On February 4, 2021, I flew from Belo Horizonte to Santiago, Chile, spent four hours in the airport, and flew back to Brazil.
I never entered Chile. There is no stamp in my passport. I have been to Chile in the sense that my body was on the ground there, and in no other sense at all.
Here is why, and what happened at both ends.
The clock
I was living in Brazil to be with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. We were not married yet, so I was there as a tourist, and a tourist gets a limited number of days.
Brazil counts those days across a twelve month window that starts on the date you first enter the country. I first entered on February 4, 2020. So my window rolled over on February 4, 2021, exactly one year later, to the day.
I did not pick that date and it is not a coincidence. It was the calendar the government was running on me. The anniversary of the day I met her in person was also the day I had to get out of the country.
Normally this is a non-event. You drive to a land border, you cross it, you turn around, you come back, and the clock starts over. Brazil has ten neighbors.
It was February 2021. The borders were closed.
So the cheapest way to leave Brazil and immediately re-enter Brazil was to fly to another country, stay inside its airport, and fly home.
The insurance
Chile was requiring proof of health insurance that specifically covered COVID.
I had insurance. My insurance did cover it. What it did not do was say so in the specific way Chile wanted it said, so on paper I had nothing. This is a very particular kind of frustrating: being fully covered and unable to prove it in the format required.
So I bought a travel insurance policy on top of the one I already had, purely to generate a document.
I want to be clear that I did all of this properly. I read the requirements, I bought the extra policy, I had my papers. I was not winging it.
Santiago says no
I land in Santiago and they look at my documents and tell me what I have is not valid. Not enough. I am not getting through.
I explained the situation, which is a strange thing to have to explain to an immigration officer: I do not want to come into your country. I am not trying to enter Chile. I am flying out in four hours. I am here because I need a stamp saying I left Brazil.
And this is where it gets good, because they solved it in the most sensible possible way. Rather than process a refusal, they took me under the airport, through the staff areas, the parts with the employees and the service corridors, and walked me back out into the departures side.
No entry. No exit. No stamp. As far as Chile's records are concerned, I am not sure I was ever there.
Four hours
So I had four hours in an airport in a country I was not admitted to.
I did what you do. I walked around. I went to duty free and bought candy. I sat.
Fabiola knew the whole time. I was on WhatsApp with her through all of it, narrating. That is worth saying because the obvious way to tell this story is as a white knuckle thing where I might have gotten stranded, and it honestly did not feel like that. I knew I was following the rules. Something could have gone sideways, sure, but I had a strong feeling it would work out, so I mostly went with it.
Which turned out to be the right instinct for the part I had not thought about yet.
Brazil has questions
I fly back to Belo Horizonte, and at the border the federal police look at my record and see that I had just left the country. Same day. And now here I am again.
They pulled me into the security office.
Their working theory, as far as I could tell, was that I had missed a flight. That was the thing that made sense to them. Man leaves, man comes right back, man must have messed something up.
So I am in an office with several federal police officers, all armed, sitting at their desks, and I am explaining through the one who speaks English that no, I did not miss anything. I flew to Santiago on purpose. I sat in the airport on purpose. I came back on purpose. I did this to reset my tourist days so I can keep living here.
They took a second with that. Then one of them looked at me and said, roughly: you did all of this just to stay here in Brazil with your girlfriend?
Yes. That is exactly what I did.
And they laughed, and they let me through.
The paperwork nobody films
The Santiago trip is the funny part, so it is the part I tell. It was not the hard part.
The hard part was lines. A lot of my time in Brazil was spent sitting in government offices working through paperwork, in Portuguese, at a level of Portuguese I did not have. I got an extension out of one of those visits, which bought me more time in the country and involved no adventure whatsoever.
That is the actual texture of living somewhere you are not from. Occasionally you fly to Chile for four hours. Mostly you sit in a chair holding a number.
We got married later that year, which got me residency and ended the whole problem. I never had to do the Santiago run again.
The rest of the story, from a livestream app in 2019 to a fifth wheel in the US, is in How We Met.