BootsnAll Travel Community

So, less that a month into my trip, pretty much everything short of serious injury that could go wrong has gone wrong. It's so frustrating! This is more because I need to rant than anything else...

1) I got a generic case of traveler's diarrhea, no big deal. Two weeks later I caught a much more serious case of it, with vomiting thrown in on the side for fun. This did all eventually get squared away, with the help of a home visit from a doctor and some antibiotics.

2) My credit card was stolen in the New Orleans airport and charged to the maximum. This is mostly worked out, except I don't have a credit card now.

3) I have 2 separate debit cards for the same bank account. Both were working fine for about 3 weeks, until my bank declared them fraudulent (despite the fact that I am vouching that I have both of them, and there have been no unauthorized accesses to my checking account.) Neither of them work now and there is "nothing" the bank can do except mail me a new card. IE: No way to get money!

As a result I've been in Oaxaca for the last 2 weeks, much of which was just spent sitting around waiting for the credit and debit card to be mailed to me. Needless to say, it's taking forever to get here... and the bank DIDN'T RECORD the tracking number so I have no idea where it is or when it's supposed to get in!!!! I could leave tomorrow, I could leave in a week.

Oh yeah, and then when I contacted the bank to get the non-existent tracking number they realized that they had "forgotten" to send the new debit card, so that needs to be mailed to me separately. (Probably mailed ahead to Belize.) GRRR!!!

Anyways, I'm hoping that I've managed to get all the crappy parts of traveling over with at the beginning, and hopefully the next 18 months aren't all more of the same...

Hang in there, M.

My bank canceled my ATM card while I was in Ethiopia because the number was skimmed in Jordan. I'd already exchanged the max in travelers checks allowed by law. My bank said it would reactivate it just so I could get money to get out of the country but it never worked. I had put a down payment on a chair and had to ship it to the US and had to pay off my hotel bill. I had $1.50 left. Thankfully I had another ATM card at a separate bank but it was a Mastercard and only one bank in the country takes MC. I paid something like 9.5% to take out the money.

I already had a flight to Madagascar so I continued on. My credit card had expired in the meantime so I had my ATM and new credit card FedExed to me in Madagscar! I had to wait around for 5 days which was a total waste. So I empathize, I've been there. Of course there's no FedEx in Mad so I was waiting around for some random guy in a scooter to show up.

Despite giving my bank a list of places I was going beforehand and having my mom as the executor of my accounts it still put a hold on my card almost every time I took out money. My mom had no legal ground to say it was okay, so I'm not sure what the point of putting her on my accounts was!

It will get better, really!

I have been so fortunate that I've never had to deal with that!! I can't imagine how frustrating it must be. But you are right - it sounds like you've gotten it all out of the way now and are well on your way to happy travels! Good luck with it all!