We are both now legal Ecuadorian drivers — we both received our driver’s licences today!

The process here is almost silly in the number of steps required, but we completed the last of the hoops today and walked out with our licenses. We can now rent and drive cars within Ecuador.  (The International Driver’s License is not valid past 90 days after receiving your cedula, so that was no longer an option.)  These were steps we took:

1) Obtain our California driving history from California.  Get it notarized, then apostilled, then translated into Spanish, then have the translation notarized.

2) Go to the Red Cross and get a blood test and obtain a blood card showing our blood types (this info goes on the final license).

3) Fill out a bunch of paperwork in Ecuador and turn it into the ANT (Agencia Nacional de Tránsito), the Ecuadorian equivalent of DMV — which is an hour’s drive from Cuenca.  That paperwork included the driving history noted above, our California driver’s licence, our cedula, and a bunch of paper forms filled out.

4) Wait about a week for all that paperwork to be approved in Quito (the capital of Ecuador), upon which time we were told we could go to the next step. Then, we studied 215  practice exam questions, all in Spanish, of which 20 would be randomly picked by the computer.

5) Drive to a different location and go through a battery of tests:  eye test (left and right eye, distance and near, color blindness, recovery speed from dazzling, distance perception); hearing test (left and right ear on 7 frequencies); reaction speed (look at a screen and move from gas pedal to brake pedal when a red light shows); dexterity test (use two hands to move a pin around a complex curved track — think of the child’s game of ‘doctor’); and a test something like the whack-a-mole game.  It was pretty exhaustive, compared to California!

6) Drive back to the ANT with all those results, plus blood card, another set of photos, the original apostiled driving history, plus approval from Quito and fill out more paperwork.

7) Drive to a bank about a mile away to pay the $38 per person for the license.  Yep, can’t pay at the ANT…

8) Drive back to the ANT and take a written test — in Spanish — of the driving laws of Ecuador.  Surprisingly, they are very similar to the laws of California, though you wouldn’t know it by stepping on any street in the country.  These laws are completely ignored in the real world, and there is essentially no enforcement of them at all.

9) See the magic “aprobado” on the computer screen, meaning we’ve passed!

10) Get our picture taken, and a few minutes later get handed our laminated license.

Hurray!

Oh yeah, the title of the blog entry.  You see, Evelyn will never let me live this down.  She got 20 correct answers out of 20 Spanish questions, while I only got 19 correct.  Oh, the shame of it! 🙂