I have always thought of myself as a prepared traveler. Though I have the tendency to procrastinate the actual executing of my plans, I make sure that I have an arsenal of information that would make my vacation a perfect one – in all aspects possible. One of the things that I pay particular attention to is the money – who doesn’t? After all, being in an unfamiliar environment without family and friends around you can be quite intimidating (though of course that is part of the adventure). My point is that you would have nowhere to run to for cash in case you run short of it.
So in planning my trips, I always check out the exchange rate before I pack my bags. The last trip I took with my husband, we learned a valuable lesson. We all know that the peso isn’t the strongest currency in the world. Of course, it is usually not a problem to have it exchanged to the local currency of your destination. So there we were, a week before our vacation, arguing quietly. My husband wanted to change our money into dollars and bring that in to Thailand. On my part I was saying that we are just going to lose money if we buy dollars here so we might as well bring pesos in. After all, the exchange rate was about 1.4 pesos to a baht then. As it turned out, I was wrong. The exchange rate as I saw it on the Internet was not the same as the applicable exchange rate when we got to Thailand. There, I got 0.5 baht for each peso! You can just imagine my dismay.
Anyhow, the lesson for me is to check out the actual prevailing exchange rates. In some countries, changing from peso to their currency is not that bad – I guess I just wasn’t informed enough at that time. We still had a blast though.
[tags]travel, Asia, Thailand, money, currency, exchange rate, baht, pesos[/tags]