Traveling with Pets - Crossing Borders

Hi, I'm Ben. Meet Alaska, the Caribbean explorer, and his capito, our Chilean bus. For the next few years this is our house, the world is our garden, and you are our family. We don't know the time of day or where we'll wake up tomorrow. All we know is we're on the ride of our lives, most of the time. So join us and see what unfolds on this epic adventure. We're approaching the border with Guatemala from the El Salvadorian side, and we've got a bit of a process here to deal with Alaska. We've got one of the papers to get her across the border but it's a bribing point. It's difficult enough getting ourselves and the car across, never mind having a dog. So what we do is we kind of like basically smuggle her. This is how we do it. First off we turn Alaska into a street dog and then tell her she needs to hide. Stage one, Alaska in the back, hiding whilst we check the car out and check ourselves out of the car. Cars out of the country, that's always the easiest part. Apart from when I was in Costa Rica when they tried to charge me $500 because I left a day late, and also admitted that their system robbed me of a day because it miscalculated the lease year. $500 and it was their mistake that they admitted. Luckily no problems like that here. Now that the car's out of the country, we need to get ourselves out of El Salvador as well. Two passports, one old and one new one. This will be my first stamp in my new passport. Okay we're officially in no man's land, we're out of El Salvador. Now we've got to see if we can get into Guatemala. We're just trying to get a bit of extra time in Guatemala and Honduras because for some reason turns out we're not getting extra time we have to go to the dangerous capital and ask for an extension. This is the most difficult part, Charlotte's taking Alaska for a walk and pretending she doesn't know her. I'm going to sort the car out and get all our papers ready for that which is just a nightmare. That way when they come and check the car we haven't got a dog and then we just drive across the border. Two copies of this, two copies of that, I need copies of bloody everything. Okay first attempt fails, I'm going to see if I can find copies of everything I own. So I now have to pay an import tax, it's 160 of whatever the local currency is which I don't know yet and I don't have any local money and the bank won't change it. Deal done. Almost there. During the customs inspection you really want your pet out of the car. Even if you have the papers as we do, you can be charged, delayed or worse have your critter quarantined. If that sounds like a headache to you then try the disassociation game. Muchas gracias. Okay that's the easy part and the hard part, now it's the scary part. So we've got ourselves out of El Salvador, we've got ourselves into Guatemala and the car in which is pretty tough. That was actually the easiest time I've ever had and it was about an hour and a half. Now we've got to get through the final checkpoint where they can look in the car and see Alaska and see that we don't have papers for her. So this is the bit where we cross our fingers and hide her in the bed. She's never allowed in the bed and I bet she's absolutely loving it. We're in Guatemala baby and it's just started raining. Welcome to the wet season.