Money woes while travelling
But not the kind you'd think (or at least
not the kind I expected when we got started on this adventure.
Before we left Australia we were able to
link a travel visa to our account where we could load a number of different
currencies and everything seemed to be in order to make this trip nice and
easy...
As we get ready to head to our 3rd country
it’s got me thinking about money and visas, well currency to be specific. In
Cambodia it’s the Riel where 4000R = $1usd and in reality they use USD but riel
for coins for the most part. Quite convenient and bank machines spit out your
choice of USD or local $. Nice and easy, the only thing is that your riel is
worth nothing outside of Cambodia so you’ve got to spend what you have. To go
to Cambodia you need a visa but you get it on arrival and it’s $30us nice and
easy
Next came Vietnam where you need to get
your visa in advance but no big deal as we were in Cambodia so they give out
and take USD. We found a ‘guy’ in some little beach town without a shirt happy to take
our passports and $50/person and told us to come back the next day at
5:00pm. No need to go to a consulate or
a big city! And that’s
when life got a little more confusing. To my surprise… the
Vietnamese Dong was not one of the possible currencies and they essentially do
NOT take USD in Vietnam oie (don’t worry I realized this out a good 3 days
before we headed that way). So we left
Cambodia with a few USD and no local currency to buy food or pay for a taxi. Yippee!
Somehow we figured it all out, I found a company like western union where I
could wire myself Dong from our Canadian bank account at a good rate the only
issue was use the least amount of fees we took out a huge sum to carry around
which was scary. $1CAD = 17,600 dong so
we became multi-millionaires!!!! They
only take Dong in Vietnam or if you find someone who takes USD you get a
terrible exchange rate as they can’t post prices in usd. This didn’t turn out to be an issue after the first
day as, like I said, we became multi-millionaires once we found the bank to
pick up the money. It took some time but
all worked out. Everything has been
going smooth until now where we are getting ready to leave Vietnam and running
a little low on cash and needing (or wanting anyway) to get a 2 month visa for
Thailand which you need before you get there and is only available from the
Thai consulate and they accept only USD.
I’ve known this the whole time and wasn’t
worried until I went to a money exchange place and they wouldn’t
give us USD, they’ll go the other way but are not allowed to give back
anything but Dong. HMMMM, next I went to
a bank and got the same answer, now I’m getting worried. No banks or money exchange places will give
you USD here so why in the world is that the only currency the Thai consulate
in Vietnam takes. Maybe this means no
visas for us so we’ll only be able to get the free 30 day visa in
Thailand. So I walked around scratching
my head when a lady tried to sell me a suit; I told her I just needed to find some
USD and that no one will give them to me and she directed me to some random
clothing store around the corner. I gave
them millions of dong and they gave me what I hope is a real $100, $50 and $10
us notes for our four $40 visas. And to
compound my stress we are running out of dong and again, like the riel, is not
convertible so no one (other then random clothing stores) will give you
anything other then dong so hopefully I ended up taking out the right amount
otherwise we’ll just have to may the ridiculous fees to take out a few
extra thousand dong.
All these huge numbers can make doing conversions
in your head a little confusing even for a math brain like me. Cambodia was ok but every now and then we’d
rack up some larger Riel bills confusing the matter a bit as we’d
have to use a combination of Riel and USD.
That wasn’t a problem in Vietnam but with $1CAD being 17,600 and
$1USD being 22,600 the conversions were a little more cumbersome. Essentially I just called 20,000 one dollar
but that wasn’t really accurate.
Here in Hoi An I’ve found a better conversion rate to determine the value
of a meal or an item. We found an
amazing Bahn Mi place where their sandwiches are 15000 dong so when looking at
every other meal or item I’d be interested in I’d just say: so that meal is 8 Bahn Mi’s
yikes or Kellie look you can get 3 beer for 1 Bahn Mi better get drinkingJ.
Oh the fun currency and visas have
been. Fingers crossed that we have
enough (and not too much) dong to finish this leg of our trip and that our
visas are approved in a timely manner as we can’t
get to the consulate before Monday and we leave Wednesday morning. Our travel credit card does have Thai Baht as
a choice so hopefully all will be smooth sailing from here moving forward
(until we decide what our next country is I suppose).
Thanks to those who finished reading my
blathering nonsense.
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