Writings By Date| Surprises and Chaos in Argentina | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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| Iguazu Falls |
Upon leaving the hotel, we flew north to Iguazu Falls, a national park at the meeting of the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. We took an 18 peso cab ride from the airport there to our new hotel, and now, thanks to the New Math of Argentina, that turned out to be a bargain for me. So I handed him a 10 dollar US bill, and 4 pesos (U$S10 = $14, plus 4 is 18. With me so far?) He stared at the bills as though I'd just handed him a pile of dead beetles, then looked at me wondering where the rest was. That's it, I explained, 18. I then did the math for him, too.
Surprise! Apparently, news of the new math hadn't reached this town. He tried to tell me that because the banks were still closed, the exchange rate here was still 1-to-1. I didn't see what the banks being closed had to do with it, given that my dollars would still be in his possession when they reopened for currency exchange in another day or two, unless he had some kind of serious gambling problem or something. ... The bellboy at our hotel, however, seemed to confer, and it wasn't until a few minutes later that I realized he'd given the cab driver 10 dollars and 10 pesos in return for a 20 dollar bill.
So why was the Hilton charging me at 1.4 to the dollar? What would my credit card company have to say about this? And how can a bank have the gall to be open, but not accept US dollars?
The chaos continued to unfold when we got into our new hotel. When we asked what the rate was for the night, we were told it would be 45 pesos if we paid in cash, 50 pesos if we paid on a credit card. What if we paid in US dollars, we asked. The receptionist broke out a calculator and came back with a figure of 36 dollars. As far as I could tell, we were either getting a 20% discount for using greenbacks, or she thought the new exchange rate was 1.2 pesos to the dollar.
We went to our room to think about this for a while, and let our heads stop spinning, then I returned to the desk for what I thought was a very simple question.
"How many pesos are there to the dollar today?" I asked in Spanish.
The answer was 1.2. No, wait, 1.1. 1.0? No, 1.1. Honest to God, each of the three people behind the desk had a different answer. The "official" (albeit still uninformed) explanation from the woman who was in the best position to know, because she stood next to the calculator, was that it was supposed to be 1.4, but that decision got delayed by at least another day. So for now, it's 1.1, but tomorrow...who knows? How the folks here came up with 1.1 is a complete mystery, because nobody else on the planet agreed with it. But then, nobody in this country honestly had any idea what the right answer was. Her explanation also didn't explain the 1.2 factor she used for our bill, but at this point, I was afraid to say anything for fear of going back to the 1-for-1 rate, or worse, being forced to pay in Euros.
