The first queue was to pay for the passport renewal process. We took two hours to reach the window where a faceless hand snuck away our $50 from behind smoked glass. The next queue (one and a half hours) was for someone to stamp the receipt from the bank. This is where the trouble started. Esther’s passport, the one with her British residence visa and US visa inside, was slightly damaged. ‘This passport is ridiculous and embarrassing, you have to get a new one’, I’m not sure what his reaction would have been if he had seen the shredded state of mine after its trips down waterfalls and through thunderstorms. Anyway there was no budging the bloke from his quest to screw another $15 out of us and we went back to the bank. Here we were told to get back in the queue (the one we had spent two hours in) Esther told him in Anglo Saxon that we were unlikely to rejoin the queue and went straight to the counter amid whistles and moans from the people already behind. To one side of the teller was a passport, ID card and some money, after a while a security guard reached inside the window, took the documents and money with a thank you to the cashier. In the reflection of the window we then saw everything except the money passed on to someone who appeared from nowhere. The security guard was accepting bribes to speed up the process for people who paid him. This was not a shock over here but after sweating in a queue all morning it couldn’t pass us by without comment. Cue stand-up row with the guard and his refusal to give his name or turn his ID card round. He looked extremely perturbed to have been caught out and I’m sure that a letter to his employers won’t help him too much either. From there, onwards to one of the most bizarre experiences I have been involved in. The final waiting room is like an airport departure lounge with about 100 seats in it. We sat down with about twenty or thirty people behind us unable to get in. Every so often, the first row would get called in to have their photo taken, thus starting a strange game of musical chairs without music. People would advance too many spaces and then realise they were left without a chair or people wouldn’t advance at all and get booed by the people behind. By the time we got to the front I was expecting the next room to be filled with people in a circle playing pass the parcel to get their passport. What we faced was a row of photo booths that looked like white chemical toilets and the request for photocopies of more documents. I went out and got them whilst Esther joined another queue. The last time I was here I had to wait outside, some trickery by us enabled me to enter the inner sanctum of the Peruvian Immigration Service and this time I managed to catch Esher’s eye as she was in the booth, so she should get a nice distracted look for her passport. Once this was done we bought the documents for my residency renewal and headed to the centre of Lima to have something to eat.