Well my luck had to run out eventually – after all my flights to date leaving and arriving on time, Aerolineas Argentina took off almost an hour late for Mendoza (despite the screens in the terminal showing the flight “on time” even as our scheduled departure time came and went with boarding having not yet started). Apart from that the flight was faultless – we even were served a soft drink and a snack, which you certainly wouldn’t get on a flight of less than 2 hours duration in Europe!

This time I had pre-booked a taxi pickup from the airport and was relieved to find, despite the delay, the driver waiting for me in the arrivals hall.

Another first – Mendoza is the first city I’ve visited where the traffic actually flows on leaving the airport, and despite getting busier near the city centre, is still remarkably ordered and calm compared to every other place I’ve been on this trip.

The manageress and receptionist at the hotel were wonderfully friendly and I was chuffed with my ability to complete almost the entire check-in process in Spanish, and to understand what the young receptionist was telling me about the hotel’s restaurant hours and breakfast times – my Spanish finally failing me at the last hurdle when I realised I hadn’t been asked to pay for the room yet (most hotels take payment upfront) and I simply couldn’t figure out how to ask if they’d already charged my card, so switched to apologetic English and the manageress happily explained I can pay when I leave.

After settling into the room I headed out in search of a Western Union branch. The various Facebook groups I’ve been using to get inside tips about Argentina, are absolutely obsessed with Western Union and the so-called “Blue Dollar” rate you can get on transferring cash from a US (or U.K. or EU) bank account to Argentina. I had read that when paying with a credit card, or drawing cash from an ATM with a debit card, I could expect to get close to the “blue dollar” rate, so had not really planned to bother with Western Union. But having looked at my Revolut account, which showed me having been charged at the official rate of around 420 ARS to the pound for recent transactions (rather than the tourist rate which is closer to 1000 ARS to the pound) I quickly signed up for a WU account and transferred £200 to myself as a test run. I did all this while waiting for the flight at Buenos Aires, and by the time we boarded I’d received confirmation the money was ready to be picked up from any WU branch.

In the meantime, I reopened my Revolut app to check my balance – and saw that suddenly, magically, my recent cash and credit transactions had been adjusted to reflect the tourist rate – suddenly my steak and wine lunch from yesterday had plummeted in cost from £69 to £28! So it seems I am getting the tourist rate after all – it just takes a couple of days for the adjustment to take place (I had read about this in the Facebook groups but hadn’t been able to get my head around how it works until I saw it in practice). If you click into the two pictures below you can see the same two transactions before and after adjustment. The $ symbols are misleading – these are Argentine peso amounts but it’s the GBP equivalent that gets adjusted.

Back to Western Union, though. I located a branch and joined the inevitable queue, eventually reaching the front and presenting my transfer code to the agent, who asked for my passport, verified the transaction and asked me to sign a digital pad to complete the transaction. Then sent me to a separate counter – without handing over any cash! At the same time, I received an automated email from WU saying my money had been picked up by the receiver!

I knew the email had been triggered simply by the agent completing the transaction on her computer, but still was a bit perturbed that no activity seemed to be taking place at the counter I was now waiting at. Until, a few minutes later, a young lady emerged from a back room with literal wads of cash in her hands, to count out my order!

At a tourist rate of just over 1,000 ARS to the pound, my £200 equated to just over 213,000 ARS. But the largest bank note in Argentina is a 1,000 peso note – as a result of which I received 170 of these, and the remaining 43,000 ARS was provided in 100-peso notes (yep, 430 of those!) The agent counted and bundled it up for me with the aid of one of those machines that counts hundreds of bills at a time, then pushed the bundles through the gap in the window to me. I stuffed them into my rucksack as furtively as I could and walked out trying to look as if I wasn’t suddenly carrying stacks of cash around!

My next top was the office of “Trout and Wine”, a tour agent with whom I’ve booked a day of wine tasting on Friday. I needed to pay the balance of the tour – and whereas I’d been planning to pay by credit card, now, with all this ready cash, I decided I’d best use that. They were more than happy to be paid in cash – though I did notice that, as the tour had been priced in dollars, it worked out no cheaper for me to pay cash – they appeared to have worked out the Argentine peso equivalent amount using the tourist rate against the USD, so the overall amount I paid (when converted to GBP at the tourist rate) was roughly what I’d have paid if I’d simply paid the USD amount on my credit card.

For those who are completely lost by all this the takeaways are:

If your bank account is in the U.K., the US or the EU, you should get the tourist rate (which works massively in your favour) when buying goods and services that are priced and paid for in Argentine pesos (including ATM withdrawals)

For goods and services priced in USD you won’t get any benefit from the tourist rate.

The only benefit I can see, of WU over simply using your bank card, is that ATMs have ridiculously low limits on how much you can withdraw in one go (on my first day in BA I tried to withdraw 40,000 pesos – the equivalent of £100 at official rate or £40 at tourist rate) and it was declined as being too much! With WU you can send much larger amounts – the only limit being that if you send too big an order, many smaller agents will have insufficient cash to fulfill it so you end up having to trudge around to find an agent that has sufficient funds. But now that I know I’m getting the tourist rate on my Revolut card, I’ll mostly stick with using that.

Enough about money – back to fun stuff! Having realised just how cheap Argentina actually is, I treated myself to yet another steak dinner. This one was supposedly only 200g but I think it had suffered the same inflation as the currency, as it is certainly the biggest 200g fillet I’ve come across! Washed down, of course, with a delicious Malbec. And all for less than £10 – including a tip!

On the way back to the hotel I encountered some Argentine tourists having great fun photographing each other in front of the wonderfully colourful sign in Plaza Indepencia. I eventually asked if one of them would take a picture of me – I clearly should have worn a brighter colour!

Excursion into the Andes tomorrow – I got a great view of a snow-covered Aconcagua from the plane as we started our descent into Mendoza; hope to see it a bit closer up tomorrow!