues, whether people there really hate immigrants. I don’t ask too much about Venezuela, but he tells me I should visit. With American money I could live like a king. A lot of Venezolanos have said this to me, but it seems like it would be very bad form, living like a king while people have no food.

At some point I notice, a ways behind me, Samira, this tall blonde German girl with a kind face. We’d been on a bus together a week before, from Rio Sucio to Cali. We’d talked some on the ride, but then went to different hostels and I didn’t see her again. As the line wasn’t moving, I went back and talked to her. She’d gotten to Ipiales three days before, and mostly stayed in her hotel room. Apparently there’s not a lot to do around here. We try to figure out how many people are there, how fast they might process passports per person, how many windows would be open. Our rough estimate is that it will take twelve hours.

Then for the first time the line is starting to move, so I run back to my spot, put on my bags. We make about twenty feet of forward progress, then stop again. Five minutes later, another twenty feet. Once we all figure out the rhythm of it, lots of people are leaving the line, going into stores, sitting on the grass on the side of the road. The Venezuelans are singing songs, offering me beer; they tell me they are used to lines and happy to be out of their maldito country. Not for the first time, I am impressed by the character of these people.

I go talk to Samira a few more times, meet a Korean couple halfway between my spot and her. Jae and Genie, in their early twenties, no Spanish, a little English. They’d also been in Ipiales for three days, in fact had met in a hotel there. Of all the places to find love. I hadn’t met a single Korean since Panama, but there had been two of them in a hotel in this little nowhere border town, and now they were a traveling couple.

For whatever reason, all of us humans were trying to cross the border on what had to be the worst possible day, after the bottleneck of the election closures, before some kind of change in Peru’s immigration policy that was coming up soon. For hours and hours we march slowly down the hill, stop and start, drag your bags, set them down, stand there. In the late afternoon the clouds overhead get dark and ominous. It would be simply terrible if it rained. There were people from local churches and the Cruz Roja giving out bread, soda, coffee.

Hebert makes me a sandwich of dry white bread and cheese sauce from a jar. In almost any other time and place, I would have thought this a terrible sandwich, but here I am deeply grateful. People with nothing sharing what they have. At one point he pulled out a huge stack of Venezuelan bills that were essentially worthless. He gave me a 10,000 Bolivar note, said that once this would have bought me a lot, but now nothing, not even a bottle of water. I should keep it and remember the people of Venezuela.

There was something about this that felt like a big protest, a march, the energy of that many people with a common purpose, some sense of solidarity. At six, a couple hours after we first saw it, we reach the police checkpoint at the bottom of the line. They were counting out fifty people at a time who could walk through, and it felt exhilarating to finally be moving, to not be in a line, to move at a normal human speed.

We walk freely downhill for another ten minutes. But this momentary elation ceases when I see the actual border: an enormous chaotic body of humanity, labyrinthine lines in every direction, nowhere near the space necessary for the thousands upon thousands of people there. Got into a new line, with mostly the same folks as before, but now Samira and Jae and Genie and I were all together, a strange little bubble of far-flung foreigners amidst all the Venezuelans. This line was moving even slower, because at the front that we couldn’t see, they were only letting five or so people through at a time. There was also a new contingent of people to contend with, albeit a far smaller one: people coming from Ecuador into Colombia, and all of us having to be processed in the same small migraciónes office. There was a tenseness and apprehensive feeling among the people.

We couldn’t even see where the line went, just more lines upon lines. Very soon, it was full dark. The mood of the crowd grew restless as the temperature dropped and we started to realize that we would be here all night. Sometimes the wind would pick up and remind us that at any time the skies above might start raining on us. You couldn’t see people’s faces anymore unless they were right in front of you, just a sea of bodies in front, beside, behind, across. Everywhere you looked, endless people in lines, with suitcases and bags and boxes. A few times the crowd behind us would press and surge, and we’d all get pushed forward. Me and a few people around yelled back, pleading with the crowd not to do that. It began to dawn on me that this scene could get really ugly, really fast. I got some small sense of what it is like to be a refugee, a displaced person, to be lost in this forest of human numbers, powerless and vulnerable to the whims of the crowd.

People started giving up and going to lie down somewhere, old ladies and women with children, some walking up the hill back to Ipiales. Lots of people were getting cold in the mountain night and shivering under blankets. Feet and backs were aching; lots of stretching and groaning. Samira got dizzy and nauseous, and had to sit down for awhile with her head on her knees. The Cruz Roja people tended to her and gave her some unidentified pills.

The line was moving so slowly, maybe fifty feet in an hour, through this big open area that is probably normally a giant parking lot, some parts of it rubble, others asphalt. When we’d get to one end of the space, the line would just turn 180 degrees and march right back to where we’d just been. People were yelling and whistling and chanting, but for the most part they stayed calm. Barely. There was really no authority: occasionally some police would walk by disinterestedly but they weren’t answering questions. No information, no guidance, just lines and lines, into the night.

Eventually, our group got smart and devised a system where two of us would stay in line, and the other two could go sit with all of the bags off to the side, so we weren’t having to drag them along or stand with heavy backpacks. On one of these breaks, Jae found a much shorter line that he had heard was just for extranjeros — foreigners — but he wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to lose our place in line. It also felt unfair to leave the people we had been standing with for more than eight hours, but I said I’d go ahead and check it out. Made my way all the way up to the front, right outside the building we were all trying to get to, Migraciones Colombia, the first time I’d actually gotten close to it.

Thirty police officers were out front in yellow-green vests manning the gates. I saw the line Jae was talking about, a separate line right on the side of the building that only had about a hundred people, about half of whom appeared to be backpackers. I found a police officer and asked him what this line was. He asked where I was from, and when I told him he said this line was for me. Everywhere except Venezuela. This meant that there were a hundred or so people from all the other countries in the world trying to cross, and some ten to fifteen thousand Venezolanos.

It was too good to pass up, solidarity be damned. We had done our time and our group was in bad shape, and it was time to cross if we could. It was a little after eleven when I got back to my group and told them it was official, the other line was real. We grabbed all of our bags and wished our fellow line standers good luck and didn’t linger for them to ask questions.

We got in the extranjero line, and we were now much much closer to our goal, but it was intense up here. There were two lines entering the building, the one for the Venezuelans and the one we were in, and they were letting in each line alternately, about ten people from one line every five minutes. The people in the endless line didn’t like it one bit when they’d let us in, and would boo and jeer and yell every time a group of us was given the go-ahead. We met some people in our line from other countries in South America: Peru, Argentina, Chile; some Germans, Israelis. None had been in line anywhere near as long as us.

After about an hour we’d gotten right to the front, and my three friends were allowed through, but just then the Venezuelan line surged forward, people banging on the police barriers and yelling, and security stopped me at the front and said “nadie mas por ahora”. I understood, and stayed there for thirty minutes while they only let the other line through. Eventually when the crowd seemed less animated, and most of the angry people were inside, they let me up the steps.

There are eight immigration officials at teller windows, and they seem less harrowed than I would have imagined. Colombians are mostly good at staying relaxed. They call me to a window and I show my passport and after a minute the man says “tiene problemas” and shakes his head. Here was the kicker: after ten hours of waiting because the border had been closed for three days, I was about to get fined for overstaying my visa because the border had been closed. “Qué?” I said, trying to play dumb. “You have problems,” he said in English, “Supervisor, Window 1.” I went over there to where three British backpackers were filling out forms for visa overstays, but theirs were by weeks, not one day. I gave the supervisor my passport, he scanned it, then looked up at me, shook his head. People were yelling and chanting in the background. It was after midnight. He kinda waved his hand at me in a dismissive motion and stamped me out.

Now I could just walk freely across the border, past the thousands and thousands of people on the other side of the fence still in line. A sea of people, the tired and wretched masses, down to the Puente Internacional, a bridge over a little river at the bottom of a deep ravine, into Ecuador.

At the Ecuadoran immigration building, there were only a few hundred people in line. I quickly spotted my lost group, given that Samira and Jae were quite a bit taller than almost everyone else there, and joined them in the middle of the line, acting like this was the most natural thing in the world. Our spirits were somewhat lifted as we could see the finish line, but we were all exhausted and running on fumes.

Somewhere around one thirty I got stamped into Ecuador; they didn’t even ask me a single question, let alone for proof of onward travel or yellow fever vaccinations or any of the other things you’re supposed to need. The four of us shared a taxi to the town of Tulcan, an unmarked thirty-five year old (the driver told us) gray Toyota Tercel that rattled and groaned its way up the hills, sounds echoed by those of its passengers’ fear as the brakes whined and cried downhill. We got to the bus terminal in Tulcan to find (what else) thousands of Venezuelans walking around, sleeping on the floor, on the sidewalk outside. I’d been meeting them ever since Panama, as we are staying in the same types of places: cheap, laid-back hostels and pensiones, but this night was the first time I really got a sense of just how many people are leaving Venezuela.

After some investigation, standing in line at various bus offices with tired overwhelmed people and workers, we found that the first bus heading south with seats available wasn’t until four. The Koreans disappeared; we assume they’ve gone to get a hotel room and call it a night. Samira and I buy tickets for the 4am bus for Otavala, a town three hours south, where I am at this moment paying for a hostel bed, while the night just goes on and on.

We get some chocolates calientes from a vendor next to the buses, sit in the bus company office/waiting area and play gin to pass the time and stay awake. Every once in awhile having a deck of cards in your bag turns out to be essential. Gin is perfect in this kind of situation because the rules are simple, and you don’t have to put a lot of cards down on a table or surface. We get another round of hot chocolates and play for an hour and a half sitting with twenty people falling asleep all around us and packages and luggages and then it is finally time to board. As soon as the bus pulls away, I fall right to sleep, though I wake up every time we stop or hit one of those high wide speed bumps that are ubiquitous in Latin America.

At dawn they give the call for Otavalo, dropping us off right on the side of the Panamerica where it runs through town. It was a Quito bus and they weren’t stopping at any other terminals. The sun was just up, and this was my first look at Ecuador. It was just before seven am, but it seemed like most everyone was still asleep. These streets are better put-together, cleaner than Colombia, and Otavalo was bigger and more charming than I’d been expecting. The castle-like peak of Volcan Imbabura dominates the skyline, but there are jagged green mountains all around. I learned later that this place is called the Valley of the Dawn.

Samira and I split up after a couple blocks — she was going to try out a different hostel. I think after our fifteen hour ordeal, she wanted to forget everything involved with it. Told her I’d see her around, wished her good luck. I felt pretty sure saying goodbye at dawn on empty streets that I wouldn’t see her again. Thankfully, a man answered the bell at the Flying Donkey Hostel, and somehow I had enough strength left to drag myself and bags up the steps to the second floor. They were still holding my reserved room for me. Dropped my bags in the room and went up to the roof terrace for a celebratory smoke, to witness the mountains at dawn. This was somewhere that I had come to, and I looked forward to exploring it, but on another day.

I went down to find that I had a very cozy little room indeed. A comfortable bed with two thick wool blankets against the chill, a little table-desk to write at. I closed the curtains and got under the covers and slept until late afternoon. When I woke up I knew I was sick.