Everyone who visits Argentina,
sooner or later will learn that the peso has many exchange rates and the
official one is rarely used if ever. The economic situation of the country and
the seemingly pointless economic policies of La Presidenta (Cristina Kirchner) have sent
the peso down a very slippery road and everyone who can and is able is trying
to exchange whatever money they have into dollars. Although in theory there is
only a certain amount of dollars any Argentine can buy/exchange in a single year, there
is a flourishing black market that is not even the least bit hidden and given
the amount of tourists coming to the country, it is not a miracle that payments
are often demanded in dollars, not pesos.
We came to know about the
ubiquity of this opportunity on our first day on the main street of Bariloche, the capital of the Patagonian Lake District (strangely reminiscent of Switzerland but much better).
Many shops post the daily “blue” exchange rate quite visibly next to the
entrance, but basically almost every shopkeeper is happy to exchange dollars
for tourists. At the time of our visit the official rate was around 6 pesos per
dollar, the “blue rate” was 8-10 pesos per dollar, depending on the
denomination of your dollar notes. Yes, that counts, and anyone wanting to take
advantage of the arbitrage should bring 100 dollar notes and
brand new ones at that. Torn notes are refused. Also, forget about 50 and 20
dollar notes, they are worthless or extremely hard to exchange on an agreeable
rate. Needless to say, but most of my money was in 20 dollar notes...
There’s a pretty good reason
for refusing smaller denominations: if you want to smuggle money out of the
country, 100 dollar notes are easier to handle. The funny thing was that we
refused to believe that the black market is this widespread before arrival
although all guides and books write about it. Then again we didn’t want to walk
around with a lot of cash – Bariloche and Patagonia are backwaters but still...
I later regretted my choice because I could have decreased costs by almost 50%,
but on the other hand I felt bad for the Argentines and didn’t want to take
advantage of this situation (I still did a little bit though) and I think it is pretty sad when this is
your only choice if you don’t want to lose your life savings.
On a funnier note, we were kind
of shocked when we learned upon arrival that our “luxury” car with Avis is a
Chevrolet Corsa. This is still the same Opel / Vauxhall Corsa you would see in Europe but in South
America it is marketed under Chevrolet’s name. Also, this was a saloon variant,
something I have never seen before. It soon turned out that in Patagonia our Corsa REALLY is a luxury car. Patagonia has the strangest distribution of cars I have
ever seen in my life: there is an equal amount of 35, 25, 15 and 1 year old
cars and the same amount of real luxury but real crap cars, too. The
distribution is completely uniform. Also, most cars are crashed, banged or have
a crack in the windshield or all this together. In this world, our little Corsa that was free of
scratches and with all windows intact really turned out to be a luxury car.
One of our first visits with
this luxury vehicle only to be surpassed by a Lamborghini was to one of the local supermarkets. Given that we were
one day before Christmas, there was quite a huge queue which was surprisingly
organised (even for someone like me who lives in the queue fetishist UK) but I
quite liked the optimisation method people used and something we copied, too.
While one person was standing in the queue, the other one was running around in
the store, collecting all items needed. Sound simple, but try this with the
same amount of people in Brent Cross Tesco before Christmas and we will fail quite badly.
Although merchandise around the
world is becoming more and more similar as globalisation claims every last
corner of Planet Earth, there are still some fun local things that survive the
global phalanster’s needs for characterless, uniform retail heaven. One such
thing is the frozen half sheep package you can easily buy in any Patagonian
supermarket. You must think that I’m joking but I’m not. People are struggling
like anything to get the beasts that must weigh at least 50 kgs if not more out
of the huge fridge cabinets into their trolleys that look like they are going
to melt down when Patagonians finally manage to navigate their grill dinner into
them.
As much as we were tempted, we
did not get half a sheep because we still had half the beef from the evening
before and we wanted to have that for our pre-Christmas dinner which turned out
to be quite fab after our nice little circuit with the Chevy Corsa. We visited a lookout that is said to be in the Top 10 of the
world by National Geographic and it was really spectacular. We were lazy so we
took a chairlift both ways but I was happy I didn’t have to walk in the sun
with the sunburn collected the day before in Buenos Aires. The lookout was also
the first time we have ever met one of God’s most horrible creatures – more
about them in my next post.
We were by the way quite lucky
to have been able to visit the lookout. We asked 3 or 4 locals in the town
until when the chairlift operates and the opinion shared by most was that it
operates at least until 8pm, more likely until 9pm because the sun doesn’t set
until 930pm anyway. People were very convincing and we were wondering whether
we should visit the place on our way to the circuit or on our way back.
Randomly, we decided to visit it on the way there and that turned out to be one
of our best random decisions as the chairlift stops operating at 5pm. Lesson
learnt: people are lovely but always treat information they give with many,
many pinches of salt.
In the next post: the Taliban
gets under our skin (literally) and we get our first taste of Patagonia’s much
feared and famed dirt roads.
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