Thursday, Mar 6 – Day 80

I now realize that I have made a mistake in bringing some stuff with me that I really can’t just throw away. At the last minute, I decided to bring some decent clothes for the Tango experience, but these duds are just going to be extra weight in my backpack on the 80-mile hike around Torres del Paine. Replacing them will cost me ten times the amount of postage required to send them home, so the practical person in me says that I should make the effort.

I saw a UPS location here in BA, and thought that would have to be the easiest way to handle it. Wrong. For a 5 kilo package, it will cost $187.00 pesos, plus an 18% fuel surcharge. On top of that, I have to itemize every single item in the box, give it a value, and pay another tax of 20% of the value that I state. If I state that the items are personal effects with little value, I can only send it to myself, and the box sits in customs in the US (accruing a daily storage fee) until I come pick it up.

So I go to Centro Postal International, to try and figure it out. Every package leaving the country has to be sent from Centro Postal – you can’t send an international package from any other post office in BA. You have to arrive with your stuff un-sealed so that a lady from customs can look through it all. Then, you mummify the box with packing tape, covering all six sides of the box completely. They seem to be particular about their boxes, so I tried to buy one, but at Centro Postal, they were out of anything larger than the 2 kilo boxes. They said that I could buy bigger boxes at other post office locations, but neither of the two branches I went to carried bigger boxes because they don’t handle those packages, and they know you have to go downtown anyway.