The office was nearly empty as we stepped up to the desk. I slid my passport to the border guard, "Destination?" he asked. It seemed rather obvious to me- If I walked outside I could see Venezuela on the other side of the river. Did I even have any other options? "Venezuela" "Sorry", he told me. "The border's closed until Monday." (what if I'd said Peru, or Brazil, I wondered- would he have stamped my passport?) I looked at Edwin and Camilo in disbelief. It was Friday. Surely we didn't have to spend the weekend in Cucuta? Another man walked in to the office, suspiciously wet, and pushed his passport under the window. The guard stamped it without comment. "I waded across" he told us. My mind raced ahead to the 4 of us with our loads of luggage attempting an illegal border crossing. It seemed doomed to failure. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who thought so and we decided spending the weekend in Cucuta was inevitable.
The only people happy about the border closing were the people running the hotels. Our hotel was booked and we kept meeting people stranded for the same reason. Rumors abounded. The border would open at 6am on Monday, at noon, at 6 pm. The border wasn't really closed for elections but because Hugo Chavez had died but they wanted to announce it on Monday to coincide with the anniversary of Simon Bolivar's death.
We decided that if the border truly did open at 6am, we wanted to be there. Sunscreen, book, and water bottle in hand, Alex, Camilo and I joined the line of people waiting outside the doors at just after 6am. The sun was already out and hot. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. We ate empanadas and waited for the building to open. When 7am rolled around and they still hadn't opened, we settled in for the long haul. It looked like would be there til noon. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the front of the line. The doors opened and the guards showed up. We peered anxiously through the windows, waiting for the "thunk" sound of passports being stamped. As we got closer and closer to the front of the line, we started worrying about Edwin- he had to do some paperwork in the immigration building first, and we were supposed to hold his place in line. We started letting people pass as we waited for him to call. Suddenly, the line stopped moving. The guards were no longer stamping passports. Turns out there'd been a miscommunication with the Venezuelan side- they weren't stamping people in yet, so the Colombians couldn't stamp anyone out.
We sat on the floor to settle in to wait again. Edwin called. We didn't need to wait for him- they told him he didn't need a stamp when he was in the immigration office. Finally, the line started moving again, and with stamped passports safely put away, we walked across the bridge to Venezuela. The border guards made me nervous with their machine guns and red berets, but no one stopped us as we walked across the border and then several blocks to the immigration building on the Venezuelan side where we waited in line again to stamp our entry.
It was close to 11:00 when we finally headed back to the bridge. We had to go back into Colombia, collect our luggage, and then leave by another road that crossed into Venezuela, but didn't have immigration offices to officially stamp passports. As we walked onto the main street, we were suddenly in a crowd of people. The street was crossed with barbed wire and warnig tape. The border had been closed again. No one knew why, or even what time they would reopen. Noon, 6 pm, midnight. . . Everytime a guard approached the fence, the crowd would compact, hoping for news. It was unbearably hot and the sun was directly overhead. A woman on the edge of the crowd fainted. Babies cried. Waves of chanting "open the border", sould break out, and then just as suddenly die away. It was almost noon when an officer on a motorcycle pulled up on the other side of the fence. He shouted out over the crowd, something I couldn't quite catch, a decree, border opening, 2 minutes. Was he saying the border would open IN 2 minutes or FOR 2 minutes? Either way, we wanted to cross as fast as we could. I held on to Alex and made sure Camilo was directly behind me; I didn't want to get trampled in the crush of the crowd. As they moved the barrier, everyone started running. We ran for the bridge, but we were immediately slowed down by the wave of people coming from the opposite direction. They were stretched from the sidewalk on one side, all the way across the road, and some even were trying to push through on the narrow sidewalk those of us leaving from Venezuela were trying to use.
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| Waiting with our luggage to cross the border |
We finally made it back to the hotel, and packed, showered, and changed money in record time. We caught 2 taxis and started on our way to the other border crossing, an hour away. The river dividing the 2 countries was almost in view again, when traffic just stopped. We unpiled our mountain of luggage from the taxi and stared in disbelief. The border was closed again. Edwin and I stayed with the luggage while Alex and Camilo tried to figure out what was going on. No surprise, no one really new. However, now our passports were officially stamped and there were dugout canoes crossing the river into Venezuela. The asked the border guards about it. "We don't care if you cross" they told them. Just as Alex was asking a shop keeper for information about where to go to catch the dugout canoes, someone shouted, "the border's opened again!" And sure enough it was. We hastily piled boxes on top of suitcases and set off towards the bridge, hoping they didn't decide to close for some crazy reason before we made it across.
Finally on Venezuelan soil once again, we could start the last stretch of our journey to Mérida.
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