Day 81: November 3, 2007 In Salta
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Salta,
Argentina
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Day 81: November 3, 2007 In Salta
We slept in, enjoying the Saturday morning. I got up around 9:00 and wrote until 10:30. Elena got up as I was heading down to the office to upload my files. Unfortunately, Nestor, the computer guy, was working on the system so I read a couple of articles about the geology of southern Patagonia. After Nestor finished, I uploaded two blog entries and a lot of fotos from our trip to Cafayate. A couple of them came out really well so I submitted them to Travelpod.com for possible featuring on their home page.
I discovered that I could not get to my network folder or receive my email from Brevard. That definitely limited my activities for the rest of the afternoon. I never thought to try to reboot; that probably would have worked.
Elena went downtown to meet Carlos. The plan was that I would come down later for dinner but they ran into one of the girls in her class. She was having a birthday party and invited them so plans with Daddy were pushed aside. I read until about 9:30. No one was at the apartment so I just went next door for dinner, again. I guess it was the first time I had eaten there on a Saturday night. Ramon always tells me that it is very busy on Saturdays. We had noticed lots of cars there on a couple of Saturday nights. The place was really hopping. Starting at about 11:00, group after group began coming in. Soon all of the tables were full so I paid my tab at 11:45 to make way for new arrivals.
Jorge and Bernardo were in the apartment when I returned. We talked for awhile. They went to bed leaving me to stay up awaiting Elena's return. I nodded off but the fone awoke me when she called from the upper gate at 12:35. She had taken a cab from the party which was out by the university. I successfully set the alarm again and then went to bed.
After paying out the nose for a rental car, yesterday, I feel I should at least tell the story of turning the tables on the greedy rental car companies. This happened in November 1989 after I had finished teaching my final short course on my first Fulbright. The course was given at the Universidad de La Plata. I taught it at the well-known Natural History Museum, famous for its excellent dinosaur collection, the best in South America. Because I was teaching there, I was allowed in before the museum opened. I usually spent a half an hour or more walking among the skeletons of giants. It was one of the events that inspired me to develop the Dinosaur course at Norwich.
When the course ended, we took the train to Buenos Aires, 65 km away. The tracks cut through the poorest part of the capital. It is the only place I have ever seen the horrible squalor of abject poverty in Argentina.
This was during a time of complete economic chaos. The term hyperinflation took on new meaning as interest rates posted on banks climbed past 7%. That doesn't seem too bad for an annual interest rate but this was the daily interest rate! Accompanying the inflation was a hyper-devaluation. When I arrived in Argentina in late May 1989, the currency of the time, the austral, had just fallen to 9 to the dollar. It was introduced in 1985 trading at $1.26 to the dollar. By the time I finished my course at La Plata, it had fallen to around 8,000 to the dollar.
We really wanted to rent a car to tour Patagonia for a month. I had budgeted $800 for the rental. The easiest way to get to northern Patagonia was to take a bus to the city of Neuquén (note the palindrome!). On the day we were to travel to Neuquén, there was a strike by bus drivers but the economic situation was so dire that the bus companies were hiring scab drivers, who were available in great abundance. We went over to the bus terminal and got three tickets to Neuquén. After an hour delay we finally pulled out of the station but had to drive through a crowd of angry striking drivers. They were shouting and waving sticks. A couple of rocks were thrown at the bus, hitting the side with a thud. As we left the city, we passed a bus that had been torched in protest the day before.
That was the end of our labor troubles. The 24-hour ride passed without incident. The strike was over by the time we arrived in the late afternoon of the following day. It was a Sunday so we relaxed and recuperated in our hotel room and walked around the local park.
The next morning, we went over to the Avis office and inquired, naïvely, about renting a car for a month. The office was cavernous with people scattered about at their desks on the main floor and on a mezzanine above. Everything anyone said could be heard throughout. After my inquiry, the agent told me that such a rental was impossible. He told me that the only thing they had was a Peugeot 504 for $400/week. He whipped out his calculator with a flair and showed me that a month's rental would cost nearly 13 million australes, concluding that it was impossible. Four hundred dollars/week was more than I wanted to pay but it was a nice car and I really didn't want the limitations that come with bus travel. They wanted to give me 100 free kilometers per day and each extra kilometer would cost us several thousand australes. They would also charge us per kilometer for the cost of bringing the car back from where we wanted to drop it off in Bahía Blanca. Avis insisted that I pay by credit card.
I had purposely avoided using my credit card for the past six months because I knew that the Argentine merchants would lose what little profit they made by the time the transaction was completed, given the hyperinflation rate. This was Avis, however, and I felt little sympathy for their notorious price gouging. After assuring that I would be charged in australes and not dollars and negotiating unlimited kilometers and no charge for bringing the car back to Neuquén from Bahía Blanca, we settled on a price of around 15 million australes with full insurance. He asked if I was sure that this was what I wanted to do. I said, "Sí."
A collective gasp went up from the other workers in the office. It was hard to believe someone had that many australes to throw around! I handed over my credit card and watched him put all of those zeros on it, wondering what the austral would be worth by the time it was submitted at the end of our trip.
He gave us the key and took us to the car. We took off on a marvelous one-month adventure throughout Patagonia, putting more than 9,000 kilometers on the car. We returned it to the office in Bahía Blanca a month later with only one small dent. By then, the austral had fallen to about 16,000 to the dollar.
We returned to the US and a few weeks later received our credit card statement. The total for the rental was about $800, which was about what I had budgeted months before. Remembering that takes some of the sting out of the outrageous price I paid the other day.
