After seven months of continuous travel in South America, we have identified four areas of frustration that keep cropping up. In the interest of preparing other travelers who also plan to embark on long-term trips outside the country they call home, we are airing these annoyances here. Unfortunately, we have not yet managed to figure out a way to prevent them: we merely hope to help future nomads brace themselves for the inevitable frustrations that await them.
Laundry
Packing clothes for a year of travel is actually easier than you think; since you can’t pack a year’s worth of clothes, you are forced to do laundry. Just pack several sets of underwear and socks, a few shirts, shorts, and pants, and drop off your dirty clothes every week or so to be washed, dried and folded by someone else, usually for less than you’d pay to do it yourself in a laundromat in the US. This all sounds pretty fantastic, but it also means someone else is doing your laundry, and they will inevitably do it wrong. You can expect to have your nicest shirt ruined at some point, one of your favorite socks lost every month or so, and an extra item of clothing returned to you once in a while. The extra item of clothing will not fit you. You can return it in an attempt to exchange it for your missing sock, but your attempt will be futile. Your sock is gone. Accept it, and move on.
Line-breakers
For some reason, women of a certain age in South America have no respect for us when we are waiting in line, though I will admit that “line” is often a fuzzy concept here. In every single country we have visited, we have had middle-aged women cut us off to purchase bus tickets, pick up prescriptions, and get seated in restaurants. You would think that having a numbering system would help, but last week in a hardware store, the woman holding ticket #93 (who gave us a friendly smile as she walked past us to pull her number from the dispenser) pushed her way to the counter after lady #91 was helped. This caused the next available clerk to call out #94, forcing us to pipe up pitifully with our badly pronounced “noventa y dos?” and lament to one another later that we had been outsmarted, once again, by a passive-aggressive abuela.
Google Map Failures
Perhaps we are spoiled, but we truly do expect the information we find on Google Maps to be accurate. This expectation persists, despite weekly – and sometimes daily – disappointments. We have walked several kilometers through truly sketchy parts of town only to find that the cocktail bar that looked amazing on Google Maps and was reported to be open doesn’t open for several hours, or until tomorrow, or at all, because it has been closed down for months or perhaps never actually existed in the first place. Beyond the inaccuracy is the fact that probably half of the businesses in South America are not actually included on Google Maps. I can’t count the number of times we have trekked across town to drop off our dirty clothes at the supposedly closest laundry, only to walk home a different way and discover a lavanderia a block away.
Getting Cash
When you’re traveling for a year, it’s not feasible to carry enough US dollars to exchange in every country. Fortunately, for the most part, ATMs are a convenient and easy way to get local currency when you need it. But that’s not always the case, and even when it is, every country has different rules, and every bank has different withdrawal limits and ATM fees. In Bolivia, the ATMs didn’t charge any local fees at all and allowed us to withdraw a few hundred US dollars worth of Bolivianos at a time (which will go a LONG way in Bolivia). This was unusual.
Argentina is at the other end of the spectrum. Most ATMs there will only allow foreigners to withdraw about $45 worth of pesos at a time, and they charge $6 – $10 to do so. We looked into Xoom, a service of PayPal, which allows you to “wire” money to yourself in another country for a reasonable fee. Unfortunately, none of the numerous cash pick-up places listed on the Xoom website actually offered this service, so we wasted several hours tracking them down, only to be turned away after waiting in long lines. If you have a friend in Argentina, you can send money to their bank account for a small fee via Western Union, but if you wire the money to yourself, you’ll pay $50 to send $500, which may or may not exceed the daily limit for wiring money into Argentina. On the bright side (for US travelers), their currency is in free-fall, so it’s ridiculously cheap to eat and drink there. In fact, a tolerable bottle of table wine will only set you back a couple of US dollars, and a decent bottle of Finca de las Moras Malbec priced at $15 in Colombia will cost about $5 in Buenos Aires. But getting your hands on cash in Argentina – and in other countries – can be an exercise in frustration.
Despite these annoyances, our travels in South America have been overwhelmingly positive, and we’d recommend the experience to anyone planning to embark on long-term travel. Knowing what to expect can be half the battle in getting over the frustrations of a nomadic lifestyle.