Border Crossing: Paso de Jama (Chile into Argentina)

This has to be the biggest distance between two sets border posts that we’ve ever seen. The Chilean formalities have to be dealt with in San Pedro de Atacama and then the Argentinian border post is around 160km down the road from here.

In San Pedro it should be very quick and easy. First visit the immigration window where you hand over your passport to get an exit stamp (on the right hand side of the building) and then visit aduana (on the left hand side of the building) where all you have to do is hand over your car papers and then you are free to leave.

This border can be very busy so try to time it when there aren’t any buses around.

It will take a while to drive up to the Argentinian Border and the Paso de Jama itself which is at over 4000m. You will however eventually arrive at the big modern buildings of the Argentinian border.

When we arrived it was absolutely deserted with no queues whatsoever.

The first stop, as always, was immigration where our passports were stamped without fuss. Then we progressed to the Aduana window, a couple of metres to the right, and filled out a short form before being given our import papers for the truck. In Argentina we received an 8 month import for the truck – by far the longest we have got anywhere.

Our crossing was made a bit longer as Michael, the Polish backpacker that we’d picked up, was struggling to be allowed across. They were telling him that he couldn’t walk across the border but had to have a vehicle. However eventually the immigration woman got bored and wanted her coffee break so just stamped his passport anyway.

The last stage of the process should be a food check. However we drove up to the barrier and were allowed straight through without even being asked if we had any food !