PROJECTS — [PART 4] Travels with Dad

Money for Nothin by RANDY FERTEL

When we were heading off around the world in my teenage years, Dad announced that it was important to have tip money when you got to each country. So he sent me down to the Whitney Bank to buy “tip packs.” Tip packs solved the problem of having to wait in line for ten minutes each time you crossed a border. Besides, Rodney thought those exchange offices in airports and at border crossings were nothing but dens of thieves.

Of course, tip packs created other problems. The exchange rate at a New Orleans bank teller cage was at least as unfavorable as the one at a cambio window. Apparently the Whitney Bank was a den of thieves, too. Because each tip pack was worth the awkward equivalent of $10, there were not just pounds and francs and marks but also pence and centimes and pfennigs to deal with. These coins added a lot of weight.

Since traveling light was one of Dad’s cardinal rules, he decided that we should jettison the added weight. Even freed of these little offenders, we had so many tip packs that we had to have a separate gym bag to tote them. We never got through them all.

Dad was very aware of exchange rates. And he played them like they were the stock market or the ponies. During an earlier trip to Hawaii, he learned that Japanese yen were a steal outside of the Land of the Rising Sun. This opportunity to avenge Pearl Harbor and make a buck was too good to pass up. So while I worked the waves on Waikiki, he worked the banks, found the best exchange rate and purchased $10,000 in yen. He carried that kind of cash in hundreds of dollars rolled in his pocket and secured with a rubber band. The equivalent yen in a roll would have been the circumference of one of those airborne torpedoes that did such damage on December 7, 1941. We had to purchase a gym bag for that trip, too.

Then when we landed in Tokyo, Dad quickly learned that yes, the exchange rate would have yielded hundreds of quick bucks, but no, if you didn’t have your receipt for having exchanged them on Japanese soil, you couldn’t turn them back into greenbacks. Dad cursed the “Japs” all the way to a Hong Kong currency exchange, where he took a beating worse than the killing he had planned to make.

The large bankroll my Dad habitually carried became an issue when we were leaving India. The country required you to declare the amount of cash you were carrying when you entered it and when you left. And they were pretty good at making sure the two more or less matched. . While we played tourist for a week there, my father found that the difference between the exchange rate in the banks and on the black market was a temptation he couldn’t resist. Playing the black market was almost as much fun as betting the ponies at the Fair Grounds. And he had that yen trading disaster to make up.

We were on our way out of New Delhi when a government official, looking at the paperwork we had filled out when entering the country, asked how much money Dad had. Dad mentioned some innocuous amount that vaguely jived with the couple thousand dollars he had declared. The official then asked him to empty his pockets. He timidly produced his roll, a bolus large enough to choke a Burmese python.

The official turned his dark eyes on me. At the time India was in the middle of one of its worst droughts in modern memory. The summer monsoons had not arrived. The streets had been full of scrawny sacred cows picking their way among the emaciated populace. Thousands slept nightly on the sidewalks. All I could think of, as the official looked me over, was how thin the gruel must be in Indian prisons if the streets were that impoverished. I burst into tears.

And apparently saved us a trip to the hoosegow. The official took one look at the tears and offered a remark that has haunted me ever since. In his clipped Raj accent he said: “I just wanted to see how Sahib would react.” Apparently black marketeers and smugglers are less free with their tears or have less active imaginations as they visualize life inside Indian jails. A cooler response would have confirmed his suspicions.

Sometimes strength lies in weakness. We were allowed to leave on the next flight home. (with or without the money???)