Money Issues
No, this isn’t one of those “I’m stuck in Milan and someone took all my money, and I need to get home. Please send me $1,000”, but it easily could be!
Por favor!! The money we have spent in the last 3 days would float me at Gary’s for a year. Here’s how the tariffs work. One spends not a dollar to enter or leave Ecuador or Peru. We have flown LAN the whole way, but I really don’t think it matters which airline you fly as to whether there is a country entry fee of not. However, get to the southern part of the continent (I.e., Chile and Argentina) and the scenario changes radically.
Entering Chile: Oops! Permiso, sir, but you have to pay $160 (US) per persona to come here. Sorry you are surprised. OK, bite the bullet. It’s only money, right? According to our local sources, whether there is a country entry fee and how big it is, depends largely on how the foreign visitors are treated when they come to the US. Probably Brits get paid to come to the US, while Chileans pay royally (their currency is the “real”, so the pun is intended!).
One can’t control or even predict the weather, right? We have made every effort to make our odyssey, crossing the Andes mountain range in a bus to Mendoza. However, the best laid plans of mice and Zeus–… We woke up this morning in Santiago, fully anticipating our overnight bus to Mendoza this afternoon. I checked email and our wonderful tour coordinator, Betiana, in Mendoza, informed us that there was a horrific mountain storm, and the highway over the Andes will be closed for at least 3 days! Upon meeting us at the airport this afternoon, Betiana told us that huge mudslides have covered the road, and it will be many days before it will be passable. They have been airlifting people out who were caught up there.
Betiana managed to get us tickets on Areolinas Argentinas for this afternoon (another $640 US, please). Some were paying as much as $900 US to fly across the mountains!
However, we did not get our boarding passes in Santiago without another surprise…(drum roll, please!). When we checked in with the airline, the ticket agent looked at John’s passport and asked him here his Argentine entry stamp was. Hello? We’ve been joined at the hip practically this whole trip, especially at border crossings, and I was quite sure any “stamp” I got, he also received. Turns out, I must have paid the Argentine fee in 2010 when I was here with Fulbright, and he didn’t come. So the ticket agent’s manager took us into the “entrails” of the airport, and duly issued John his Argentine entry, another $160. I told John that traveling between Chile and Argentina is going to make our Machu Picchu tour look like a bargain, pricewise.
Oh well—I think I said earlier, it’s only money and we can’t take it with us, right? Especially if you are paying $4.5 reales for the dollar (Chilean), or $2.5 soles for the dollar (Peruvian). According to Google, one US dollar is 5 Argentine pesos. That should be easy to convert.
Time to go drown our sorrows in a good Malbac!!!
Teresa Van Haalen Ventures 