Travel Tip: Know your Banker

I have been back in the States now for over a month and thought, with a bit of reflection, that it might be a good time for me to start blogging about some travel suggestions I have for people that are about to do some international traveling. My first tip in this area applies to everyone -- backpackers, rich tourists on guided tours, and everyone in between.

Know your banker.

When I say, know your banker, I mean that you need to know an actual person at your bank that is going to help you if something goes wrong. You need to have met them before in person, and preferably bought them food and/or drinks. You need their personal email. The email account they will look at on the weekends or in non-business hours. Your banker might not be your friend now, but he or she should be soon. Then can save you from travel hell.

My bank friend is Donna with the Bank of Fayetteville. The Bank of Fayetteville (BoF) is a very small bank in my adopted hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. They have all of five branches, I believe. I doubt they are one of the 300 largest banks in the United States, but in these times, size actually does not matter in terms of banking. My ATM/credit card with the BoF operates on the Shazam, Pulse, Cirrus and VISA networks. I was able to use it successfully all around the world. There is no need to have your money at a big bank these days, in order to get money out while you travel.

The advantage to banking at a smaller bank is that I actually know the people I bank with, and more importantly, they know me and will help me immediately if I have a problem. On this trip, I either lost or had stolen my credit cards on three different occasions. Each time it happened, I emailed Donna, she had the card immediately canceled and then shipped a new card out to me (along with the paperwork to report any fraudulent charges incurred). Since I was moving around without reservations, having a card shipped to me wasn't that easy, but she always immediately replied to my emails and sorted out the details of the when and wheres.

When I was having horrible problems finding US Dollars in Ethiopia (Money and other issues in Ethiopia), Donna was talking to Western Union contacts in the States about finding a way to get me US Dollars. She couldn't, ergo my visits to the black market in that linked blog, but she was great for trying. When both my credit cards were stolen from a Bangkok hotel room when I wasn't there and each had thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges incurred before I discovered their disappearance, Donna did up the paperwork for me back home and made sure none of charges passed through to me -- my other credit card with the mega-bank Citibank said everything was fine, only to threaten to sue me for more than $8,000 once I got back -- a situation that is still not resolved. I was never in a money situation where I needed any money wired to me, but Donna and I talked about that possibility before I left and she was ready to push that contingency through, if need be.

Seriously, I think it is vital to know your banker. Personally, I suggest banking in a small bank also, because meeting someone that is going to be your person at Citibank or Barcleys isn't going to happen. You might not need this travel tip -- I hope you never run into a money crisis on the road -- but if you do get into any sticky situations, like many travelers I met have happen, knowing an actual person at your bank is a godsend.

p.s. I just went to her wedding yesterday. She is also a beautiful bride. Public thanks to one of my travel saviors!

Visas, Dollars and Bureaucrats (and cabbies, again)

I need to write this while it is fresh in my mind, because I don’t want to make any notes about it or have to think about it again for as long as possible.

TIP: Big travel tip. Always, always keep $300-$500 of U.S. Dollars in your possession somewhere. Obviously, you don’t need to keep the money literally on you at all times, but have a stash of U.S. cash somewhere in your luggage. If you get under $300, buy some U.S. money at the next possible place you can buy it. . . because you might just end up somewhere you can’t get dollars. And that is bad.

English is the lingua franca of the world. If you are going to know one language, there is no doubt that English is the one that is going to get you the farthest. Corollary: the United States might be in decline or disrepute in some areas of the world – OPEC might be considering changing payment for their oil from dollar-based to euros or some basket of currency – crazy people out there might want to run trucks full of explosives into our embassies – George W. Bush might (indeed) be Satan, but. . .

The U.S. greenback still rules. There is no substitute.

After my screwed-up situation at the Kenya/Ethiopia border from Saturday to Monday, it took me until Tuesday afternoon to get to Addis Ababa. I was under the impression that I would be able to go to the Ethiopian immigration office Wednesday morning and get my visa, so that I could proceed on to applying for my visas for Sudan and Egypt.

I’d just been through bureaucratic hell at the border. What form of selective amnesia came over me to think that I’d just be able to walk in and some bureaucrat would slap a visa into my passport? Seriously. What the hell was I thinking?

I first went to the U.S. Embassy Wednesday morning to talk about my situation with them. Although I was suffering from some sort of selective amnesia, I was coherent enough to realize that I might just get arrested when I showed up at the Ethiopian immigration office, in the heart of Ethiopia, without a valid visa in my passport, though I did have an entry stamp from the border. The people at the U.S. Embassy were fairly amazed at my story and even more amazed that I had somehow, luckily, gotten to Addis. They had me fill out a registration form, giving them the hotel I was at and my other information, in case something (arrest being the primary concern) happened to me and told me to give them a call later to tell them ‘how it worked out.’

My taxi then took me to the Ethiopian Embassy to get my visa. I went to office 77, which is the office for foreign nationals. I explained my situation. They were confused and sent me to office 80, down the hall. The people in office 80 then sent me upstairs to office 97. Mr. Dematow’s office. The head of immigration. The person that twice (at least) rejected Paul and my appeals at border to be let in – only to finally change his mind when the South African bikers traveling with Paul went over his head to someone in the Foreign Affairs office. Basically, he never wanted to let us in and only did so under direct orders from someone higher up on the bureaucratic food chain.

That person higher up wasn’t with me now.

I profusely thanked Mr. Dematow for him letting us into his wonderful country and explained that I just wanted to go ahead and pay for my visa, get legal, and follow all the rules and regulations to properly be in Ethiopia. He told me that a visa wasn’t necessary. If I would just call his office the day before I was to leave his country, he would call the border post that I was going through and make sure that my exit would be expedited. My entry stamp signaled that I was in Ethiopia legally and if I had any problems, I should just call his office.

I’ve worked in government. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of bureaucrats. I’ve been through the red-tape parades as a lawyer. I recognized the content between the lines.

This guy was pissed. Someone higher up had jumped down his throat to get us across the border and he wasn’t happy about his turf getting encroached upon. He wasn’t going to do anything more for me, unless he had to. He shushed me out of his office with false hospitality – “don’t worry. Everything will be fine. Enjoy Ethiopia.”

As I saw it, there were three possible problems with me not having a valid visa: (1) I was still going to travel some in Ethiopia and if some cop asked me for my ID, I could get arrested in small town two days away for being here illegally, (2) I still had to apply for a Sudan and Egyptian visa and they might reject me because I didn’t even have a valid Ethiopian visa, and (3) even if I got a Sudanese visa, I could get detained at the Ethiopian border when I tried to exit. None of these possibilities seemed appetizing.

The next day, Thursday, I went back to the U.S. Embassy to explain my concerns and see if there was someone there that might be able to call Mr. Dematow and talk some reason into him. The folks at the U.S. Embassy were really helpful and nice. They completely understood my concerns and someone called Dematow about them. After a short while, they came back and told me they had talked to him and he said there wasn’t any problem – I just needed to come back to the office and apply for a visa in the normal manner.

This would have been helpful information to know yesterday, when I was standing in his office, right upstairs from where I needed to get the application.

Took my cab back to Ethiopian immigration and went back to office 77, to get the application and fill it out. The person in that office wrote something on the back of my form in Aramaic and sent me to office 82. That person wrote something on the back of my form and sent me to office 80. More writing and sent to office 97. Mr. Dematow’s office. The acid test.

His secretary sent me on in. He told me, “You need to start downstairs,” and I said, “Yes sir. I’ve applied downstairs and been through those offices. They sent me up here to your office,” as I handed him my marked-up application. What I didn’t know at this point was that a few hours before, Paul had been in this same situation, and Dematow tried to put him off with the “your entry stamp is all you need” story that he’d given me yesterday. Paul was able to get the Foreign Office person to intercede at that point and make sure Dematow approved his getting a visa. I’m not sure it was that or the U.S. Embassy calling him on my behalf, but after a few pointless questions about my travel plans in Ethiopia, he made some more notes on the back of my form and sent me back to office 77.

Back in office 77, after a long wait (I’d killed about three hours in the various immigration offices at this point), they took my picture for my visa and sent me to office 78 --- the payment office. Whooo hoooo. I was going to get approved and get my visa!

I went in and sat down. The lady at the desk looked at my application and asked me for $20. I asked how much that was in Ethiopian birr. She said they didn’t accept birr, only dollars.

Yes, I was in an official Ethiopian governmental office and they wouldn’t accept their own currency for payment. If I was a currency trader, I’d say this was a pretty good indication to short the Ethiopian birr.

I didn’t have any dollars on me and by this time, it was almost 6 p.m. I couldn’t get back to my hotel and get the last $100 bill I had on me and make it back. The woman told me she’d hold my application form and I should just come back at 10 a.m. the morning and pay. She seemed really nice and sincere, but I didn’t sleep too well that night. I figured there was about a 50-50 chance that I was going through the entire process again the next day.

The other problem I had at this point was that I didn’t have enough dollars to pay for my Egypt and Sudan visa. According to what I’d read, the Sudan visa was $100 and the Egyptian one was either $15 or $30. I only had the one $100 bill left on me. So, in the morning, before the immigration office opened, I took a cab to the main branch of the biggest bank in Ethiopia, Dashen Bank, to buy some more dollars.

There they told me that I could only buy dollars if I had an airline ticket showing I was leaving the country. I told them that I wasn’t leaving by plane, that I was going to go overland to Sudan. “I’m sorry. We can’t give you any dollars.” “Is there any place I can buy dollars in Addis?” “I don’t know.” Problem. I went to another bank and a Forex office. Neither even offered the option of getting dollars if I had an airline ticket; they just looked at my like I was a moron when I asked if I could buy dollars.

I went back to the immigration office and the woman that waited on my in office 78 remembered me. She pulled my application off the pile on her desk, as I said “thank God” under my breath, and asked me for me $20. I handed her my $100 bill. She looked at it for a second and said she couldn’t accept it.

A caveat to my earlier tip about carrying U.S. dollars: for some reason, the only dollars accepted around the 3rd world are the new dollars with the oversized portraits of the people on the front, the ones they started making in the mid-90s. If you have ‘old’ money, it isn’t going to get accepted anywhere. An additional note, they money also cannot be ripped in any fashion – I had a bill turned down previously because there was a quarter-inch rip in it. I’m not sure what they would do if someone had written on the money, but I wouldn’t count on it getting accepted.

I’d been aware of this situation for months and my $100 bill was one of the new ones. . . but it was a 1998 bill and she told me they only accepted bills minted after 2001. Why, you ask?? Don’t ask why. There is no explanation.

I begged. I pleaded. I told her that it was my last U.S. bill and that I’d already unsuccessfully tried to buy some more, but could not find a place to sell U.S. Dollars to me. I asked her to run it through her machine that detected forgeries again (she’d already run it through three times).

Like some cabbies, some bureaucrats also aren’t agents of Satan. She finally relented and went ahead and took my $100, gave me four $20s back, and told me I could pick up my visa the next morning.

And speaking of cabbies that aren’t horrible people, I still had to find a way to get some more dollars to pay for my Egyptian and Sudanese visas. I do find it especially amusing that Sudan hates, hates the United States. . . but they will only accept our money at their embassy.

Someone had told me that I could buy dollars at the Sheraton Hotel in town, which, by the way, is one of the nicest hotels I have ever seen. It has to be the nicest hotel I have ever seen outside the U.S. or Europe and would be a five-star hotel if they transplanted it to London. I went to the bank office located there and they also told me I couldn’t get any dollars without a plane ticket out of the country.

So, the next day, I went to an internet café and made a fake reservation on expedia.com for a plane flight from Addis to Cairo. I’d had to do this 3-4 times previously, in order to show various border agents proof that I was leaving their country (a requirement to enter some places). If you go through the booking process, almost to the end, you can print off one of the screens that shows your name, reservation, cost of ticket, etc. Show that to a border agent and you’ll get stamped in.

This morning, I went back to the Sheraton with my passport, my Ethiopian birr and my fake plane ticket, in order to buy some dollars. The woman at the bank looked at my reservation for a while and said that it didn’t show a ticket number. She needed a ticket number to put on her form. I told her that it was an electronic ticket and that they wouldn’t give me the actual one until I got to the airport. “Then you can buy the dollars at the airport after you get the ticket.”

Great. I’m pretty serious about this round-the-world-without-flying thing, but I’m not going to actually buy a $1,000 plane ticket, just so I can go cash some money to get the dollars I need to proceed overland to Sudan, Egypt and beyond.

I got back into my cab and noticed there was another foreigner standing at the cab stand. She had a bunch of cabbies surrounding her and she was crying. I asked my cabbie what was going on and he said that she was trapped here and needed to buy dollars to get out. “That’s MY situation!” My cabbie said, “O’, well if its OK with you, I told her that I’d go get her some dollars to exchange with her.” I told him that was not only perfectly fine, but asked if I could buy $300 from him as well. He told me it would take an hour or so to find it, but he could just drop me off at my hotel and come back in an hour with the money.

And so he did. Three $100 dollar bills. Official exchange rate is 11.25 birr for $1. Black market rate was 13.2 birr per dollar. I’d never been happier to overpay for something in my life. 4,000 birr later and I had $300 in my hands. Another good cabbie – right as I was ready to condemn the whole lot of them again. And my first black market exchange to boot.

Now let’s see what those Sudanese bureaucrats say on Monday, when I show up applying for my transit visa. At some point soon, I could really use a couple boring, mundane days. Really boring would be great. Sightseeing. Maybe a tour.

Who wants to loan me $250 to check into the Sheraton for a night?

Dinner tab in Livingstone, Zambia

So the dinner tab last night for the remaining 10 people on the eight day safari I just finished was $862,000. Almost thought it was going to be the first million dinner tab that I was ever involved in.

The $862,000 here is in the Zambian currency, which is the kwacha. Right now, you get about 5,000 kwacha for every U.S. dollar. My cab ride back from town today was $30,000. Yesterday's internet cafe bill was $27,000. It makes me chuckle every time I get a bill.

What is also interesting here is that just about every place takes a variety of different currencies in payment. You can pay your bill in South African rands (600 to 1), Botswana pula (700 to 1), US dollars, or Euros (6,500 to 1), or of course, kwachas. Or any combination thereof, which lead to an interesting bill payment last night.

Everyone took a look at the bill and got an idea of what they owed. I usually hate dealing with bills this way -- I'd much prefer everyone just paying 1/10th of the bill in this case -- but whatever. And then everyone starting throwing money into the pile, which I was assigned to sort out. Not sure why I was the choice -- I went to law school partly because I can't do math.

Thank goodness the bills here also usually come with a calculator.

Into the pile went 200 South African rand, 27,000 kwachas, and $55 U.S. dollars. The last three people needed to pay their portions on a credit card. I did the math a few times and came up with about 442,000 kwatcha that we had in cash and the credit card payments made up the balance nicely. Of course this all took about a half hour to sort out.

It was compounded by Wulf, a 71 year old German on the trip (much more on him in a longer safari blog soon) insisting that his bill was 135 South African rand. He only had two 100-rand notes. The restuarant couldn't make change for him in rand and he militantly refused to take back kwatcha in change. None of the other people in our group could change one of his notes in rand either. I eventually talked him into putting one of his 100 rand notes in the till and pretending that someone else lent him the balance -- because he wouldn't just let us cover the 35 rand difference. "That is RIDICULOUS!! I owe 135 rand and will pay my bill!!"

35 rand is about $4 U.S. dollars.

Gotta go -- this stop at the internet cafe is going to cost me tens of thousands. . .

More Miscellaneous Travel Notes

• Generally, I’ve been pretty depressed by the state of coffee in South America. It is strange to me that there are excellent coffee growing regions all around – Brazil and Columbia in particular – but they still serve crap, instant coffee in so many places. When I took a coffee plantation tour in Panama, the tour guide referred to the low quality coffee beans drying on the ground (with stems, leaves and so on mixed in with them) as “Nescafe beans.”

I’m sick of Nescafe. Instant coffee sucks.

• While we are on the topic of coffee, I like just a small bit of cream or milk in mine. Just a small, little bit. The first few times I ordered coffee in Latin America, I saw “café con leche” on the menu. Leche is milk. I figured, “perfect, coffee with a little bit of milk or cream in it.” Ahhhh – not so much.

Coffee con leche is about a half and half mixture. About half milk and half coffee. And that’s a pretty horrible combination in my book. It reminded me somewhat of one of my roommates during freshman year of college, Dave Rubin.

We drank a lot of coffee that year. I suppose we thought that a few cups of coffee in the morning was some sort of sign of us finally becoming adults. One day I was doing the dishes and washed out a couple coffee mugs that Dave had used – and there was about a half inch of sugar at the bottom. I’d never noticed before, but he poured a ton of sugar in with every cup. “Would you like a little coffee with your sugar” became the roommates’ refrain to him every time he poured a cup.

He’d fit in well down here. They seem to like everything served sweet here. I’ve thrown away more than a half a dozen cups of coffee because they came to my table with sugar already in them.

By the way, if you want to order just plain, black coffee, its “café negro.”

• Sidenote story from freshman year in college. Before I went away to school, I only wanted three things from living away from home: (1) a liquor cabinet, (2) a kitchen, so I could cook for a dinner date -- and assumably impress the hell out of some woman -- and (3) the ability to stay up all night without answering to anyone.

Number 3 was a success. Too frequently. Number 1 existed, but was stocked with such horrible liquor that my father refused an offer of a drink the first time he visited. I don’t think I had a single date my freshman year of college, so number 2 was a bit of a failure. I did get to witness Dave screw up making a grilled cheese sandwich though – that was amusing.

• I love smoking cigars. Back at home, my cigar habit was getting to be somewhere in the five to ten cigar a week range. I really got to like a Nicaraguan cigar called Padron. They were smooth smokes and very reasonably priced – I could get a box of 25 of them for under $100.

As we all know, you can’t buy Cuban cigars legally in the U.S, because of the really stupid embargo on all things Cuban that has far outlived it usefulness, except in courting Cuban-American voters in Florida.

So I’ve been cigar shopping in a few places in Central and South America and the reverse problem appears to me here – you can ONLY buy Cuban cigars down here. And though I do love a nice Montecristo #2 occasionally, Cuban cigars are just way, way, way overpriced. I’m used to paying $3-4 for a cigar, not $12-18 per cigar.

So as a strange result of being in places where you can buy Cuban cigars . . . I am smoking very infrequently. I wouldn’t have figured on that.

• I’d say far less than half the time at the places I’m eating dinner there is salt and pepper on the table. That’s probably a good thing for me – I’m one of those people that habitually salts and peppers my food before even tasting it. As a cook, I know that is stupid, but I can’t seem to stop. In addition, especially in Central America, when they bring out salt and pepper – its salt . . . and then hot sauce not dry pepper, as we are used to.

• I mentioned in a previous blog about all the countries that the U.S. has either invaded or attempted to overthrow their government. There is a strange dichotomy, in my mind, of countries we screwed with and their choices of currency. Two countries stand out. We messed with Nicaragua famously for years, with the Contra War. Strangely enough, they have pegged their currency to the U.S. Dollar. Although they have a local currency, the Cordoba, its value is set against the U.S. Dollar – as our currency goes up or down in value, so exactly does the Cordoba. And although we invaded Panama a few decades ago and took out Noriega, their currency is the U.S. Dollar. The greenback is alive and well in the land of the canal.

If I was running these countries (and Daniel Ortega just go elected President of Nicaragua a couple years back – he of the Sandinista revolution and the target of the Contra War for all those years), I don’t know if I’d be happy having my country’s financial status tied so directly to the country that has screwed with us.

• Keeping with the theme of money, it is really, really nice to go to the ATM machine in some of these countries. In Chile, for example, one U.S. Dollar is worth about 600 Chilean pesos. This doesn’t mean much in terms of how much things actually cost (Chile is actually pretty expensive, compared to a lot of other places down here), but what is great is getting the receipt from the ATM machine showing your balance in pesos.

I’m a multi-millionaire in Chile, baby. Feels sooooo good.

• And on the topic of currency, did you ever wonder where all the Sacagawea dollars went to??

Ecuador. Ecuador is another country that uses the U.S. Dollar as its currency. But when you get change there, you often get the one dollar Sacagawea coins back. The first time I got one back, I did a double-take when I looked at it. They were issued in the U.S. in 2000 and 2001. I feel confident in saying that I’ve never seen a single one in circulation back home. I saw dozens of them in Ecuador.


I wonder if they just loaded up big cargo planes with all of those coins and sent them down to Quito. “Here you go boys. We aren’t using these things. Go crazy.”

• And lastly on the subject of change – NO ONE has change in South America. It is truly amazing how many times, when I hand over a 20 or 50 or 100 peso note, the person in the store asks if I have exact change for what I’m buying.

One night in Quito, Ecuador, I went out to a bar with three of the girls I was traveling with for a week or so. The bar was fairly crowded – I’d say there were 50 or so people in there, drinking and dancing. I went up to the bar to buy a beer. The beer was $3. I handed him a $10 bill and he shook his head and said “I can’t change that.”

It was a TEN dollar bill. In a bar, for God’s sake. A fairly crowded bar at about 10 p.m. How the hell can you run a business and not have two one dollar bills and one five dollar bill in the cash register?

Yesterday, in Bariloche, Argentina (a very popular tourist town with no shortage of money around) I went to a store to buy a windbreaker. The store was a big one on the main commercial street in town. In fact, the store was a North Face store. The jacket I bought was $72 pesos. I gave her a hundred peso note. She asked me if I had two more pesos, so she could just give me $30 pesos in change. I checked my pockets and told her I didn’t have any small change.

She asked me to wait. Went to the back room for about 5 minutes, obviously in search of change and ended up coming back out and just handing me the $30 pesos in change. It wasn’t really a big deal in the scheme of things, but this store gave up $2 pesos. . . just because they didn’t have change in the cash register.