Paying The Bill

 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. 

Predictably the Germans went ballistic in a very controlled monosyllabic frustrated way.  I wondered if somehow I wasn’t in fact trying to cheat them as I started to get Stockholm syndrome. This prolonged agony was absurd. It’s much more fun to watch green  parrots fly overhead. 

Messages flew ba k and forth as Victron tried yo find the missing deposit and I wished I could teleport myself to Fort Zachary beach and just go for a swim but I had no such luck; I just kept heaping logs on the fire and watching parrots. 

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.

Waiting For Our Part

 It happened when in Paraguay we tried to repair our broken shore power connection and we discovered the 110 volt battery charger which was part of the inverter was burned out. Chris the mechanic said he could order each part separately and then we found the charger half was no where to be found. So we had an inverter of no use to us. That’s because the Victron inverter includes the charger half. Keep on keeping on.

Now we wait for the inverter to arrive so the job can be finished. 

We’re expecting to get on the road by next weekend and we want to take a tour around Uruguay, a small country, to test everything and make sure we’re all present and correct before we cross the border to Argentina. 

With Gannet2 upgraded we’re thinking about doing one more circuit of South America before we cross back to Central America in 2028.  It seems a long way away but I guess the time will fly. 

This is the start of the second half of our tour of South America and we’re ready to roll. I hope the inverter gets here soon.

I went for a walk and saw some crappy roads because back roads get less attention even in wealthy Uruguay. 

And after my stroll in the winter sun I still maintain this countryside you could see in the Midwest. 

Oats for sale. 

The entrance to the workshop: 

The prediction is for Arctic cold this coming week. Fantastic, my favorite.

Winter weather here blows north from the southern latitudes, the world turned upside down.

Nearly Complete

When our new inverter arrives, any day now of course, GANNET2 will be ready for the road complete with 540 amps of Victron Lithium, 220 volt and 110 volt shore power charging, engine charging via a 50amp DC to DC charger from our starting battery, cabin heat from our new gasoline cabin heater and repaired carpentry projects that were annoying but not fatal.

Adrián polished off his superb work with a clean up of our home. He vacuumed the interior and washed the exterior and parked our home next to our rented cottage which at $20 a day is cheaper than driving with gas at $8:24 a gallon. A pretty sweet situation. 

We’re likely to be here another week we figure, not because of Adrián as he can install the inverter in an hour when it arrives, but the question is: when will it arrive? It’s a $3,000 item and we said we’d pay for it when they have it in hand. I figure the importers at TerraVentura want their money so I figure we will get word as soon as they have it.   

It’s expensive as it had to be special ordered as most inverters here are 220 volts but GANNET2 operates household appliances  on board at 110 volts: the induction cooker, the microwave, the charging outlets, our heavy duty fans, the air fryer and Starlink are all designed for the US market.

We could convert Starlink to 24 volts  but Layne is reluctant to add $600 to our already enormous bill and it works very well on 110 volts through our inverter. We really like having our big old second generation dish firmly planted on the roof of GANNET2. However we had to deal with an issue which was not technical but billing. 

Since we landed in Colombia in February 2024 we have been using residential roam service based on our Airbnb address in Cartagena. The cost was $60 a month which soon went up to $80 then last year went to $115 paid in Colombian pesos through our credit card: easy. (Maria-Jose, Adrián’s girlfriend and her inevitable maté:)

Starlink has a rule for residential roam and that is you only get two months outside your home country. And they require you remain at a new address for at least three months before you can do another address change which would only last for two months... Anyway they caught up to us, I suspect because we used Starlink while in motion. So we decided to go to global roam which allows you to move and use Starlink on land or water anywhere in the world. The catch is  it’s more expensive, $500 if based in South American countries but only (“only”) $250 if based in the US. So we bit the bullet and made the change rather than lose service altogether.

I always knew prices would go up as Starlink is a monopoly but it is an amazing service. Sometimes people tell us they enjoy being out of touch on vacation but we aren’t on vacation and we aren’t terribly interested in hermitage in our van. Nor are you if you are reading this, let’s face it. If Google ever offers satellite service I will be sure to look into it. 

Stay in school, work long and hard  and pay your Social Security contributions to get a decent pension as prices will only go up as you age. Thats a pro tip in case you need it. You might not like living cheap and saving money in a van in old age and a pension comes in handy when you are an unemployable curmudgeon… Which leads me to Claudia and Norbert from Zurich in Switzerland, retired and driving the world for the past 13 years.

They have driven across Russia to China and back through Mongolia on the Silk Road to Turkey then through Africa to South Africa and started on South America last year. They are on their way to Venezuela through the Guyanas so we told them what we encountered there driving our modest two wheel drive delivery van. They’ll probably do fine in their six wheel drive high clearance Mercedes powerhouse.

They stopped by to have Adrián refurbish their portable generator. They use it to run their roof top air conditioning in their giant 6 wheel drive Mercedes van and they know they’ll need it in the equatorial Amazon. 

Then we all had a barbecue. 

We didn’t eat the cat but Rusty was sleeping and happily didn’t notice me fondling it. 

Adrián the Argentine took to the grill in best local style and cooked beef, pork, lamb and chicken. Just a mere snack to get us through a cold Saturday afternoon.

We had a weird but delicious boiled egg cheese and rice salad (above) with a more conventional carrot salad and Layne produced a couscous feta and tomato salad which tasted exotic to the locals. And there was a cheese fondue. 

I asked Adrián how it was to be an outsider coming to this country and he said if you want to work you can get ahead but Uruguayans whom he views as lazy, get annoyed if incomers are too successful. He plans to be very successful, our ambitious and capable Adrián. Coffee revived us momentarily but a long nap was indicated.

Claudia and Norbert looking unusually serious. 

Maria-Jose and Adrián’s gardener a Peruvian called Hoger. We reminisced with him about Peru and its food.

Your maté kit, bitter chopped grasses mashed in the cup with hot water from the thermos to top it up from time to time.  Wussies add sugar, locals don’t. It’s disgusting stuff. 

Argentines and Uruguayans will haul maté around with them everywhere. You know you’re entering Argentina when the customs counter has a maté cup and straw sitting on it. Everyone in Argentine offices across the country  suck from the same straw from their shared maté cup. I told you it’s disgusting. But cultural.  

Pitmaster.  

Stray cat found a home when pregnant. The litter found new homes and mom got fixed.

Rusty does not frighten her. Much. 

String coffee with Swiss Toblerone for dessert. 

Then the Swiss had to go so they did.

Monster Mercedes Truck. If we meet them again we will recognize them. 

The master of his domain:

I can’t wait to test out our new systems. Living aboard should be a well electrified experience.