I have been missing Key West lately and I don’t know why. I’ve been looking at Doug Bennett’s pictures from around the city and they have struck a chord. I suppose from time to time such feelings might be expected to come up and perhaps the cold crisp days of winter in Uruguay are reminding me of tropical pasts.
Life in Uruguay is pretty peaceful though not typically inexpensive as you might expect of a Latin American country. Indeed Uruguay is rated the most expensive country in South America, excluding France’s colony in the Guyanas, the most expensive of all. However a tourist in this rather small country of three and a half million people gets a quiet place to hang out far from threats of war and madding crowds. Europeans land here with their campers and immediately run for Peru and Bolivia to seek wild landscapes and indigenous folklore of which there is none here. Uruguay is placid, orderly, European and predictable. Except when it’s not.
A case in point has been our bureaucratic struggle to pay for the new Victron parts installed aboard GANNET2. The importers of the parts are the German family we first saw when we started looking to improve our system. TerraVentura sent us to Adrián to get the work done and I’m very glad they did as he is the most detail oriented mechanic I’ve seen in years. The question has been how to pay for the parts. In the US we’d proffer our credit card and that would be that but not in Uruguay.
Our choices were back transfer or cash and the transactions are a in US dollars by the way. The Uruguayan peso has been fixed at 40 to the dollar for as long as anyone can remember but international trade even at this modest level is paid in dollars. Easy right?
So Layne the banker decided to deploy Wise a money transfer app she had previously toyed with but never needed to use. So she entered the sum of $6981 and pressed send. Wise said no way this transfer looks suspicious, contact your bank. Very helpful.
So we contacted our Key West Bank here the phone answerer asked if we had signed a transfer permission? No we haven’t. Oh well in that case drop by the bank and we can get that done in a minute. Except we’re in Uruguay.
It did occur to me I may have to fly back to Key West to get this payment made. Perhaps that notion set me to thinking how nice it might be to go home even briefly.
At this point we were slightly stymied and the German importers of Victron were starting to treat me as though I was about to go a runner. It seemed an odd way to run a business especially as we had decanted our modest little life into Adrián’s cottage which we rent for $20 a day. We had no easy way to run anywhere and the bill had to be paid.
We had already paid an initial $2024 to Adrián by using Western Union money transfer but that method is horrible. It takes five days which allows the bank to hold your money and make interest off it. Then it’s up to the local office to collect the cash and pass it on to the customer. On his first approach the office at western Union had sufficient funds on hand to give Adrián $24. The other two thousand is inaccessible but in his account. He shrugs, he’s used to this nonsense.
We still had the problem of paying $6981 for the assorted Victron parts not included in the Western Union transfer to Adrián. Dale cane to the rescue, a friend of Layne’s of long standing who introduced her to Wise.
He found the solution instantly by offering to make the payment for us. And he did. However there was still a glitch believe it or not.
The transfer form left Dale no room to include the customer and invoice numbers and Victron is a massive multinational conglomerate and they lost Dale’s direct payment on our behalf to TerraVentura’s account.
Eventually they located the money and I got actors message to that effect. I think the Terraventure Germans would have been delighted to teleport me to Siberia. However we still owed $2990 for the 110 volt inverter/charger that is supposedly in the pipeline.
Fabulous do we still had to make one more payment. How to do that?
We talked to Adrián and decided to pile up more cash in his already constipated Western Union account. We transferred the money and he can see it in the pipeline though it won’t arrive before Friday, and he assured TerraVentura the inverter is paid for.
And so we wait for the inverter to arrive when Adrián will install it pretty rapidly. The wiring is ready to go and the space is set aside for it.
We had the electrician in Brasilia attach an up down converter to our system to allow us to plug in to 220 volts as we wished. The first time I plugged it in it destroyed our charger.
Adrián found the cause of the failure. The main plug was wired backwards in one final act of brilliance pursuing us from our ill fated repairs in Brasilia. In the photo below our original plug, the messed up one is on the left and the plug on the right is the new 220 volt charger installed and tested by Adrián. 
And one last thank you is owed to Uruguay for taking down our internet service. Apparently there is a problem affecting the neighborhood and no one seems to know why. We can’t use our Starlink as we run it through the inverter, the one that is on the way from California. Luckily we have a string phone signal around here.
So there you have it. Uruguay is very pleasant not without its flaws. Key West is merely a twinkle in my eye. I’d better go out another log on the fire.
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