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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I guess we’re still stuck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Continue reading Money Printing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}