The Visa fiasco and a day on the edge (part I)

An oblivious Chey skips rocks, unaware of our dark future.

Most of my first-world friends laugh at me when I tell them I prefer to travel with cash. And I do, or at least I did when I was traveling solo. That's because I come from a country where you can't really trust banks (if you don't know what I'm talking about, research Argentinian 2001 chrisis).

Believe me: if there's one country that makes it difficult to access your own money, that country is Argentina.

Of course you're reading the writing of a person who would be happier if I could trade you this goat for that sack of carrots...

But don't let me stray too much from the story.

So we're in El Chalten enjoying beautiful sunny weather and not really giving much thought to the fact that the ATM doesn't work and pretty much no shop takes credit card, because we were actually traveling with some cash.

Cash that was running low very quickly, but we were heading to Chile soon, where (we were sure) we would be able to use the Visa card again.

The morning of the day we were leaving, we went to buy our bus tickets to Los Antiguos, where we were going to cross into Chile. The travel agencies at this touristy place of course take card, and that was good, because we were down to our last 100 pesos.

After trying several times and two different agencies, the card didn't seem to want to work. We couldn't buy the tickets, couldn't buy much food and the town didn't have a working ATM.

Luckily Linda (Chey's mum, to whom I send all my love and gratitude again) could use some sort of Paypal to get us out of there and into Los Antiguos.

And somehow my name ended up being "Linda Demattui", my own
personal version of "Miss Chanandler Bong",

Some of you may wonder why we didn't hitch out of El Chalten and the answer is: 7 armpit hippies doing it at the road out of town (by "doing it" I mean hitchhiking; I clarify just in case).

Waiting for the bus,

Look at that face. That's the face of innocence,

We took the overnight bus after having 2 empanadas each, thinking we could take some hours without food until we reached the glorious Chile, where working ATM machines were expecting us.

It was 9 PM.

...

In the morning very early we arrived to Los Antiguos, and walked 3 kilometres to do the Argentinian side of the border crossing. As breakfast we had a fistful of walnuts and raisins that we had left, thinking about the awesome coffee we were going to get in Chile.

We walked 4 kilometres more, did the Chilenian part of the border paperwork, and happily found a lift into town as soon as we stood by the road.

"Welcome to Chile"

Obviously the  first thing we did when we arrived in Chile Chico was hitting the ATM... which didn't work! Starting to get desperate we talked to a bank person, who knew nothing about anything.

We went to the supermarket and the card failed again.

By then, Chey was starting to sense something fishy was going on, so we found the local library and asked to use the free wifi (for the record, the Chile Chico library people are horrible, unhelpful and rude). Before they kicked us out of the library, he managed to contact his bank for long enough to learn that his card was cancelled. Cancelled. The one access to money we had, gone.

Apparently they saw some "suspicious activity" in his account and, instead of messaging him and asking him, they just killed that card.

Now, allow me to remind you of our situation: We had reached over 16 hours of no food other than a few nuts and raisins, had only 30 Argentinian pesos in my wallet, no accomodation and no way of solving any of those things.

Our first move was to hitch (as quickly as possible) back to Argentina. The border people gave us their best WTF faces before stamping our passports again.

Back in Los Antiguos we sat down drinking the only thing we could afford: two teas that allowed us to use the wifi at a local cafe, where I contacted my dad and told him quickly about the situation, and Chey contacted his family to see if they could contact the bank.

We started thinking that our best shot was to hitchhike (over 700 kilometres) to El Bolson, where I have my family and we could have a roof over our heads and food and some love while we solved the Visa issue.

But by then it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and we were still in the center of Los Antiguos.

With bulletproof determination (or maybe we were just very hungry) we decided that yes, we would try the almost suicidal task of crossing all of the Patagonian desert and beyond in one day to reach safety. We paid for our tea with the last 30 pesos and, backpacks on, headed to the road again.

Patagonian sunset.

What will happen to the Random adventurers? Will they make it across the desert or will they die of starvation, thirst, anger against Visa, or eaten by wild guanacos? 

Don't miss the next episode, as soon as we get decent enough internet!