Tom Germain
Tom Germain is the owner and main author of Permatourist.com. A Canadian consultant and writer and serial expat currently living in Colombia.
Homepage: http://www.tomgermain.com
Posts by Tom Germain
Gringo Discrimination Alert!
Jan 11th
Imagine going to a restaurant and being handed a different menu than other diners. The menu is identical in every way to the others, save for the prices, which are three times higher. This would never happen in New York, Toronto, or Sydney, but it happens routinely in Cozumel, Mexico, and a lot of other places in the developing world. The reason you were given the pricier menu is that you were deemed to be a foreigner from your appearance. If that isn’t discrimination, what is?
Photo courtesy of Karl-Erik Bennion
This unjust practice isn’t limited to restaurants. It’s also commonly used to gouge foreigners for a hotel room, entrance fees to national parks, and even for airline tickets, to name a few. For example, virtually every quality hotel in Buenos Aires (Argentina) will charge a room rate that’s higher for foreign nationals. It’s also routine for national parks in Mexico and Colombia to charge higher gate fees to non-nationals. I’m only giving examples that resulted from my own experiences, but I suspect that this money grab isn’t limited to the locales I mentioned.
Businesses who engage in such ludicrous behavior may actually be violating local laws, but as enforcement of such regulations is usually very poor (and corrupted) in the developing world, they do so with virtual impunity. The one situation that made me most furious amongst all was that Lan, the big South American airline, charges higher airfares for foreigners traveling within Argentina, where I reckon they’re permitted to do so. I will think twice before flying with them again!
There are some things you can do to defend against such practices. In the case of the restaurants, ask them for the “menu local” (local menu), which is what the other patrons have in their hands. Point-out in a friendly way that you’re a resident if you need to, and if you’re rebuked, just eat elsewhere, no matter how great their shrimp cocktail is! For hotels, have someone who’s a national reserve for you, and avoid using credit cards, which would identify you as a foreigner. If you’re given a rough time, ask for the manager and nicely request that you be treated fairly and pay the resident rate. You could try the same strategy with the airlines and other types of businesses, and if you know that what they’re doing is illegal, you could bring up that fact to great effect. I would be very careful not to escalate the tone of any dispute, especially with those who handle your food!
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Adapt or Leave
Jan 10th
Culture is everything in a human being. It tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, and never can we escape the culture we grow-up with. In order to be a successful permatourist, you have to be flexible in your belief system. Like it or not, the cultures you’ll adopt will probably conflict with your own. Embrace those differences — never view them as defects of your host culture, or even worse, as barbarisms. Here’s a few areas where you’ll have to be minding your P’s and Q’s…
Photo courtesy of Rodrigo Gelmi Mariano de Freitas
Treatment of animals:
A lot of societies treat animals in a manner that may shock your sensibilities. Pets are unkempt and left to roam the streets, or abandoned outright when the owners move. For example, in Argentina the streets are filled with abandoned dogs. Other animals may be slaughtered for meat in the most unsanitary and inhumane way. For instance, Colombians have a tradition of butchering pigs on the street during holidays, even though the practice is prohibited.
Environmental Pollution:
In most societies, people have no qualms whatsoever about throwing garbage on the roads, in a field or in a river, even if trash receptacles were close by. The answer I usually got when I asked them why they did this was simply: “It’s garbage!”. The curious thing is that most often these people keep their own homes quite tidy. A person’s social standing doesn’t necessarily change this behavior. Meanwhile, few businesses pay heed to the environment, taking advantage of weak regulations and poor enforcement. Industries spew poisons into the air, ground and water without any treatment, often in highly populated areas. Cottage industries, such as impromptu auto repair shops, aren’t any better, often operating illegally on residential streets.
Noise Pollution:
Loud all night street parties; roving vendors advertising their wares with the help of loudspeakers; barking dogs, squawking parrots and roosters singing at all hours; scores of dilapidated vehicles chugging and coughing along — This is the constant cacophony in countless towns and cities in the developing world. Somehow the local people never complain, no matter how loud it gets.
Hygiene:
Bathing every day isn’t an option in places where water is scarce, while in others it isn’t a tradition even if water is abundant. Thus people’s body odor can be rather overwhelming in such places, but not offensive to them. For the same reason, clothes might be worn for many days despite the intense heat in some countries.
Unhygienic food preparation is often a problem. Even washing and disinfection of fruits and vegetables can be viewed as unnecessary. Natives might not suffer any serious effects from contamination, from already having built some immunity or from harboring vast colonies of parasites in their digestive tracts, but you, the newcomer, might become deathly ill, on the other hand.
Courtesy:
If you’re used to hearing “thank you”,”please” and “excuse me” when the situation calls for it, don’t expect the same when in a foreign land. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel appreciation or regret, but rather that it’s not something they normally vocalize.
Treatment of Women:
It might be 2010, but in many parts of the world, women are a very long way from being emancipated. Of course, this is horribly wrong, but if you think you can change local mores, think again. Your intervention could get you in trouble fast.
Driving:
Driving is highly dangerous in a lot of places in the world. There often seems to be no respect for the law, and when the police do clamp down, a small bribe will usually make them forget even the worst offenses. Add to that vehicles and roads in poor condition and you’re better off not driving at all.
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24 Hours is all you Need to Visit Any City!
Jan 9th
If you travel as often as I do, you’ll break-up the physical and mental torture of long trips by including a brief stop in a major city of interest, preferably where you’d be connecting to another flight taking you to your final destination.
If you travel as often as I do, you’ll break-up the physical and mental torture of long trips by including a brief stop in a major city of interest, preferably where you’d be connecting to another flight taking you to your final destination.
I’m going to be a heretic and tell you that you can indeed visit just about any major city in the world within a single day. Forget the travel guides whose pages are chock full of “Must Sees” and “Must Dos”. The authors have to fill pages and are thus prone to fishing in obscure waters for dubious interesting places for you to visit. There’s an astounding number of sights in any given city which the natives themselves have likely never heard of, let alone would bother visiting. Why would you travel thousands of miles to waste an hour in a Renaissance pottery museum? If you’ve seen one major zoo, you’ve probably seen them all. Ditto with botanical gardens and city parks. Any science center, natural history museum, or planetarium is pretty much the same the world over. Unless you’re an art fanatic, or your stopover city has a unique collection, art museums will just make you tired and cranky. Old Christian Churches the world over repeat the same dreary themes and can be overlooked, unless we’re talking about something like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or Notre Dame in Paris. Avoid the sites that are prone to big lineups and be content with seeing them from the outside, or consider an alternative. For instance, in New York, since the loss of the World Trade Center, most tourists will line-up for the observation deck at the Empire State building, not knowing that there’s another observation level at the Rockefeller center. In London, most will head for the “London Eye” not realizing you can get a great panoramic view of the city from atop the Monument, and for just 2 “quid” to boot! Look for those kinds of alternatives and don’t be a sheep!
Books and TV shows greatly exaggerate the importance of dining out. In this day and age, you probably can get a better meal at a French restaurant in your hometown than in some overpriced and overrated joint on the Champs Elysees. Instead of wasting 2 hours at a full service restaurant, grab a bite at a Quick’s (if you’re in Paris) and use the extra time to discover another emblematic site. Walking and riding subways are without a doubt the most efficient, economical and quickest ways to get around just about any big city and see it all. 90% of what you want to see is more than likely to be in the city center anyway. You’ll generally find transit system maps of any city right on the web, which you can download and print. The open air tour buses found in most cities are fun, but are usually very expensive and don’t give you the freedom to explore when and what you want to. The tour buses that do allow you to jump out at any point in their trajectories wind-up wasting you hours waiting for the next bus to come along.
Planning ahead what you’ll visit and how you’ll get there will definitely help you to see everything that needs to be seen in short order. Most importantly: wear comfortable shoes, or blisters will put a damper on your adventures!
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Checklist for Choosing a Country to Live in
Jan 9th
More and more people are free to live wherever they wish these days, mostly thanks to the Internet. Having to live close to where you work is no longer a requisite, especially if where you work is in cyberspace, which is everywhere. If that’s you, then there’s a few things you need to know in your hunt for your dream country.
First and foremost, it’s important to understand that where you choose to live you must be able to adapt. Don’t think for even a second that you can have it your way and they’ll just have to live with that. If that’s how you think, perhaps you should stick to the land where you were born. In this world there’s a huge number of cultures, and each culture has its own ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong. Your right is often their wrong, and vice versa. If you’re installing yourself in a new land, learn ahead of time about the local culture and be prepared for surprises once there, especially if said land is in the developing world and you’re from the other end of the economic spectrum. This is not to say that you should be supremely docile and just accept everything that the local culture throws at you, but rather that you develop tactful responses to situations which might otherwise lead to conflicts. In short, if you’re going to conquer Rome, win the hearts of the Romans instead of pillaging!
One of my own requisites is to have a good command of the local language. Nothing will win locals over faster than if you speak their tongue! In more practical terms, grasping what is being said and written will avoid costly misunderstandings, be it a social gaffe or a business blunder. Unless you can afford a full time interpreter once there or are prepared to spend six months to a year acquiring sufficient language skills, skip any country where you can’t speak at least one of the mother tongues. Note that you can never master an idiom until you’ve actually been immersed in an environment where the it is spoken, but by the same token you shouldn’t arrive there without at least a good command of the language. Be mindful of local dialects as well, thus if your destination country is Brazil, learn Brazilian Portuguese rather than the classic version, as there’s vast differences. I’m fluent in Spanish, for example, but in every Hispanic country I’ve been to, there are completely new words and old words that take on new meanings, sometimes rather offensive. In Spanish the verb “coger” [ko'hair] means to take, but in most of Latin America it’s the equivalent of the English F-word!
Climate is obviously a top item on this checklist, but don’t let the lure of sunny climes be the primary factor in your final choice. There’s plenty of places with tropical climates to consider, but the beautiful weather usually is accompanied by occasional not so nice weather. Hurricanes are, to varying degrees, a reality in virtually every tropical island or coastline in the world, as are tsunamis. Thus, if you want to live somewhere like that, you might want to be located at a reasonable distance from an escape route, usually including a major airport. Avoiding tsunamis entails living away from the coast or having higher ground at a short distance. Tsunami alerts usually are issued well in advance, but if your “paradise” is within a seismically active zone, the wave could hit before any warning can reach you. If you want year-round hot weather, you’ll only find it within the tropic of Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn (thusly, “tropical”), a 22 degree band on either side of the equator.
Visa restrictions have to figure prominently in your decision as to where to relocate. If you’re a citizen of a developed nation, you usually won’t need a visa in just about any country in the world. There are some notable exceptions, however, a few countries, like Brazil, having a reciprocal immigration policy. This entails that what the visa policy of your country of origin to their citizens are applicable in equal measure to you when you visit their’s. Typically, you’re granted three months without a visa, but then after that, most immigration policies diverge. The most generous visa policies, such as in Argentina, entitle you to leave and immediately return after the three months are up and receive another three months without a visa, and this ad infinitum. Thus, you can conceivably reside indefinitely in such a country without seeking a residency permit, as long as you’re happy taking a trip elsewhere every 3 months. Some countries grant even longer stays: Mexico grants you up to six months, but you do have to request it with a little insistence when you arrive. Generally speaking, you can often obtain a visa extension once in the country, but this involves filling-out forms and in many instances paying a fee to the local immigration office. Many countries in the developing world also have easy terms for foreigners to obtain a long term residency permit, although this will usually mean filing and paying local income taxes, in which case the local income tax rates will be an additional concern. There are even, although very few, nations that allow foreigners to buy citizenship! By the same token, top economic tier countries like the US, Canada, those of the EC, and Australian, have very restrictive policies for extended stays and even harsher conditions for obtaining a resident’s permit. If you’re a millionaire citizen of any country, you usually won’t encounter any problems getting resident status anywhere in the world if you promise to invest a minimum in your host country! In contrast, if you’re a middle-class person from the developing world, you’ll encounter stumbling blocks almost everywhere even just to obtain a tourist visa, and surprisingly, even from some other developing nations! For exact terms applicable to you for visas or resident’s permits, consult the official web sites of either the country you’re interested in, or of its consulate/embassy in your country.
Picking the country you live in can also hinge on the quality and variety of services. To begin with, expect much costlier telephone and Internet services in poorer nations. The quality of your phone and Internet services can vary widely within the same country, but in general they’ll be much better in the big cities and probably horrendous in small towns and villages. For instance, in Argentina, there’s a wide number of carriers and Internet providers to choose from in Buenos Aires, Cordoba or Santa Fe, but you may have none, or at best one unreliable service in small towns, where the phone infrastructure is often antiquated. As for electricity, you’ll usually experience more outages in the developing world than you would in the privileged world. For example, there were almost daily power cuts in Cozumel, Mexico, sometimes lasting 8 hours, when I lived there. The cost of electricity is generally much higher, but in if you consume moderately as do most of the local people, you’ll pay very little as you’ll be within a subsidized tier. Crank-up the air conditioning and you’ll be thrown into a much higher Kilowatt/Hour rate. Many an unwary ex-patriot has received a heart-stopping 500 USD electrical bill before they learned the valuable lesson: use fans instead!
Banking is also an important consideration. Opening a bank account locally is usually possible, but often unnecessary and seldom advantageous. You’re usually better off leaving your liquid assets in your country of origin and withdrawing it as needed via ATM or your credit or debit cards. Banking machines aren’t usually a problem, but there are still areas of the less developed world where banking machines are few and far apart. Also, while almost any ATM can likely interface with your bank’s network, be it Cirrhus or Plus, I found few that did in some areas of Brazil. As for credit and debit cards (with MC, Maestro or Visa logo), a lot of merchants in poorer countries will tack on a hefty surcharge if you use it, thus making cash via ATM the more practical and economical solution.
Of course, there are many other factors that will influence your decision on where to relocate, many of which will be specific to your own needs and wishes. Best to pick well, because once there things can unravel quickly and you might be forced to retreat! However, we again remind you that the most important ingredient in successfully living abroad is your ability to adapt.
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Money-Saving Tips for Renting Cars in North America
Jan 9th
Renting a car in North America is a similar experience to buying a car in North America. If you’re not attentive, you might wind-up signing a rental contract that is anything but a good deal. There’s a few things you should be aware of before you make a reservation that will help you understand the game rental companies are playing at your expense. There’s even a few tricks you can have up your own sleeve that will allow you to come out on top!
Most important, when shopping for the best deal, base your cost comparison on the final costs, not the advertised base rate. Once all the extra, non-optional charges are factored-in, the best deal may actually have had a higher base rental rate. Rental franchises are quite clever at tacking-on extra charges, making them sound as if they’re taxes, when in fact they’re not. Thus, you’ll see mysterious charges such as “Concession recovery fee” or “Customer Facility Charge”,”Vehicle License Recoupment Fee”, which translate to “our lease costs of our location”,”the cost of our infrastructure”,”our license plate cost”, respectively. These bogus charges are arbitrary and will vary greatly from one franchisor to the next, adding as much as 15 per cent or more to your bill, not including the real taxes that will go on top of all this. What this means in real terms is that an advertised rate of 30 dollars a day is really 35 dollars before taxes. Such costs, in a normal world, should be included in the base rate, but unfortunately the car rental industry as a whole is guilty of this dishonest behavior and I’m afraid is does work at making people believe they’re paying less.
Don’t go for the pre-paid tank of gas deal. You’re not very likely to return the car completely empty and no matter what price per gallon/liter they quote, it’s their win. The inconvenience of refilling the tank before returning the car is a very small thing!
Don’t let them pressure you into buying optional features, such as insurance. Liability insurance is more than likely not necessary as your own policy probably already covers you. For example if you’re a Canadian or US driver and you’re renting in either country, your driver’s liability insurance takes care of you. Some credit and debit cards also include such coverage. Furthermore, the high priced option likely comes with a big deductible. Life insurance is just money thrown out the window.
The loss/damage waiver (LDW) isn’t insurance. The car they rent to you is covered by the their own insurance already, and the LDW is just a treaty between you and the franchisor whereby they absolve you of any responsibility if the vehicle is damaged. The problem is that the price of this option often exceeds the rental rate. LDW is a very important source of profit for rental companies, and they’re quite eager to sell it to you. The usual recommendation is to decline the LDW, especially since your own insurance may already cover you for damage to rental vehicles.
Rental car franchises also inclined to charge a weekly rate for what is really a 5 day rental. While sometimes the weekly rate might be a better deal than paying a daily rate for five days, verify first that that’s actually the case. Verify that those bogus extra charges mentioned earlier as well as any other daily charges aren’t also charged for 7 days instead of 5.
Book via the Internet for the best rates. Competition amongst the car rental companies is most fierce on the Internet and there’s no easier way to compare rates. Pay attention to the specials or “deals” on offer.
Most rental car franchises in the USA accept debit cards with the Master Card or Visa logo, instead of credit cards. However, few accept them in Canada and there are areas of the USA where almost no rental companies will accept them, such as in New York City. If you reserve a vehicle, make sure to verify that they indeed accept your debit card, or you might have an embarrassing moment once you get there. Some states prohibit rental car companies from refusing debit cards. Such is the case with New York state, apparently NYC being exempt from that law.
Review the rental agreement carefully before signing it. Some unscrupulous franchisors are known to add-on rental options without asking if you actually want them. One even had me down for life insurance, as if that had anything to do with renting a car!
Now, a dirty little trick of your own: Always book “economy” cars, thus guaranteeing the lowest rate possible. If you book well in advance, it’s most likely that they won’t have any economy vehicles on the lot when you get there, and you’ll be upgraded to a compact, mid-size car or even a van at no extra charge. If you didn’t really want the economy car and they have one, then just change your mind on the spot and upgrade, although in this case you will pay a higher rate. In the long run, you’ll save a fortune, even if you’re being a bit dishonest in the process!
Some rental companies allow you to drop-off the vehicle at a different location within the same state at no extra charge. For example, I recently picked-up a vehicle from National rent-a-car at Westchester County airport and dropped it off at John F Kennedy airport at no extra cost. Normally, you’d have to pick-up the vehicle at the same place as you drop it off, and in the case of JFK, that would have meant a much higher rental cost.
