Crossing the border
Sunday, December 11th, 2005Entering a new country involves leaving another country. Crossing with meat, vegetables and other animal products is usually banned, and if you are entering a pretty security consious country like Chile then your bags will get searched. In my day bag I had a lot of drugs for sleeping, these are usually illegal to carry into other countries without prescription but I wanted them so I was set on claiming ignorance, if questioned.
My rucksack was first to go through the scanners, fine. No problems. As common practice the Chilean border guards open the top of your rucksack look at the top item – in this case a jumper, then close it upset they havent caught you smugglin a three-toed-sloth into their country (if only they looked under my jumper).
After opening a few more zips, ignoring my medical kits, knives and woodern crafts they noticed my weaved juggling balls on the side of my bag.
The first women, aka “security whore” was determined I wasnt going to have my balls. She prodded them, smelt them and tried to squeeze the life out of them to find out what was inside. I picked up my other 3 and demostrated what they were for, unimpressed, she removed them hastily from my hands and passed them to another man – with a knife.
This man was mean, I mean he had your typical “I mean business” face and wore the security apparrel with officious arrogance. He put his knife to my balls, determined to penetrate them. I begged, he moved the knife closer, laughing as he did so. The knife flicked out of its body, reflecting the UV light into my eyes, forcing me to wince, I waited for the inevitable, removing the sweat from my brow as I did so. Then, suddenly, this overdramatised scene was interuppted by another secruity guard “Young whippersnapper” who had extracted from my balls what the Chilean authoritys had feared – a seed. The knifewielders smiled vanished, his knife slipped and clicked back into its body and I started to sweat more.
Someone of authority spoke, “You cant take seeds into our country”. I explained, pleaded, “only 2 of my balls have seeds, the other 2 contain plastic” .. We stared at each other, threatening each other with our gazes, refusing to break contact – but he was squeezing my balls, I remained strong trying not to submit to his underhand tactics. A fly landed on his sweaty brow, he pushed out his bottom lip and blew upwards with startling acuracy, the fly took off, circled around the room, then found another shit to land on.
Just as I was about to buckle, a miracle happened. “Security whore” discovered something in a womans rucksack of much greater significance. I heard her scream “sundried tomatoes” and that did it, man-of-authority released his steely grip off my balls, broke the stare and turned around defeated.
I had won, my balls entered Chile.
Rob Hasler