Backpacking South America

So we thought the Post Office was bad… but it was nothing compared to thebank.  This is where I would say “there has to be a better way.”  After our experience at the bank, I feel as if I fully understand why people wouldn’t want to keep their money in the bank, because it’s near to impossible to get it out.  I’m not trying to judge, but allow for me to paint you a picture of what it was like for us.

Here we are in La Paloma, a small little beach town.  We are nearing the end of our stay and we still need to pay the hostel.  We realize that we need more Uruguayian pesos to pay in full, plus the laundry we had done (they don’t believe in charging their customers up front, so you always pay the day before you leave).

It was a nice morning in a walkable beach town, so we asked where there was a bank (there’s only one) and we walked downtown.  Up until this point, it must be noted, that we had had no trouble extracting money from any ATM in Argentina, Chile or Uruguay, big cities and small villages.  The bank had two ATMs out front, we thought – “no problem.”  So, we tried one ATM and it then proceeded to tell us that it was not working.  We tried the other ATM and it too proceeded to tell us it was not working.  Strange.  I saw a woman go into the other ATM and come out with money.  At first, we thought maybe the ATM was out of money and that was why it wasn’t working.  But, it appeared to be working for other people.  Hum.

There were several people sitting outside the bank already.  I figured they were probably waiting for it to open.  A man approached us after he walked out of the ATM seeing that we were having problems and told us to just go inside.  I proceeded to tell him the bank isn’t open yet, but opens in 30 minutes.  So we decided to run a few other errands and return closer to opening time.  We returned 15 minutes before it opened and in hind sight, it was a good thing we did.  I don’t know why the long line before the bank opened came as a surprise to me, because while in the big cities we had often seen long lines out the door at banks before they opened.  But, now we were experiencing it hands on.  And people just kept coming… from every direction.  So what was just a group became a crowd, as if they were waiting for concert tickets to go on sale.  There was no order to this madness.  Everybody was just trying to find a shaded area as they waited.  Finally, a bystander took charge and started to make a line based on “who was there first.”  It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough.

As the clock ticked three, the bars covering the doors and the doors finally opened.  People proceeded inside and took tickets like you would at a deli counter and then proceeded to take seats as if you were at the DMV.  And people kept coming and squeezing into this tiny little bank.  We followed suit and took our ticket and our seat.  However, there was doubt that we actually took a ticket from the correct machine as there were no signs.  It was a little chaotic inside despite this attempted order.  Out of sheer nervousness because I didn’t want to be stuck inside the bank all day, or should I say for the five hours that it was open and the fact that it wasn’t open the following day and we needed MONEY, I asked the woman beside me if I had the right ticket and she seemed to think we did and told us to go very quickly because it was now our turn.

Well, apparently they hadn’t quite figured which number to start with so, it wasn’t quite our turn yet.  But, there did appear to be a man sitting at a desk doing “something” on his computer.  But, in all seriousness, based on his approximate position to the people, I’m pretty sure he was suppose to be helping us.  So, Jared simply approached him.  The man was rude, but we continued to kindly explain our situation.  You see, sir, we have an ATM card and your machine will not give us any money.  We need money.  Can you give us money?  He told us the bank doesn’t accept this type of card.  We were wondering what he meant by that because this is our bank card.  We used it in Montevideo with a corresponding bank with no problems and we needed money.  We always use this card to get money from any ATM.  “Nope, sorry,” he said.  He then proceeded to tell us that the nearest ATM was a bus or taxi ride 30km to the nearest town with a Commercial Bank.

Ok…so now we needed to think…how else can we get money?  We then proceeded to ask if they accept Visa, perhaps we could take a cash advance, right?  He said, “oh yes, no problem.”  However, a copy of our passport wasn’t sufficient.  We needed our actual passports to access our money, which were back at the hostel.  So, if we wanted to get our money, we would have to head back to the hostel and return only to go through this deli process again?  Lucky for us, that was only about 30 minutes of our time, so we now had 4.5 hours and counting to try and figure out how to get money to pay for our hostel and what to do about dinner.

As we walked back to the hostel we discussed how we weren’t quite sure we wanted to do the cash advance as we would incur more fees.  We are budget travels after all.  We try to minimize the cost at every corner.  So, we assessed our options.  We had several dollars and several Argentine pesos and few Uruguayian pesos.  The guests from the day before had left some food in the fridge.  So, we called the credit card company to gather all the information we needed about a cash advance and asked the hostel if they would accept mixed currency.  When they said they would accept the few US dollars and Argentine pesos we had, we decided we could go ultra budget and get us through our last day and a half until we were back in Montevideo where we knew we could get more money.  But Jared decided to try the ATM once more just in case.  Still, unsuccessful.  So, we survived.

The irony though, is that when we got to Montevideo, all the ATMs were out of money.  Go figure; holiday season.