Sending Wiskey Off in Lima (and a Few Days to Kill Afterwards)

We arrived in Lima on Wednesday afternoon with enough time to meet with the representative Whitney had hired to help ship Whiskey to the U.S. He was a nice guy, checked our paperwork and determined that we needed to do more work. Oy.

The paperwork process to ship a dog to the U.S. is a pain in the ass. Starting at the vet in Cusco, we paid s./100 (about $30) for him to give us health certificates and other official documents. I don't recall Whiskey ever getting a check-up (other than shots), but somehow he got every bit of paperwork he needed to go to the United States with just a wad of money placed in his hand. Who'd have thought you could grease the palms of vets??

But then we had to deal with SENASA. It's the bureaucratic portion of the process. They're the ones who "approve" all of the (fake) paperwork to let Whiskey go to the U.S. And, of course, you have to pay them, too. It's a more official process though. You have to go to the bank and deposit another s./100 in their account and bring back the document stating that the money's there. And then they claim to want to see the dog before the flight to make sure he's healthy (although they barely glanced at him when we brought him there) and give us more paperwork and send us on our way.

The SENASA employee I brought all the paperwork to had 3 days to do the work to get Whiskey ready before we brought him in for his final "inspection." When we brought him in the day before we left, she was messing around on her computer, the paperwork NOT ready. Humberto just shrugs his shoulders as if that's just the way it is. I usually do the same, but this time had had enough. So, politely but sternly I asked this woman (in Spanish) why the documents weren't ready since she'd had 3 days to prepare them.

This woman was clearly not prepared for a question like this. Laziness is the norm here (unfortunately) and so she just assumed we'd tolerate this and quietly wait for her to do her job. That was not going to be the case this time. She made a bunch of excuses, blaming other co-workers, but I wasn't buying it. So, I followed her around for the next hour, and made sure everything was in order. She didn't like that very much.

But we got all the paperwork and were on our way. But when Pablo, Whitney's rep in Lima, checked it, he said that the photocopy of the health certificate wasn't sufficient and we needed the original. SENASA had kept the original, telling us that all we needed was the copy. But since they were in Cusco, we had no way of retrieving it. Soooo, off we went to find another vet to give Whiskey a "check up" (read: look at him, take our money and give us another certificate). With that in hand by the end of the day, we crashed in our hotel early that night (with Whiskey), awoke the next morning and headed back to the airport (the cargo section), met with Pablo and handed Whiskey over to him.

We stopped in one of Lima's parks along the coast on our way back from the vet to the hotel



Hum was rather torn up over it. He'd grown quite attached to Whiskey over the past couple of weeks and it was hard for him to put the pup in his crate and walk away, listening to him cry. That night, he dreamed that they were playing catch and running together. We got a call from Whitney the next day with the news that Whiskey had arrived safely in Detroit and was sound asleep on her lap on the way back to Troy. Everyone was relieved and happy.

Hum & Whiskey's last morning together

Sending him off

And then we headed out into Lima to buy stuff for the restaurant. We shipped back barstools, potholders, cool dishes, etc. on the bus and Hum picked them up when he got back to Cusco the next day. We parted ways Saturday morning at the airport, when he took his 1-hour flight back home to Cusco and I set out on my all-day journey back to the U.S.