Mi historias de viajes 1: honesty and dishonesty in Chile

¡Hola! It is time to begin the new series inspired by my month-long trip to South America. I thought I would begin at the end and contrast two incidents that happened to me in Chile, the very last stop on my long tour as it left such a deep impression in my mind that I simply had to begin this series of stories with it. So let's begin at Valle Nevado - one of the biggest and most popular ski resorts, located about 90 minutes drive from downtown Santiago. I have long wanted to ski in Chile since I have seen it featured in The Amazing Race Brazil (A Corrida Milionária) and given that there was a pretty decent ski resort within shouting distance of Santiago that could be done as a day trip, I simply had to go there. I rented my skis from Ski Total upon the recommendation of my Airbnb host - it was a rather convenient arrangement as you simply turned up at their office in Santiago, get your skis and ski pass so the moment you arrive at the ski resort, you can start skiing immediately rather than have to start sorting out all those things. Okay, admittedly it wasn't cheap at all (it actually turned out to be more expensive than skiing in Europe or even New Zealand) but still it was convenient and I was on holiday. I had a pretty good day skiing at Valle Nevado and the mini bus to take us back to Santiago was due to arrive at 5 pm - well, that's when the ski resort shuts and the main car park was most crowded and chaotic at that time.

If you need to take off your skis and have some lunch or even just go to the toilet, you would usually leave it against a wall or in the snow and trust that nobody would steal it. Yeah if it seems somewhat odd to you at first, trust me you'll get used to it! I've been doing this for over 20 years as that's the thing everyone does and there's an element of trust - in any case, if someone takes your skis by mistake, they'll realize pretty quickly if it doesn't fit them and they'll return them. However, at the car park at 5 pm, everyone was just waiting for their transport so as fate would have it, some idiot grabbed my skis by mistake. You see, the mini bus I had been waiting for was caught in a traffic jam trying to enter the main car park and thus we were told sit down, relax, the driver would be here in five or ten minutes. So a group of us merely put our skis against a wall and found somewhere to relax - some people in our group went to the toilet, others went to take selfies. When we returned less than five minutes later, everyone's skis were still there apart from mine and there was a pair of skis that looked very similar to mine left - it was the same colour: red and white but they were clearly not mine. Good grief. After skiing for over 20 years in 19 countries on 5 continents, this was the first time someone had taken my skis by mistake and by now, s/he was in a van, car or bus halfway down the mountain. I told my driver what had happened and he told me to just grab the skis that were there anyway then we will sort it out at the ski shop in town.

So on that 90 minute journey back into town, I was upset - I must have left my skis there for like 5 minutes at most, yet that mistake had happened and if only I had put my skis in a different position or if that idiot had grabbed someone else's skis instead! But when I got to the ski shop, I explained to the friendly guy there called Benjamin (who spoke flawless English, unlike the driver who spoke no English at all) and he calmed me down. He told me that this kind of thing happens all the time in a ski resort and if we have the skis that were left behind, then chances are we can trace where my skis had ended up and do a swap. The ski service community in the Santiago area is close-knit and everyone knows everyone, so it wouldn't be hard to sort out a problem like that. I was cynical of course and I was already prepared to pay the US$80 penalty for losing my skis but he said, don't worry, leave it with me, let me see what I can do and I'll message you on Whatsapp to keep you updated. I didn't think much about it but when I got back to my AirBNB, sure enough, within 15 minutes, Benjamin and his team had found the shop where my skis ended up, found my skis and told me, "everything is sorted, you don't have to worry about a thing, sorry about the inconvenience and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Chile." I was just amazed at how fast, efficient and helpful he was - he had gone out of his way to help me without expecting anything in return  when he could have simply charged me the penalty for having lost my rental skis! Needless to say of course, I was extremely impressed - this was in such sharp contrast to the second part of this story.

Santiago is a very cosmopolitan big city so you can find a wide variety of cuisines available from Indian to Chinese to Japanese to European to Peruvian cuisine - Peruvian cuisine is actually extremely popular in Chile and I totally love Peruvian food. It is a fusion of influences from indigenous Inca, European and Asian flavours and offers a far more exotic selection of ingredients and flavours than Chilean or Argentinian cuisine which tends to be horrifically bland and tasteless. So on our last night in Chile, we went to our local Peruvian restaurant and had a wonderful meal - we ordered two main courses: the ceviche (a Peruvian raw fish salad with lime juice) and a prawn dish but when we got the bill, they had charged us for a steak and the prawns. I pointed out the mistake to the manager but he claimed that oh the steak and the ceviche were the same price, so it didn't matter. He had been so very friendly up till then that I didn't question him, but when we left the restaurant, I thought, hold on a minute, something isn't right and I said to my partner that I just had to go back and double check the price of the ceviche. So I walked back to the restaurant and asked the waiter (not the manager, but the waiter who served me) if I could get a take-away and he said sure, let me show you the menu. That was when I realized that the steak we were charged for cost 900 pesos more than the ceviche I had and I then confronted my waiter with the bill - he noticed the mistake at once and instead of offering me an explanation, he simply reached into the tip jar and handed me a 1000 peso note. I just said 'gracias' and left without making a fuss despite being deeply displeased with the manager who was clearly trying to overcharge me - he should have known the cost of the various items on the menu and I was just relieved that I did follow my gut instinct to double check.  Look, 1,000 Chilean pesos is only about £1.10 or S$1.90 - so it wasn't a massive amount of money, but it still was the principle of the matter.

So in Santiago, I had encountered both honest and dishonest people - I think the moral of the story is that you have to take responsibility for all your actions when you are traveling rather than rely on the goodwill of others to help make your holiday a good experience. This brings back a memory of when I was working in Istanbul many years ago - now given the huge language barrier you're bound to encounter in Turkey, for people like me on short term contracts we often would have a driver/guide/handler who would help us with all aspects of life from going to the pharmacy to getting our meals to getting us to work and back everyday. Now there was this Chinese lady who was working with us - let's call her Ms Yang (as that's her name) and she had heard from her friends that Turkey had some very good spas (also known as Hammams or Turkish baths) and she asked our handler if he could take her to a spa. So our handler said sure, I know of a few quite near the hotel and he started stating the various options - this one is a women-only spa but it is quite small, there's one which is quite big and has been around for a long time, but it is rather expensive, there's another one where the service is exquisite but it is somewhat further and we can't go there today. Basically, Ms Yang was given like five options and her English was quite limited, she didn't understand the difference between the different spas but instead of asking me to translate (as I was sitting around and had witnessed the whole conversation), she said something really odd to our handler. "You better take me to good one, you don't take me to bad one! Don't cheat my money one! If you take me to a bad one, I will blame you!" Oh, Ms Yang was always that inarticulate and rude even in her native Mandarin.

Our handler looked somewhat insulted and he replied in perfectly good English, "Ms Yang, all the hammams I have recommended are very good, they are just different in character and they will never cheat you of your money. You just have to decide which one you prefer to go to and I'll take you there." I rolled my eyes and wanted to scold her, but if I may be blunt, Ms Yang is a total idiot who was inarticulate even in her native Mandarin, so I was not surprised when she came up with that crap in English. I knew exactly what was going on - she couldn't fully understand what our handler said and thus she couldn't decide, she needed help in deciding and the sensible thing would have been either to have asked me to help act as her translator to facilitate the flow of information about the different options, or she could have simply trusted our handler to pick a spa for her (since none of them were bad, just slightly different in character). Ms Yang simply wasn't prepared to take responsibility for making a decision - she wanted a good experience but simply didn't know how to participate in the decision making process in order to pick the right option. In the end, our handler was so offended by her that he simply said,  I can email you more information on the different spas - just let me know when you have decided." I think she was aware of how badly that went and since she had been rude to me previously, I had no desire to help her at all and in the end - she never brought the topic up again and so she didn't go to the spa in Istanbul.

People like Ms Yang are actually fairly common in that they refuse to take any responsibility for their own decisions - you need to study the options you have been offered, weigh up the pros and cons and then decide which option you prefer. And if you make the wrong decision, then you need to take responsibility for having made the wrong choice rather than start blaming others. But people like Ms Yang would always find excuses rather than take responsibility - we had another very similar experience in a Turkish restaurant in Istanbul. Our handler had taken us to a really nice restaurant and we were given a bilingual Turkish-English menu, we were told we could order any main course we wanted. And sure enough Ms Yang started being difficult: she couldn't understand enough English to navigate the menu and started kicking up a fuss. There were so many items on the menu and she couldn't make up her mind. Our guide then politely walked over to try to explain the different kinds of dishes on offer. She then said, "I don't know what any of these things are, what if I don't like it? What if it is not nice? Can we go to a Chinese restaurant instead?" She bitched and complained about everything that evening despite the fact that we had some incredibly good Turkish food - I deliberately isolated her as I refused to speak to her in Mandarin, as a matter of principle I wanted her to take responsibility for her decisions and I adamantly refused to act as a translator. I even studied Turkish before taking on this job and could speak basic Turkish with my colleagues in Istanbul, she made zero effort and I sure as hell wasn't going to let her benefit from the fruits of my labour when she wasn't a nice person - she had been so rude to me. The fact is whether you're going to another country to work or simply for a holiday, you have to make a lot of effort, you need to do a lot of research about everything from the cuisine to the language to public transport - if you don't make the effort, then you will suffer the consequences like Ms Yang and whilst I could have been a lot of help to her, but I would rather see her miserable since she was a total bitch.

Thus in conclusion, I got lucky with the ski shop - it had really been my responsibility to take better care of my rental skis the same way it was my responsibility to have checked the bill (and the prices) at the Peruvian restaurant. You reap what you sow: Ms Yang had a difficult time in Istanbul because she had made no preparation whatsoever whilst I had a much better time there because of the insane number of hours I had put into studying Turkish and reading up on Istanbul. So if you were to ask Ms Yang how her experience in Istanbul was, she would probably tell you it was truly awful and never to go to Turkey. But if you were to ask me, I would tell you that it was one of the most fascinating cities in the world and you would have an amazing time there - if and only if you were prepared to arrive there after having done your homework and behave like me rather than Ms Yang. I would like to think that I am stating the obvious: if you want a good holiday experience, then you need to make a lot of effort and that begins from doing your homework by researching what you want out of your experience right down to taking care of your belongings and double-checking all forms of invoices and payments you have to deal with. That's why when I hear people say things like, "oh I went to (insert name of country or city) and the people there were so nice!", I get a bit cynical. After all, I think my experiences in Santiago had proven that there can be both honest and dishonest, nice and nasty people in any big city you go to - that much is inevitable but one thing we do have control over is our attitude and expectations when it comes to taking responsibility of these challenges.

Now I would like to contrast this to the way my eldest sister travels: now she is one of those Singaporeans who works crazy long hours and thankfully, she is paid a lot of money for her efforts so she can afford to spend a lot of money to ensure that her holidays are fantastic. However, the one thing she doesn't have is the luxury of time - if you think about the amount of time I spend researching a country to plan for a big trip or the amount of effort I put into learning a new language prior to one of my trips, yeah well, she just doesn't have that amount of time on her hands when she is that sleep deprived. She likes traveling but a major motivation for her to go on holiday is to get away from work - to relax and take it easy, thus a lot of the things I do like spending ages on Skyscanner looking for the best flight connections or learning a new language seems way too much like work for her; hence she would prefer to simply pay someone to do all that for her and take good care of her when on holiday. That is a completely different kind of experience of course - my sister made it to South America years before I did and she traveled through Brazil, Argentina and Peru with her luxury tour group - she flew business class and stayed in amazing 5-star hotels all the way. I suppose it is a very different kind of experience in contrast where I am acting as the de facto guide for my partner but she is outsourcing one important element of the trip to her travel agent - she is paying him good money and in exchange, she expects him to pamper her all the way on her travels. That is a fair exchange of course and there are plenty of travel agents around the world who will gladly provide that kind of service at the right price - I have no objections to my sister choosing that option. What I do object to are people like Ms Yang who expect something for nothing - Ms Yang put in zero effort into her trip yet expected others around her to make sure that she only had good experiences and that was totally unreasonable and unrealistic.

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you ever met stunning acts of honesty when on your travels? Or have you ever met the opposite - con men who are trying to cheat you of your money? Have you ever met people like Ms Yang when traveling? How much preparation are you willing to put into your holidays or do you prefer to simply pay someone to do all that on your behalf? Do leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.