Little Pieces of Paper

Five different currencies have slipped through our pockets in the last 3 weeks. Everyone said there’d be no problems changing our Chines Yuan (RMB -- aka Kuai) throughout Southeast Asia -- after all China’s the big country up north and our province has a free trade agreement going on. They went on to say that when we’re in Vietnam, we can even use our kuai no problem at all.

Yeah right. Maybe if you’re Chinese you can use it but everyone in Southeast Asia sees big, green American dollar signs when they look at you.

So every time we say ‘how much?’, the shopkeeper replies usually in some denomination of the American dollar (which is practically on par with the Australian dollar right now anyway). Which is confusing for us as we haven’t really thought in American money for a year now (we usually only do that when we’re trying to justify a purchase more expensive than usual...like sushi for example). Plus to make things more confusing in Cambodia, the common currency is Reer but say you want to buy a bottle of water. The shopkeeper will tell you its “.25 of an American dollar.” They don’t say 25c or a quarter. And if that’s not confusing enough, they only except American dollar bills so if you give the shopkeeper $1USD for the bottle of water, you will get your change in Cambodian Reer. A Combodian ATM will dispense American money (in large denominations that locals find hard to break) and no one wants to touch Chinese Yuan let alone change it.

If we’d know what a plague this Chinese kuai was going to be for us, we’d have changed it all in one go when we first got to Vietnam and it didn’t seem to be such a major issue. In Hanoi, we’d say “How much?’ and they’d answer in either US dollar or Vietnam Dong and we’d say “How Chinese Yuan?” and they’d look at us with this strange look on their faces, go digging through there money pouches for their calculators and eventually, we’d walk out with the croissant. But by the time we got half way down Vietnam, as soon as we got the kuai out of our wallets, people started passing us off like we had the plague. Eventually we were told some jewelers might change it for us. We got the feeling some of them where more like a “I got an uncle who knows a guy who does deals down the back alley. (Wink, wink, nod, nod.)” kind of thing.

So we carried this useless paper through Vietnam, Cambodia and then into Thailand where we tried one last time in Bangkok to try make this paper worth something. Jason’s technique for trying to get them to change the money is to reason with them why they should be able to change it --

“Its the big country up north.”

“The most people in the world.”

“Its worth more than your money.”

I don’t recommend this tactic and if you try it, definitely don’t us the third sentence. It seems to discourage business relationships rather than helping the situation.

In Bangkok, after calculators, internet comparisons of current currency exchange rates and a phone call to the supervisor, we were finally able to be rid of the burden and change our money to Thai Baht. As we say in Chinese: Tài mafàn!