Peruvian cops

These guys deserve their own special blog entry. We’ve been stopped more times in Peru than the entire rest of our trip. Outside of every little town, next to every highway toll station, and in a few other random places are a few cops standing outside their SUV, or sometimes motorcycle, watching everyone go by and stopping whoever they feel like. We’ve been warned again and again about corrupt Peruvian cops, especially south of Lima.We’ve been told they love to stop foreigners and make them pay for some imaginary infraction. Sometimes they will ask for your documents and then refuse to give them back until you pay them. We’ve taken precautions against that strategy (thanks for the idea, Colin and Liz) and photocopied every document they could conceivably ask for, stapled the pages together, and put it in the glove compartment. When they stop us and ask for documents, they get the pack of photocopies and not our originals. This seems to work, and when we get asked for the originals, we tell them they’re in the car somewhere, which seems to satisfy them.

So far we haven’t encountered any cops asking for bribes. We’ve mostly met two kinds of cops. One set are *very* friendly and curious about our trip, ask us questions about where we’re from, whether everything has been OK in Peru, tell us to take much care on our onward journey. This set sometimes asks us weird random questions, too, like how many gallons of gas it took us to get here, and what we had for lunch (that’s my favorite so far). The other set are not so friendly, and hint that we have broken some Peruvian laws. They always ask us where our front license plate is, and we explain to them that in NC we only have one on the back, it’s normal. One cop kept insisting that we needed to have another one, so we asked him where we should get it. He said “The US”, and we said, well, we’re not going back to get one, and anyway, they wouldn’t give us another one, because they just don’t issue front license plates. He kept insisting that we should find a way to get one, and we finally gave up the conversation as fruitless. Then he wanted to see our international insurance papers, and complained that they were in English. Well, duh, they were issued by a company in Florida. Anyhow, he eventually let us go without doing anything more than annoying the heck out of us.

We’ve been stopped so many times, that we’ve developed some strategies to avoid it. If we see a police point coming up, we snug right up to whatever car is in front of us, or if it’s a 4-lane, whatever is beside us, hoping they don’t notice us. It works sometimes. Other times when they are flagging us down, we pretend we thought they were just waving ‘hello’ at us, and wave back and keep driving. This also works, surprisingly. They haven’t hopped into their cars and chased us, yet, anyway!!