“No Visa, No Flight”

Avvai and I arrived early to the airport.  After a long wait, the check-in lady leaned forward and told us we couldn’t fly.

“You don’t have a visa.  You can’t get on this flight.”  She closed our passports and held them out.

“Uh…”  I took the passports and set them back down in front of her.  “I’m pretty sure we don’t need a visa to enter Colombia.”  We had done extensive research on this exact topic.

Her perpetual frown deepened.  “You can’t get a visa without a ticket out of the country.”

“Um… we do have a ticket out of the country.”  I pushed the paper with our return confirmation closer, just in case she was nearsighted.

“Your return ticket is in six months.”  Her lips puckered.  “Colombia requires you to have a flight back within 90 days.”

“But…” I began.

She ‘humphed’ loudly and cut me off.  “I don’t care if you’re flying round-trip to Australia and back, you’ve just gotta have a return ticket within 90 days.”  She pushed our passports towards us.  “Next!”

I looked at the clock. We were supposed to be at the gate in less than an hour.  “Wait, can the ticket be anything?”

Her frown extended until it seemed to be drooping off the side of her face.  She said nothing.

“Could a bus ticket out of the country work?”

She squinted at me.  “Whatever you get, make sure you print it off.”

I looked around the airport, my gaze now desperate.  “Uh… is there somewhere in the airport to print things?”

“Humph…”  She seemed to be considering whether or not to help.  “There’s a UPS store with a printer over there.”  She vaguely waved into the distance.  “Next!”

We turned and ran in her vague direction, trying to connect our phones to the internet.  After five minutes of desperate sprinting, we reached the end of the terminal and a blank wall that was definitely not the UPS store.

“We have to ask someone!”  Avvai shouted.

An ancient security guard pointed back the way we had come.  “Right around the corner from the check-in desks.”  We turned and sprinted back.  I went to the UPS store while Avvai waited in the line.

In the scramble, I ended up booking the cheapest flights I could see.  I printed them off and joined Avvai, who had just reached the front of the queue.

“How much were they?”  She asked.

I looked at the paper.  “350 bucks.”  I looked again.  “350 bucks!  Those are the cheapest flights I could find?”

“Kyle!”  Avvai grabbed the paper.  “These flights leave in four days!  Do you think they’re going to believe we are going to Colombia for only four days before getting a flight to… Balboa, Panama?”

“Well, I sure hope so.”

“Are they at least refundable?  A lot of flights let you cancel within 24 hours.”  Avvai studied the pages, then sighed.  “Kyle, these are non-refundable… but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

The lady we had talked to previously became open.  We were next in line.  She looked over at us, thought a moment, then casually got up and walked away from her desk.

“I guess she didn’t want to deal with us,” Avvai said.

There were only two other desks open.  Each was surrounded by a giant Asian family that had been there since we’d arrived at the airport.  I could feel the tick of the clock deep in my soul – we were supposed to be flying out of the country in half an hour.  After what felt like an eternity someone opened another desk.  We rushed up and told the new check-in lady about our situation.

She looked over our papers then brought up the Colombian visa policies.  “Hmm… maybe the rules have changed.  I’m from Brazil and I can tell you that very often the countries change their policies–” she snapped her fingers, “like that.”

“Okay, well I’ll trust whatever you’ve got on your screen,”  I told her, trying to sound friendly and relaxed.

“Hmm, that’s strange,” she was looking at my freshly printed flights to Panama, “They didn’t give you a reservation number.  Are you sure this is confirmed?”

I pulled out my phone and showed her the ticket.  “Yes, it’s confirmed!  Look, it says confirmed!”

“Well… I should ask my supervisor.”  She got up and walked to the far end of the room where the supervisor was standing.

I looked at the clock again.  We had twenty minutes to get on the flight.  I said a little prayer that this would proceed smoothly.

The supervisor joined our little stress zone.  With exaggerated slowness, he studied the papers and phone confirmation.  “Hmm.. well, the email says it’s confirmed…”  He thought about this for some time.  “Which is…”  He paused.  “Good enough for me.”  I almost hugged him.

“Okay!  Lucky guys!”  The check-in lady from Brazil smiled.  “I just need to put the information in again.”  While she did this she joked about bug spray and sunscreen and dying of dengue fever.  I forced a few laughs and tried to ignore the drumbeat of time in my head.

“Here you go,” she said.  “I hope you can get into the country!”

We thanked her and sprinted to the gate, arriving just in time to be the absolute last people on the aircraft.

Ten hours later we were next in line for the Colombian immigration desk.  In my pocket were all our confirmed onward flights.  I had practised explaining our flight to Panama in Spanish and was ready for anything.

The immigration lady called us forward.  We gave her our passports and she flipped them open.

“Tourism or business?”  She asked.

“Tourism,”  I said, bracing myself for the next trial.

“Bien.”  She barely glanced down as she stamped our passport.  “Welcome to Colombia.”