Archives for October 2009

Country Guide: Bolivia

October 31, 2009 By Jillian

Heading to Bolivia? Here’s our brief guide on what not to miss!

Access: Air – La Paz or santa Cruz. Land – Lake Titicaca (Peru), The Salar and the Atacama (Chile), Amazon and Pantanal (Brazil)

Points of Interest:

Bolivian Amazon – One of the cheapest and easiest points to access the Amazon rain forest. Travel to Rurrenabanque from La Paz via very scary/uncomfortable overnight bus or fly. Cancellations and changes to flight tickets are easy and not costly. Once in Rurrenabanque we recommend the pampas tour as you will have fewer insects and more wildlife, it is also cheaper than the jungle tour. You can book this in town, generally for the following day.

Death Road – At some point you will likely pass through La Paz and the death road is not to be missed. The trip is not much of a mountain bike trip so much as a thrill ride, but it is a lot of fun. Be sure to choose a company with a good safety record and just enjoy your carefree day. Most tours will bring you back to La Paz at the end of the day, in time to catch an overnight bus to Uuyni if you´d like to continue to the salt flats. Here’s our review of Pro Downhill a death road tour operator.

Salt Flats – Easiest to travel to Uyuni from La Paz overnight via bus, booking a tour once you arrive in Uuyni, beginning later that very day. (Busses to points east do not run overnight.) Tours can range from 1-3 days and are generally all inclusive. If the salt flats is all you care to see then a 1 day trip will be fine. Days 2-3 visit other natural landforms (gysers, lakes, mountains, hot springs, etc) of the area and can also take you to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile for free if you choose. Three day trips can also be booked in Chile. When booking a trip it is best to already be in a group of 6 (the number of passengers that fit in the vehicles) as this represents a full tour and guarantees that you´ll get a good price and be able to start when you want. Additionally, be aware that tours here are known for being very “hit and miss” so take care when choosing a tour company.

Spanish Study – Sucre is probably one of the best places in all of Latin America to study spanish. The charm of the city combined with the purchasing power of the dollar or euro make this both cheap and comfortable at the same time. The location is also close to several nearby activities (such as the mines of Potosi) which are worth going to.

Foodie Friday- The Enjoyment of Mate

October 30, 2009 By Danny

I first heard of Mate traveling in Guatemala on my semester abroad from college. I didn’t try it but I did remember it and when I saw it again, and had the opportunity again, chose not to try it again. I figured that since I was going to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile I should wait to try it in one of those countries.

Mate itself is basically a type of herbal tea (sort of looks like oregano or crushed tea leaves) that is very popular down here. Rather than filling a coffee mug with water and dropping in a small filter bag with tea leaves inside, with Mate the cup itself is special. No ordinary mug will do. The mate cup (actually just called a Mate) is actually a hollowed out gourd. Since the inside is an organic material (the outside is often decorated) that soaks up the flavors of your Mate overtime so the gourd collects more flavor. Sort of like a caste iron skillet.

To drink mate you also need a special metal straw enclosed on the bottom with a strainer. The entire mate (gourd) is filled up with the yerba mate, what we in the north would call the tea leaf. Since there is no filter bag, the straw has to do the filtering.

To drink, you fill the gourd with hot water (often kept in a thermos), a little bit of sugar and sip it down, adding more water only when you want to drink it. This however does take some practice as drinking hot water through a straw is not exactly the best of ideas…and that’s forgetting the fact that this is a metal straw. Whatever you do, don’t jiggle the straw…metal doesn’t exactly make the best filter and that can make it so some leaves come on down your throat.

Mate is a social beverage and often the mate gourd is shared among friends. One person finished the “tea”, fills it with more water and passes the gourd to another person. Like an herbal tea, mate has a bitter taste and often people add a little bit of sugar to the mixture to soften the flavor. Mate is often referred to as a stimulant, and its use is similar to that of coca leaves in northern andean countries. If you can find it in the US I highly recommend trying it!

Money Management – Credit Cards Take 1

October 28, 2009 By Danny

water-lilies People often ask us how we manage our money while we’re abroad. Do we just use cash, can we use credit cards, how much do we pay in fees, etc. Although we have a nice little page (ishouldlogoff.com/finance) devoted to how we do this, there are a couple of things left unsaid on that page.

Does it all work out as it should?

For the last 7 months we’ve been testing those financial products we’ve come to depend on to see if they do deliver as promised. We use a Schwab Visa card as well as a Capital One Master Card which both claim to not charge a foreign exchange fee. We also carry an American Express card and while my parents were visiting, my father was carrying another Visa card that made no such promises. Lastly, there is our Schwab ATM card which promises no foreign exchange fees in addition to no ATM fees.

To test if we are not being charged a foreign exchange fee by our credit cards we used all the cards on a single day in Argentina and have calculated the exchange rate we received, automatically, from each service. Since my father had his Visa card with him, we chose to test the Schwab Visa rather than the Capital One Master Card to determine whether Visa itself took a fee.

ARG / USD – 3.8395	Pesos	USD	Rate	Variation
Schwab Visa ATM Card	1011.52	264.29	3.8273	0.32%
Schwab Visa Credit Card	30	7.86	3.8168	0.59%
Chase Visa (Marriott)	204	55.02	3.7077	3.55%
Amex (Starwood Preferred)	24	6.44	3.7267	3.03%

Using the rate provided for me by Yahoo! Finance (far better for these purposes than Google Finance, although not nearly as snazzy) of 3.8395 pesos per dollar on the day in question I’ve calculated the above exchange rates and their variation from that rate provided by Yahoo. As you can see both Schwab cards (the ATM fee is included in the calculation, Schwab will reimburse this at the end of the month) charged me a foreign exchange fee less than 1% higher than the rate reported by Yahoo. Amex was next cheapest at an even 3% and the regular Visa came in around 3.5%, about 3% higher than my Schwab Visa card.

First off we need to understand that I am a travel blogger without regular access to a Bloomberg machine nor did I ever work as an investment banker. Yahoo provides only one rate to me and I’m not sure if each card pulls a spot rate or a day’s closing rate or whatever other options might be out there. Basically I’m disclosing that all the numbers I provide are “close enough for government work” type numbers.

It looks as those Chase bank charges 3% more than Schwab bank. I think it is also safe to say that the 0.5% fee we see from Schwab (and therefore from Chase as well) is the foreign transaction fee charged by Visa and not by the bank. Nothing in life is guaranteed but death and taxes and this is yet another form of one of those taxes.

In its documentation, American Express claims a 2.7% foreign transaction fee. The fee I’ve calculated is slightly higher, I believe this may be a difference in fluctuating exchange rates if American Express pulls a spot rate. In fact, if I compare the AMEX rate to the exchange rate I received at the ATM rather than to the rate provided by Yahoo finance I get 2.7%. Additionally, this means that Visa itself may be charging somewhat less than 0.5%.

In summary it looks like my special ‘no foreign fee’ cards do deliver as promised. Chase is clearly a poor option, as I’m sure are most other banks’ credit cards. Hopefully I’ve not confused you but I have left several questions open.

1.Do Visa and MasterCard charge the same fee?
2.Does my Wachovia/Wells Fargo ATM card charge the same fee as my Schwab card?
3.How does CapitalOne’s promise compare to Schwab’s promise of no fees?
4.Have I made a grave error in proving to all of you that I’m a nerd at heart?

Future posts on this subject will aim to tackle numbers 1-3. Number four I fear, has already been answered. Please me know if there is something else you think should be tested or there is something obvious I’ve missed.

Incomplete Information

October 27, 2009 By Jillian

Using a guidebook is a blessing and a curse. It provides tons of information, but somewhere in the back of your mind you have to remind yourself that the guidebook can always be misleading or even (gasp!) wrong. We once flipped through a guidebook on the USA which referred to the Grand Canyon as the best site to see in California. I guess the editors didn’t get to that chapter before publishing. Big mistakes like that are easily caught by a well read traveler, but smaller mistakes or rather assumptions can leave you stranded.

A few weeks ago, on our way to Salta we arranged our transportation schedule so that we’d have a day in Resistencia. Not much to do there besides an incredible park about 50 km away, we assumed that we’d be able to take public transportation to and from the park without much fuss. Once in Resistencia, we found out that while it was possible, we’d missed the first bus and the second one would give us about an hour in the park, great. That left us with an entire day stranded with nothing exciting to do but to wait for our overnight bus. (These days usually involve a movie theater if we can find one.)

Sometimes its not the guidebooks though that get us. We’d been advised by a group of Argentinians that we absolutely must go to Parque Ischigualasto (Valle de la Luna), an UNESCO world heritage site boasting the oldest dinosaur fossil anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, the park did not live up to our expectations. Instead of finding dinosaur bones and fossils, we found ourselves in the middle of a dust storm in the desert with a couple of cool looking rocks to appreciate…hardly worth the two day’s and $100 worth of effort we put into the endeavor. To add insult to injury, all the fossils (not just some) had been removed to an archaeological museum.

And then there are the times when you make assumptions you shouldn’t. A few days ago we left Salta headed south for Cafayate, the beginning of Argentina’s wine country. While the guidebook says there are buses continuing south from Cafayate, it doesn’t say the times. We assumed that three a day meant, morning, afternoon and night, so when we arrived in Cafayate we expected to be able to take an afternoon bus the next day south to Tucuman giving us the morning to tour some nearby ruins. Wrong again. The three buses to Tucuman were 2am, 6am and 6pm, we had to take the 6am to get to our next stop in time.

But surprises are part of what makes travel, travel. If everything always went right then we’d be without some of our best (and worst) memories. On that very trip to Ischigualasto, we found ourselves in a hostel with no other guests. The owner warned us that there was a party that evening for the staff and that we were welcome to attend if we didn’t mind a bit of noise once we hit the sack. The noise didn’t bother us, neither did the unlimited supply of home-made pizza nor the bottle of wine provided to us that once finished….was replaced!

Biking Argentina’s Wine Country

October 26, 2009 By Danny

We began our bike-tour of the Argentina while we were still in Salta. Unable to go mountain bikes we managed to find some ‘regular’ bikes to go for a spin around to the surrounding towns. The bikes were slow, we were out of shape from all this great food we’ve been eating, and we couldn’t find our way into the big forest that we had wanted to go to. Feeling ‘bike’ sore in more ways than one we began to worry about the other bike trips we’d be taking in the near future, we quickly reminded ourselves that those would be featuring wine!

After finally tearing ourselves away from our great hosts in Salta, we made it to the bus station in the nick of time to head on down to Cafayate where we quickly put our things in a hostel and got on with the wine tour. The first winery had 4 organic wines (Bodega Nanni, and they do export to the USA….yes, I said organic) to taste for about $5 pesos (3.8 pesos to the $) per person…good start. The second was closed for a private tour. The third wanted 15 pesos (for 10 pesos you can choose from about 1000 bottles in the store) for a single taste so we passed. The next one was closed. The one after that was open, but the person who handles the tastings was on vacation. The next one looked out of business. The following one let us have a taste of one red and one white, neither very good. We returned to the second one and the private tour was over but there was only a taste of the Malbec. The next winery was closed and then finally we found another one in town that was open with three wines to try. In total we spent about 5 hours on those bikes, and in those five hours we visited 9 wineries and tasted a total of 10 wines. Finally we returned to that first one to buy our own bottle for an additional 10 pesos…(that’s about $2.60 for a bottle of organic wine!)

After that we moved onto the real Argentine wine country…Mendoza. This is where most of Argentina’s wine comes from and we expected to be able to really enjoy ourselves. Setting off on our new rental bikes we soon learned that we would be wrong. We had expected to go to at least 10 wineries but soon learned we would be quite disappointed as well. Sure, all of these in Mendoza were open, there were plenty of tourists after all, but they all wanted 10-25 pesos for a taste of just 3 or fewer wines . (Several actually charged less for a bottle, but then charged a 15 peso corkage fee!)

Given that we’d heard from several sources that none of the wines on “the route” are known to be particularly good, we continued biking to the winery furthest from our starting and ending point. There we sucked it up, paid our 15 pesos to taste three wines, all of which were good. Adding only 5 pesos to the tasting total, the three of us (we managed to rope our CS host Jessica into coming with us…who qualified for something of a ‘local’ discount) enjoyed a nice bottle of rose with the lunch we’d brought along for the ride and spent the rest of the day lounging in the shade drinking wine. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, but certainly not the biking through vineyards we imagined. In a stroke of complete irony the bike rental company, who only charged us 15 pesos for each bike, then provided us each with a very full glass of wine, some cookies, and a bottle of water… Why couldn’t this woman be the one working the vineyards?

Although our image of cycling from vineyard to vineyard toasting wine after wine was a bit of a bust, the day had yet to bear its biggest bit of fruit. At some point Jessica mentioned that she had been trying to arrange a trip to Ushuaia. Over a few supermarket bottles of wine and those delicious empanadas (from the video!), we hatched our plans to meet at el fin del mundo. Nos vemos pronto!

Country Guide: Bolivia

Foodie Friday- The Enjoyment of Mate

Money Management – Credit Cards Take 1

Incomplete Information

Biking Argentina’s Wine Country

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