Thread: Permission I said when entering ...

One time I was in Argentina it was just for 36hrs while I waited for a flight home. When I flew to Uruguay we flew Latam from Auckland - Santiago - Montevideo as we usually do but I had a Airnz flight home direct from BA to Auckland. I went on the Buquebus ferry from Uruguay to Buenos Aires and went out for dinner and stayed the night at the home of one of the fellas who had worked for us while on his working holiday in NZ. Next day he dropped me off at the airport for my flight home and as I went through customs we hit a problem... When I had got off the ferry they just waved me through customs and didn't stamp my passport or anything so now customs at the airport were quite upset about how I was in the country in the first place. They couldn't let me leave the country without first having proof of how and when I had entered. It got dangerously close to boarding time before I was taken into a room and offered the chance to fix everything for a one off payment of USD $200. I paid the money and they took my passport, came back 5 minutes later and it had a "backdated" entry stamp in it from the day previous and I was free to go. You can fix most things with a bit of currency. I didn't know if I should feel clever I had got a solution to my problem, or stupid that I had quite possibly been hoodwinked out of $200 by some kind of corruption haha