Money

It was a pretty big day today — visiting Iguazu Falls (Argentina side) and all — but I couldn't rest quite yet. First, I had to leave Argentina, and cross into Brazil for the evening. This turned out to be a lot easier than I'd feared, mainly because I chose to take an easy mode of transport: taxi! After a bit of bargaining, I managed to negotiate a ride straight from the Hostel Inn, on the Argentina side, to Hostel Paudimar, on the Brazil side. And all for just 40 pesos (US$13 or so) — not too much more expensive than navigating numerous bus lines, and certainly a lot less hassle.

After getting through my two connecting flights yesterday evening, from Quito to Santiago, I arrived back in Chile at about 2am this morning. Let's just say that I had a bit of a "rough" welcome. They let me into the country in the end: but not until I'd paid yet another gringo tax. Which, upon stepping off the plane, I quite literally could not afford.

I woke up this morning, in my dorm room at the Secret Garden in Quito, to find a very nasty surprise indeed. It seems that yesterday evening — when we were all upstairs on the terrace, having dinner and a few beers — someone came into Dorm F, and went through everyone's bags. They took everything that was unlocked, valuable, and lying around. Sadly, I was the worst hit: they emptied my money belt of its cash (about US$150); and even worse, they stole my new camera. Nooo — not again! Please g-d, why? This is about the worst way that my time in Ecuador could have possibly ended. It's going to leave me with a very bad taste of this country indeed. And as for Quito: well, I wasn't sure before, but now I'm quite certain — I simply am not too fond of this city.

You get all sorts of people on the buses, up here in Ecuador (as in Peru and Bolivia). They'll jump on, they'll do anything for a buck, and then they'll jump off a few minutes' ride down the highway. They'll sing in Quechua (please, could you not!). They'll sell you paperback books. They'll hawk the herbal remedy solution that could revitalise your sex life, boost your confidence, and increase your lifespan by 15 years. Usually, they're loud and painful, and you pay them just to shut up and to move on to terrorising the next bus. But today, on the bus back from Otavalo to Quito, the busker on the bus was quite professional. He had a guitar.

In my past few days in Ecuador, I've already started to experience something that I didn't experience elsewhere in my South American travels, and that I find extremely brash and insulting. For a million little things around here — for bus tickets, for set lunches, and even for bottles of water — Ecuadorians seem to believe in "special tourist prices". I had about three incidents, just today, where the seller quoted me one price, and then suddenly changed their mind and said: "hang on, actually it's $x more". And when I ask "why", they say: "well, the first price is only for locals — you're a tourist". Pr#$ks.

While I was waiting to catch a combi back from the ruins of Sipán this evening, I had a nice long chat with one of the locals, who comes there each day to sell his artesanias (lit: "handicrafts", i.e. souvenir shmontses). My friend explained to me how Sipán is a very remote and impoverished area, and how the discovery of the gold-filled Moche tomb in 1987 did little to change this in the long-term. He described how impossible it is for the locals around here to travel, or to have any real hope of getting out and doing something different with their lives, due to their very modest finances. And he also said something that really made me stop and think: "you tourists that come here are our biggest opportunity, and our only hope".

The problem is, Lima doesn't have one. It has about 50. One for each company. Each one down the road from its peers, spread out over an entire suburb — nothing less than an absolute bus terminal balagan. No wonder that most people don't even bother trying to sort through the mess, and just buy their bus tickets out of Lima from a travel agency in town. Today, I decided to take the plunge, and to find myself a company and a bus ticket, to get me out of Lima tonight, and over to Huaraz. Managed it in the end, but it wasn't fun. Yet another reason why Lima's an evil city: they make it so daym hard to get out of it.

I don't know where all my money's gone, this past week in Arequipa; but clearly it's gone somewhere, because it's not in my pocket anymore! I must have spent over s/900, just in the last week that I've been back here in Peru. I guess that Chris and I have been living it up a fair bit, what with dining at fancy restaurants two or three times a day, and with a big night out last night. Ah well, I guess you have to enjoy life and splurge out sometimes; and if you're going to splurge anywhere, you may as well do it here in South America! Because it leaves a much smaller dint in your wallet than a splurge back home does.

This morning, Chris and I caught a bus from Copacabana to La Paz. But before we could get the bus, we had to buy our tickets. And as with everything in Bolivia, buying bus tickets is a process unlike what you'd expect it to be.

I'd heard that you have to watch out for counterfeit money here in Peru, but I hadn't encountered any until today. I caught a taxi to the Plaza de Armas this evening; and when I handed over the two un nuevo sol coins to the cabbie as payment, he inspected them both, and handed one of them back to me. "Es un falso" (lit: "it's a fake"), he explained to me. I couldn't perceive any difference in the falso, until it was explicitly pointed out to me; but apparently, every man, woman, and child in Cusco can tell a falso a mile off. Can you?