The Illegal Tourist

You hear a lot about illegal immigrants these days but less about illegal tourists for some reason. I only mention the subject because I crossed a border illegally for the first time in my life at the weekend. I need to point out that I did this for no apparent reason, as I wasn’t dodging the police of exporting plutonium or anything of the sort.

Anyway, I got to wondering about the kind of activity which illicit travel agencies could set up for illegal tourists like me.

Would it be worth sneaking across border control to get a woodcrafting magazine you can’t get at home? Well, we crossed into Argentina to buy butter and powdered milk so anything is possible. Are woodcrafting magazines really good enough to make you risk deportation, a hefty fine and a gratuitous beating from the ruthless border police? Well, if you are a bit fan of crafting wood and have run out of home produced reading material then I guess it might be.

Cross border smuggling of paint colors is probably rife, isn’t it? Actually, now that I think about it, I should have bought some at the weekend. There is a pitiful selection of paint colours on offer here in my hometown and this means that just about every house around here uses the same few colours. I should have taken advantage of the opportunity to get a few tins of autumn strawberry or arctic pink blush or whatever those exciting sounds colours are called in Spanish.

I could have asked an Argentine how to build a pergola, since no one here seems to know. I need one to enhance my garden and give shade to my car through some artfully draped plants climbing over it. However, I need someone else to built it since I don’t know how to either.

I discovered a few cheap furniture stores on my illicit travels but it is quite tricky to sneak across the border and into the makeshift boat while carrying  a chest of drawers. If only they did home deliveries in the middle of the night I could get them to leave the drawers at the side of the river and then float across on them.