It was on her recommendation that I the following day went to visit the radio station. Doctor Sanchez, the merry psychiatrist, after having made his own ‘denunciation’, asked me to accompany him to his car. In it there was a young beautiful lady patiently waiting behind the wheel. From the point of view of a foreign tourist, a common difficulty in Colombia is to determine whether the young lady presented to you is the daughter (which age-wise she could easily be) or the wife/mistress of the man you have just met. In this case the family situation was never clarified and I didn’t have the time, or nerve, to ask. I was on the other hand graciously transported up and down the steepest streets I have ever seen to the radio station located on top of a hill in a part of town called Ciphre, where ever friendly Sanchez helped me to transmit the message to the guardian, who in turn promised to have it handed over to the radio announcers.
That was it. I now ceased to actively search for my passport and spent three days sightseeing and playing chess with the gentlemen gathering in the afternoons in the Parque de Caldas, so-called after the martyr of independence, Francisco José de Caldas, whose statue stands in the middle of the square (the same man gave name to the departamento of Caldas, of which Manizales is the capital). At the end of these days I summoned enough force to hit the road again. One rainy morning — the night had been full of lightning and thunder — I stood with my violin, my ominous Peruvian backpack and my travelling bag in the street hailing a cab, as I suddenly remembered that in the process of looking for the passport three days ago I had also lost my old Panama hat. Though no longer in mint condition it had served me well, and I recalled having removed it from my head while talking to the Dutch couple in their hostel. Since these premises were right around the corner, I asked the cab driver to take me there so that I could check for my hat — that would be the last thing before I was headed for Bogotá. ‘No lost hat here’, the young lady tending the reception emphatically assured me. ‘On the other hand, somebody came with this’, she said, and handed me a photocopy of my passport with a telephone number written on top of it.
Strangely I never met with the person who eventually returned my passport. I had told the young lady attending the reception at my hotel to give 30.000 pesos to whomever would turn up with it in case I was out for breakfast or not in the lobby when he came around. As it happened I was in my room, on the Internet trying to reset my flight ticket to its original Florida destination (I had, believing I would stay at least for another three weeks in Colombia, changed my itinerary to a flight from Bogotá to Fort Lauderdale and duly paid the $100 changing fee) without incurring further costs. To this end I was now on the telephone with the Airline call centre and the transaction was actually successful — the $100 for the initial change I lost to the company though.
Nonetheless it must have been the original cab driver who turned up with the indispensable travel document, because he was the only one to know of the particular hostel where the Dutch couple had staid. In addition it was also the place where I had found the photocopy of my passport. He was obviously happy to get 30.000 (a sum covering six average taxi rides in the city) and must have given the little bag of cloth to his daughter, because it was still missing — I believe the reason he didn’t hang around to clarify the circumstances to me was that he didn’t want to explain how this particular item could be missing when the passport inside it had actually been found! Anyway, the finding of the travel document was well worth both the loss of the hat, the small bag, watercolours and brushes.
I was thus set straight on my trail again, played some more chess and waited for the next day, dreamingly watching the rain pour down over the city. Morning come, I hit the bus station and arrived in the early afternoon to the small town of Armenia, the airport of which is so small, (you may even want to call it intimate) that it doesn’t even have a tax-free store. By check-in it was found that I had exceeded my allowed stay in Colombia for sixty days (which I erroneously had interpreted as a two months visa) with one (1!) day, and had to pay a $35 penalty.
Later it also turned out that the two reservations I had tried to make over the Internet for flights from Manizales to Bogotá — which had manifestly been refused by the airline reservation system, my bank, or both — had in fact allowed the airline company to charge me twice for a non-existing reservation. It would be natural to assume that all they needed to do, once I had called them and pointed out this anomaly, was to again access my credit card details and reimburse the account from which the money had been obtained. But when I finally got the English speaking Señor Fajardo over a rusty Skype line, I learned otherwise: ‘Oh no, Señor Holm, it’s not all that easy, but don’t give up, we’re all here to help you.’ Checking out other passenger’s experiences with the same airline over the Internet, I came to the alarming conclusion that the charging of foreign credit cards for non-issued tickets was more or less standard company practice.
There are in my view three possible explanations as to why Aires Airlines insists on throwing these obstacles in the way of gullible tourists reclaiming their money. First, it must be well known to the company that foreign credit cards have a notorious tendency to bounce every time they’re applied towards a ticket reservation. With the result that there are more or less constantly, as well as primarily, foreign customers requesting a refund of money. To even be considered for this procedure, though, the customer, who in reality never became one, has to comply with a surprising number of mandatory requirements. In order to initiate a preliminary investigation the customer must (a must referred to as a ‘company policy’ and just as impervious to reasonable questioning as the dogma of the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and the Fall of Man), send scanned copies of his passport, his driving license and a bank statement showing that the money has actually been drawn from it by said company.
My first attempt at meeting these requirements failed because, according to Señor Fajardo, the registration numbers on my scanned documents were illegible. Although I told him I could easily read the numbers from the same scanned copies, he maintained they were not visible. I had to get a better camera and try again. This time (and it took me another week or so to get around to it) the result, as testified by an automated e-mail reply sent in this regard, appeared to be satisfactory. A week later, though, there was still no sign of returned money on my account. I again called Señor Fajardo.
This time he informed me that it would take a about a month, from the moment my request had been registered, for the money to be reimbursed. Or to be quite precise: Señor Fajardo didn’t actually promise me that the money would be reinstated. I was only assured that it would take a month for me to be informed about the result of their investigation, involving contacting various ‘credit institutions’ to verify that the payment had really been made on my part. On my persistently repeated suggestion that all they needed to do was to verify their own transactions, Fajardo kept answering me in an evasive manner that invariably ended in the assurance that the customer service, he himself an edifying example, would always be there to assist me. Assist me with what, you may ask? Alas, that was also my question.
There might be different explanations as to why a public company behaves in this way. The first is that in a country like Colombia it can get away with it is because the law, in so far at it applies at all, is implicitly on their side. This inherent imbalance of powers follows the same logic as traffic circulation in this part of the world, where a pedestrian a priori has less right of way than a bicyclist, who has to look out for the scooter driver, who in turn is inferior to a motorcyclist, who in turn is obliged to yield to cars, in turn subject to the caprices of truck and bus drivers. At the very top of this food chain one finds airplanes and their owners.
In for example the US any legally registered company facing the kind of blatant evidence I was able to throw at Aires would probably have returned the money within the shortest possible delay for fear of being sued over a sum by far
surpassing the one claimed — arguing about the bleeding obvious would simply be bad business. Not so in Colombia. Here the company management knows that my chances of getting to them legally are practically non-existent. For this reason they can allow the remuneration process to be so painstakingly slow that the customer hopefully loses heart and gives up fighting for his right. Add to this the not all too surprising circumstance that Aires Customer Service has a marked tendency to make itself inaccessible. On numerous occasions when I tried to call them on the number indicated on their homepage, the automated voice asked me to press 1 for English and 2 for Español. But as soon as I had made my choice (and believe me, I tried both options) the recorded voice just returned again urging me to make the choice I had already made. Consequently I spent hours and days just trying to reach the customer service switchboard. When I finally got hold of an Aires representative (via their chat line!) the only explanation I could wring out of her concerning this anomaly, was that my chances to actually reach the call centre were best either between eight and nine in the morning or between four and five in the afternoon — no explanation given as to why precisely these hours would be preferable.
The second explanation entails a gracious benefit of the doubt. It could be that the company actually wants to make sure the customer has not had his credit card stolen or its number copied. The knowledge that foreign credit cards are often refused by the company in connection with online ticket reservations could provide imaginative thieves with an easy way of receiving money for nothing. But since the money ideally would just be returned to the account from which it was drawn in the first place, why bother to waste it on non-forthcoming airline reservations in the first place (remember, I paid not once but twice for the same ticket)? The benefit of the doubt thus hangs by a thin thread covered by an impenetrable smokescreen.
A third explanation has the advantage of being the most plausible and realistic, since it implicitly combines 1 and 2. Their claim, stating that thorough protection of the customer’s identity and credit card information is necessary, is a mere pretext for making it exceedingly difficult for the customer to get his money back. But if so, why didn’t Señor Fajardo tell me that the prolonged procedure was in the interest of customer safety? As a matter of fact no representative to whom I spoke was ever able to explain why the remuneration process had to be this slow. It was like trying to argue with Destiny itself.
Several months later, when back in Europe, I contacted my bank hoping it would be able to deal more effectively with Señor Fajardo and his devious staff. To my surprise the bank quickly found out that the money had been credited to my account, and not one or two months after the original event. No, the money had been registered as returned even before it had been registered as drawn upon. I know it sounds paradoxical, but all this time I had only been spinning around my own tail. Countless hours, not to say days, spent contacting the airline suddenly vaporised into thin air. The reimbursed money, for some strange reason, had been transferred and registered to my account at a date prior to the date when the charges for the same transaction were made. Technically speaking I had actually got my money back before my account was charged.
Was this the end of the story? Yes it was. The only thing that still puzzles me is this: Why did Aires for several months keep up the illusion that they would eventually pay the money they supposedly owed me, never realising or caring to inform me, in spite of all their alleged investigations and lengthy correspondence, that the job had already been done?
I know I shall never receive an explanation of how this all came about. Likewise I shall never know why a bank in Santa Marta charged me with a grossly exaggerated exchange rate via their ATM-machine. Nor will I ever find out why another ATM at the Santo-Domingo airport in the Dominican Republic charged my account with the withdrawal of 12.000 pesos (US $300) without delivering the equivalent in bills in the slot. That said, I’m happy to conclude that my financial encounters with individual people and business owners in Latin America have been, on the whole, very positive. For example, during my last stay in Colombia, I can’t recall a single instance in which any man or woman, to my knowledge, tried to short change or in any other way cheat me out of money. All would stick to deals made and not show sour faces when actually receiving the amount agreed. Change on bills in hotels, restaurants and bars were always correct too. Which gives me the opportunity to highlight the few occasions on which I have indeed been the actual or prospective victim of a deliberate scam.
In Nicaragua, a couple of years ago, one shady thing seemed to lead to the other. I remember having negotiated a taxi rate from Managua airport to Granada that was only half-heartedly accepted on the driver’s part. For me on the other hand it was a small but symbolically important victory. But I did make the mistake of handing him the entire sum of money convened in advance as payment in connection with the compulsory stop at the gas station. I know I should have refused, or at least only given him enough money to fill the tank for our trip. In the event, having received full payment, he no longer felt obliged towards me and subsequently refused to take me to the city centre unless I agreed to pay him more. I refused, with the consequence that I had to walk the remaining distance into town from its outskirts. Once there I immediately looked for a cheap hotel — in my experience it’s often a good idea to get settled in as soon as possible upon late arrival in a new place, and relay to the next day the adventure of finding a hotel to one’s actual liking. I found one close to the main square. In the court yard it offered rooms with a bed, a miniscule bathroom, a light bulb in the ceiling and a ventilator on the wall. That was it. The family lived and cooked food right in the lobby.
In the hotel patio I ran into Chris, a flamboyant gay staying at the hotel. He made no secret of his agenda — finding young boys — and proudly boasted of how, with his employer’s Rolls Royce, he would pick up cute guys in Beverly Hills and bring them to the mansion with their pants down. Six months out of the year Chris worked as a butler for some unimaginably rich couple who had one estate in Los Angeles, another in New Zealand and a third in Lake Tahoe. The remaining six months he was off and, for better or worse, on his own. He told me he was on his way from Nicaragua to India, or was it Ceylon, pretexting some disappointment with the local prostitution in Granada. Or else it was just plain habit for him to go to Sri Lanka, because he claimed to have been there many times before. To me he seemed an unabashed and inveterate pervert. Probably for the same reason he was also quite entertaining, albeit in a characteristic gay manner. But although he was indeed depraved he didn’t drink. This limited the fun we could possibly have together. Unable to persuade him to have a glass with me, I left him in the hotel to explore the night life of Granada by myself.
Not before long I ran into a smiling young man offering me anything money could buy. His specialty was drugs, and he insisted he could get me whatever I wanted. I cheerfully responded that I didn’t need anything from that department and I left him to carry on business as best he could. But then I saw him again next day and we started to chit-chat. He told me about his university studies. I don’t know what I answered, but I remember talking a lot since he seemed reasonably interested in keeping a dialogue. I also bought him a cup of coffee, later a beer, and then another one. Before we parted he once again asked me if I wanted to buy drugs. I said: ‘perhaps some other day, but don’t make it a priority.’ The next day he again spotted me across the main square and I invited him to come and have a coffee or a beer, knowing guys like him don’t usually have that much money to spend.
This kind of socialising between the two of us went on for a couple of days. By now I had come to accept as normal that he stalked me in order to get a free beer. As a matter of fact, I felt his presence to be quite agreeable even though he had a somewhat oblique smile and squinting eyes. However, as my time in colonial Granada was coming to an end — I was about to take a ferry boat on the adjacent Lake Cocibolca to get to the twin-volcan
o island of Ometepe — I saw him again in what turned out to be the last time. We sat down as usual and I bought him something to drink.
Here I finally got tired of hearing him repeat his standing offer. So I said ‘OK, do you have it on you?’ ‘No, he replied, but I can get it for you in no time’. When we finally split from the cafe he told me to wait for him in the street. After no more than two minutes he turned up, quickly handing over a small, tightly sealed parcel that appeared to contain a pretty solid amount of the good stuff. I gave him the 20 dollars he had asked for: ‘And how do I know you’re not just fooling me with a bunch of not even dry seaweed?’ I asked jestingly. He squinted impishly and replied: ‘Naaoo, why I would I do such a thing?’ Since I couldn’t see any reason for this either, I laughed, pocketed the parcel, bid him farewell and set off down the street to seek shelter from indiscreet regards in my room. Having made sure the door was securely locked behind me I attacked the parcel with a pen knife. Suddenly I had a bunch of weed in my hand. But not just any kind of weed: a good handful of juicy seaweed!
I was amazed. For almost a week this young guy had diligently and convincingly played the role of a local friend and conversational partner only to finally be able to draw 20 dollars out of my pocket for nothing. It just seemed so incredibly petty, even though 20 dollars of course meant considerably more to him than to me. Our many conversations now revealed themselves as one long preparation for the decisive moment when he had earned my confidence to such a degree that I would no longer bother to ask him to show the actual goods before I paid for it. Still today, when I think about it, I admire him for his endurance and patience, notwithstanding that he did get a couple of beers along the road as well. What surprised me the most, though, is that I simply didn’t see it coming. I really was his dupe. Still, what an effort for a mere twenty dollars and the inconvenience of then having to disappear in the crowd, because believe me: I kept looking for this guy in every street corner. And not only that day and the following, but also when I returned there a couple of weeks later. But he had vanished and I never saw him again.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 8