Airport Tax

Here's a learning experience for you.

Leaving Venezuela is ludicrously expensive - the cost of airport tax and exit tax was recently increased to $45 per person. Many airlines include the cost in the ticket, but the values we had apparently pre-paid were the old amounts, only about $25.

Now, here's the problem: Caracas' airport has a pathetic selection of ATMs. The Banco de Venezuela ones are still under construction, and the remaining two don't accept Cirrus or Delta cards. You can only pay the exit taxes in cash, so to be safe we brought with us $90 in bolivares just in case we had to pay all of it.

Of course, it turned out that we didn't have to pay anything - presumably Avianca absorbs the price rises - so we were left with lots of bolivares.

As any fule kno, the bolivar is about to be devalued (or whatever the technical term is) - the official exchange rate is 1600 to the USD, but next year that will change to over 2000. As a result, no one - absolutely no one - wants to touch bolivares, and so they're impossible to change. No one in Venezuela will take them, nor in Ecuador. Countries with weak currencies might, but we didn't want to risk that.

So for the first time in our lives we went on a duty-free splurge at the airport, stocking up on everything you can imagine: chocolate, camera film, Venezuela t-shirts, snack food etc. We were kind of annoyed we had to 'waste' the money, in a sense, but we ended up with plenty of useful (and cool) stuff :-).

Moral of the story: try to avoid having lots of weak currency when you leave a country.

Happily, Ecuador's currency, the sucre, was so useless that they switched to the US dollar in 2000. All the notes are identical to US ones - the coins are the same shape and size but with Ecuadorian stuff on them. And, of course, it's a strong currency, so trivial to change.

Now, I'm off to eat some duty-free Venezuelan chocolate. Katherine can write about the Otavalo market...