Venezuela: Killing with kindness

If you're to take your lead from most Western — including Colombian — media, going to Venezuela these days without solid reasons is a very risky undertaking. 

Throw in a hotly contested and potentially era-ending national election, as we just had, and the advice is to give the place a wide, wide berth.

This used to be packed with cars on a daily basis ...

Yet, having had a pleasurable experience visiting the country in 2013, the constant invites to return from a Caracas-based friend mixed with a curiosity to see if the current situation was as bad as some would have you think, led me to return. 

Well, that and the desire to spice things up a little by venturing, for the first time, into 'dangerous' Caracas with that aforementioned election looming.

It might sound a little devil-may-care, but the fact that my friend would be hosting me in the Venezuelan capital reduced, I figured, the risk factor considerably.

The first major difference from 30 months ago was encountered before actually entering Venezuela. 

From previous experience, to get the best price for my Colombian pesos to bolivares (or so it used to go anyway), I changed the best part of my cash in Cúcuta.* The number of notes I got this time for a similar exchange as before was at least 10 times more. Hyperinflation placed right before your eyes. I felt uneasy to say the least, like a walking cash machine.

You need big pockets in Venezuela these days ...

Then at the border itself, the hustle and bustle of what had been the busiest frontier crossing between Colombia and Venezuela has been replaced, for now anyway, by an almost eerie silence. (Puente Internacional Simón Bolívar, as it's known, has been closed to vehicular traffic for months following this year's border dispute.)

For any tourists making the journey either way this is great; it must rate as the least time-consuming nation-state crossing in Latin America. In fact, the most inconvenient thing is trying to find the office to get your entry stamp in San Antonio, Venezuela; it's not done right on the border as it is in Colombia.

The lack of human traffic might be good from a personal viewpoint, but for merchants on either side of the divide, it's having an adverse effect.**

With the inflation, I expected my big bundles of notes to disappear quite quickly. In reality, while everything appears to have an extra zero added to it compared to 2013, the converted pesos seemed to last longer, a good bit longer. 

In fact, with the almost unfathomable black market exchange rates, it turns out I could have got even more bolivares for my pesos. I'll get it right yet.

I'd also prepared myself for the usual heat foreign visitors to Venezuela can expect from the military and police, especially at checkpoints. This time around only once did I have to step off a bus, along with all the other passengers and have my stuff searched, half-heartedly as it was.

In one lapse, what you might call a testament to the regard I hold Colombian police in, I asked state police in San Cristóbal for directions. Not the best idea. I was escorted to the nearest station where officers went through everything I was carrying. Pleasantly surprising, they didn't take any of the wads of cash stashed in my bag.

Impressive sights abound around Caracas ...

It does, however, seem a little ironic that the police told me to be careful after it was them who, without wanting to sensationalise this, semi-interrogated me whilst making jokes about robbing me and calling me rich. 

They generally made me feel uncomfortable and more at risk — with a smile albeit — when all I'd done was ask for directions. And you couldn't but be bemused by some of the things they asked: 'What's this?' 'Um, bread.' 'What do you have a camera for?' 'Eh, you're asking what now?' 

It's a case of, as many of the locals will tell you, trusting more those not associated with the upkeep of law and order. Playing the innocent gringo/foreigner doesn't get you far.

To add to this, a friend of the family I stayed with told me of an incident that happened in a downtown shopping centre the week I was there where two police officers robbed a couple of foreigners of all their belongings in the middle of the day.

No doubt there are decent, trustworthy police and military but, in general, it seems the nation's 'protectors' could learn a thing or two from the civilians. 

The friendliness of the ordinary Venezuelans I dealt with was up there with the best of them. 

Little things like the bus company employee in San Cristóbal phoning my friend in Caracas to tell her what bus I was on and what station I'd be arriving at. 

Then, when I got to Caracas, a stranger lending me his phone to call my friend to say I'd arrived. 

In some other Latin American countries, even friends are reluctant to hand over their phones for a quick call.

My hosts, who live in a part of Caracas where a Western face is seldom seen, were, to say the least, hugely accommodating. It very much felt like a home from home.

Getting around election-day prohibition, Caracas style ...

Yet, even though I was staying in a potentially dangerous barrio (you might ask, with reason, where isn't in Caracas?), with locals by my side I pretty much felt oblivious to any dangers, dangers that my friends were quick to tell me do exist — gunshot fire was a regular enough sound. 

Even on election day, passing by fanatical Chavistas (supporters of the current 'socialist revolution'; my host family are not), it felt more like a carnival than a country experiencing political polarisation that is crippling it in many ways.

Tellingly, though, I went nowhere without one of my Caraqueño (Caracas natives) friends by my side. For the nine days I was in the city that was fine, but I generally like to wander about places on my own. With my foreign face, I was told that's not the wisest move to make in Caracas. 

In any case, the tienda-drinking culture you get in Colombia that I enjoy is largely lacking in Caracas' barrios. It's more a style of home drinking or on the street outside your house or nearest tienda.

With political change potentially in the air following the opposition's victory in the parliamentary elections, Venezuela's officialdom might start becoming a little less insecure and seemingly suspicious of all outsiders.

There's a lot of work to be done on that front. For the time being, there's always the friendliness of the locals to fall back on for those willing to visit this beautiful country.

*To get a fair idea of what your pesos are worth against the bolivar on street exchange bureaus, a good website to check is bolivarcucuta.com. For the street price of dollars and euros versus bolivares, see dollartoday.com.

**Alas, it was far from an efficient border crossing on the Venezuelan side on the return journey; the Christmas rush had begun.

To listen to a radio interview I did on the situation in Venezuela, check out this link: http://bit.ly/22iwq97 (the interview starts about 10 minutes into the playback service, a couple of minutes after the news and sport).
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Colombia: A banker's paradise

For the second time in a number of months here in Colombia we found ourselves snookered as to what to do with our cash. 

OK, it could be seen as a pleasant headache to have – better looking at it than for it, in a sense. The issue, though, on both occasions was that without a bank account, where do we put the cash we’ve (finally) built up over our time freelance English teaching in the country when we go travelling?

Safe haven: cash under the bed.

You see, it’s not a problem when we stay in Bogotá. We just keep it tucked away in safekeeping, accessing it when we need to. 

But going on the road with a relatively nice bit of "real money" – enough, in any case, that we certainly don’t want to lose – is not the brightest idea around these parts, or anywhere for that matter. It would be bringing ‘dar papaya’ to new levels of stupidity (see http://bit.ly/XLDyLg for an explanation of that).

Due to our visa situation and a lack of the foreigners’ version of the national identity card (a cédula extranjería as it’s known – it took Colombia immigration almost six months to get us one of those issued, getting it just six days before it actually expired) we couldn’t open a bank account back in January.

Our three-pronged cash solution for our travels back then was thus: we brought more than maybe advisable with us; we left some behind and; in an extremely generous gesture, a friend of ours gave us her bank card to use for the duration of the trip (cheers, Melissa) – so we put the remainder of our cash into that account as cover.

Now, all that worked out quite well in the end, but we didn’t feel fully in control of the situation. So for our latest voyage, one where we had to pop into neighbouring Venezuela for visa purposes,* we tried again to open a Colombian bank account. 

The game changer this time was that we had our cédula – the lack of it beforehand was the only obstacle preventing us doing business with Davivienda (the other banks, for the record, needed written proof of income, something Davivienda did not).

So cash and national identity card in hand, we go to open what they call a savings account – after all, all we wanted was somewhere to "securely" store our money while also having the ability to access it at some stage if needs be.

Standing tall('ish') - Davivienda.

‘Right, what kind of benefits do we get?’ ‘Benefits? Well, you can use the debit card to withdraw your cash at any Davivienda ATM in the country (but use another bank’s machine and you’ll be nicely charged) – get this, free of charge!’ 

‘Wow! Tell us more.’ 

‘You can also make point-of-sale and internet transactions with your card without incurring a charge from us.’ 

‘Great. What about the interest rate?’ 

‘Well that’s minimal, less than one per cent.’ 

‘Ah, that’s OK, it’s better than zero – at least our money will make something.’ 

‘Well, you are, of course, charged $9,300 Colombian pesos (COP officially – roughly US$5) per month to have this account.’ 

‘Hold on, what? We leave our money with you, money you use to invest to make more and you charge us for our "generosity"? How can you do that?’ 

‘Bienvenidos to the banking world of Colombia.’

Yep, we get charged for letting the bank play around with our money. Indeed, if the interest rate was one per cent (it’s less) we’d need to leave a minimum of ten million pesos (about US$5,000) just to break even – that's if the interest was calculated monthly, which it’s not. 

This isn’t just Davivienda (a company where we, incidentally, teach many of its high-rolling staff) we must add – it applies to all the banks; Colombian law apparently.

In fact, it seems to be a cosy cartel between the banks and the country’s lawmakers – nobody seems willing or, more importantly, legally allowed to break ranks. From what we’ve been told, even the international banks play the same game. The likes of HSBC and Citi must love things here – easy money and all that.

We don’t make any secret of the fact that we’ve never been big fans of banks, wherever in the world, but the above practices are just plain wrong. 

How the ordinary Colombian can accept it is beyond us. And, of course, it is the working- and lower-middle-class Colombians that are most affected by it. The lower classes tend not to have bank accounts – they’ve enough problems without them – while the upper-middle and upper classes either don’t really care about such charges or, perhaps more likely, have their wealth elsewhere.

A popular protest, just not about the banks, though.

At least in the other two countries we’ve banked in – namely the Republic of Ireland and the UK – we don’t get charged just for leaving our money with them. The balance we’ve left in our UK bank account – the current account that is – hasn’t budged since we departed, only for the small sums of cash we’ve taken out.

What’s more, our instant-access savings account, where we can transfer funds from this to our current account in seconds via the internet, is making money for us – not a lot, but at least it’s moving in a positive direction. It’s more or less the same in the Republic of Ireland.

Yes, "proper" savings accounts do exist in Colombia, but from what we can gather they are highly restrictive and not very practical for the average worker. So with seemingly little or no public or political pressure to change their ways, why would the banks do so?

They are on a nice little winner here. After all, it is a banker's paradise.
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*We’ll have more on what turned out to be a very positive, highly enjoyable trip to Venezuela in the coming days.