The Lost Girls

Leaving things until the very last conceivable minute is a Lost Girls way of life, which on a trip like this one, can get us into serious trouble! For instance, it's probably unwise to delay applying for your Brazilian visa until one week before you hope to visit the country, but due to scheduling conflicts, language related misunderstandings and inconveniently timed Peruvian holidays (excuses, excuses), we were force to wait until today to visit the appropriate embassy.

We'd heard that it could take up to five days to receive a Brazilian visa, but we weren't all that concerned....we figured that we'd file our paperwork on a Monday, fly north to visit the Peruvian Amazon on a Tuesday, return to Lima on Sunday, pick up our visas the following Monday and depart for Brazil on Tuesday the 8th. One week. Pleeeenty of time. Right?

As of 10:30 this morning, everything was going smoothly...we paid our $100 (a fee imposed simply because the US government charges Brazilian the same amount to enter our country), presented our information, filled out our forms and handed in our passports...a document that we'd need back in order to show airport officials to board our expensive flight at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow.

It never occurred to us that the embassy might actually want to keep our passports in order to complete the processing, but once the woman behind the counter set us straight, all three of us stared at her, unable to do much more than stammer, stutter and basically beg her to make the process happen in the amount of time she originally stated was, oh, impossible.

We must have looked incredibly distraught (I was clutching my head in my hands at that point), because the woman took pity on us. She made no promises, but told us to return at 5:00 that afternoon, "not a minute sooner, not a minute later."

The Travel Gods must have been smiling, because when we slid inside the door at 4:59:55, our visas were ready, and all of the women in the office wished us a good trip. We were shocked. We grabbed the documents and our passports, profusely thanking everyone in sight and dashing out the door before the embassy officials decided to change their minds.

Lesson (perhaps) learned: plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead (and then add an extra week for safe measure).

--AP