The first leg of our Patagonian road trip was to cross over to Argentina from Chile. We left from Puerto Varas and drove all the way to San Carlos de Bariloche with a rental car. We had to apply for a cross border permit 3 weeks in advance, which turned out to be a bunch of paperwork and it is tied to the number plate of the car. The cross border permit was sorted out by the rental company, they need those 3 weeks to get the paperwork ready. We used Econorent which is a local Chilean car rental company, booked the car on their website and dealt with the directly in email.
The whole drive takes around 5-6 hours depending on how busy the border checkpoints are. We drove by snowy mountains, lakes, plains, waterfalls so it was a beautiful drive,the roads were OK and it wasn’t busy at all. Very likely because we did it around 9am on a Sunday.
The procedure to cross the border was kind of weird. Once you get to the border control checkpoint, you have to park your car. Walk into an office, and queue up in a line. There are 2 steps to follow when leaving Chile. The first step is when the officer checks your passports and you get the leaving stamps, they also check if your car has the paperwork ready. Once step one is completed, you have to move on to step 2 where the officer stamps the “Salida / Admission Temporal” form which is basically your permit to bring a Chilean rental car into Argentina. This document is very important as you will need this when you are coming back to Chile. We had a permit that was valid for 2 weeks and we were told to drive back to Chile before the 2 weeks is up. It is also possible to get a permit that is valid for 4 weeks, but that costs more money.
I expected that the Argentinian border control is right after the Chilean one but this is not the case. We had to drive about half an hour to get to the checkpoint at the Argentinian side. Procedure-wise it is exactly the same. 2 steps, step one is checking your passports, step two checking the paperwork of your car. Strangely nobody checked what we have in the car, while we have seen officers searching bags and cars on the Chilean side for people crossing into Chile from Argentina.
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