Vilcabamba

Day 156 – Bloody banks!

We woke up in time so as not to miss the breakfast of scrambled eggs and homemade bread toast and decent coffee. Seeing the hostel in the day was a lovely surprise as the rooms surrounded a lush garden (hence the name), swimming pool and it housed two German Shepherd puppies, one a little older than the other.

Tara, the bigger puppy, drinking from the pool!

Our money had still not gone through to our Galapagos tour boat, so while Matt did his best to work out why the bank wouldn’t fork over the cash (despite us advising a number of times that it was OK to be transferring the hefty funds to a South American bank account) and plead with the boat owner not to give our places away, Anna and I got out of his hair and went for a stroll around town.

We had wanted to climb the couple of hours up the nearby Cerro Mandango to the lookout, but the hostel owner warned against this plan as recently tourists had been attacked up there. This made us immediately worried about wandering the streets, but it turns out that it is only happening up there over a land dispute (ie who gets to charge the tourists for hiking up the big hill) and that everywhere else is perfectly safe. And it looked it! It reminded us very much of Daylesford in Victoria.

We didn’t get around to organising any massages, or even go to the chocolate shop for a coffee, but we found a great little jewellery shop and got to know the general lay of the land. Once Matt was off the phone (with Plan C agreed with the boat owner, more about that later) he joined us and we walked out of town a bit to a second hand book store to replenish supplies and also round the back of town past Rumi-Wilco Nature Reserve.

The bridge near Rumi-Wilco. Me thinks it’s a bit broken.

Streetscape in Vilcabamba.

Teaching Umber, the smaller puppy, to play fetch!

OK, so with the tour boats for Galapagos…. I ended up getting a fantastic deal on a first class boat called Nemo II. It was already last minute as it was, hence the deal, but it was starting to become too last minute as we were to be on the boat in 3 days and we weren’t going to be let on the boat if we hadn’t paid!

Plan A was to organise a transfer to the agency’s account. You would think that would be simple, but Australian banks seem to have a bit of a prejudice against transferring large sums of cash to South American accounts (I can’t imagine why?) without getting their customers authorisation and their first born child in triplicate, which is a little hard to do from outback Ecuador! So given we had warned them of the transaction, transferred money into that account in order for it to go out again, the bank agreed that authorisation could be obtained over the phone. But it couldn’t be given over the phone now, of course not. The bank had to call us, despite us already being on the phone to the bank! Grr! And who knows when they would have gotten around to calling us? It ended up being impossible given the rate at which we had to get to Guayaquil to catch the boat and the fact that we don’t have quad band mobiles to even get roaming in Ecuador.

So Plan B was to pay by credit card. Not an option offered by the agency, but for us they would do us a special deal and let us do it at 8% commission. EIGHT PERCENT! You have to be kidding. That almost negated the discount we got!

So it was down to Plan C, withdraw and then deposit the cash into the account ourselves. Not entirely happy as it involved carry a fair bit of cash on a bus, but worth the risk if it would save us a few hundred US dollars each. Given the daily limits on our accounts we had to draw out half today and half tomorrow. This meant carrying a few hundred dollars each in our shoes to our next destination Cuenca. So after dinner we were off to the ATM to draw out the cash. Bank machines in Ecuador only dispense $20, $10 and $5… so we had about $900 each in $20 notes!