Insurance was also painless. It looks like someone is working on reducing bureaucracy here at last. The other success today was that we found a way around the limitations for buying tickets on Drukair.
One of the problems that Bhutanese companies have is paying for items in foreign currency. I don’t think that the problem can be as big as they make out given that there is so much international aid here, but to some extent there is a problem. The solution is to get tourists to pay for everything in US dollars – the chosen international currency.
Unfortunately, those restrictions are extended to all chilips living in Bhutan. Druk Air tickets can’t be bought outside of the cities they fly to/ from, so we must buy the tickets for our visitors here, but we can’t buy air tickets unless we pay in USD. But where do an Australian and a European get USD from? Until now, we’ve had to ask all our visitors to repay us for their tickets in USD. Cash, since we can’t use their travellers cheques.
That hasn’t been a major issue until now, but our guests have been young and carefree. Marie’s parents are a different matter though, especially since they were recently mugged in France. They turned up with Euro travellers cheques, causing Marie and I to panic about how we’d pay for the tickets for my family to visit in June.
There’s always a solution, and a trip to the bank and Druk Air revealed that Marie can write a cheque to Druk Air in USD and the bank will honour it. I’m not sure that the economics work out. It’s a Euro account in a local bank (hence in Ngultrum) and when the airline cashes the cheque, it must be paid in Nu.
Ah, but now Marie tells me that when she tried to implement the idea, it took an hour to cash the cheques and since we can only get $500 per month, that’s all the bank would cash. A return ticket generally costs $750.
I guess we’re still stuck.