It’s all about getting more bang for your buck

I had the privilege of being a millionaire at one stage of my life. It really was not all that it was cut out to be. That’s because I happened to be one in Vietnam – a country with a hyper-inflated currency.

The Vietnamese Dong is not very strong so everyday items and salaries tend to go up to the hundreds of thousands – and even millions. After a while you get used to halving everything and taking away plenty of zeros to convert it into rand. My maths skills really improved.

It’s said the currency is so weak that it costs the state more money to produce coins than the actual value of the coin. So, you’ll find no coins in Vietnam, something that I quite liked – along with the higher denominated notes being waterproof.

This doesn’t by any means imply that the country is poor. A walk down some of the high-end streets in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City will reveal grand designer boutiques that cater for high-rolling tourists and moneyed locals.

As a traveller one tends to visit countries where the currency will stretch further. This explains the thousands of tourists that descend upon South-East Asia throughout the year.

It also explains the recent preference among South Africans to want to travel to Thailand or Vietnam – because we get more bang for our buck.

Europe and the US are different. I’ve been told about the rand being as strong as the dollar back in the day.  What would it have felt like to experience seemingly normal prices in the US?

It is interesting to visit Cambodia and Zimbabwe where the dollar is preferred because their currency is volatile.

Watching how currency fluctuates and deflates is crazy. I remember leaving the country for my first long-term stay and the exchange rate of the rand to the dollar hovering around six to one. A year later it had jumped to twelve to one. Insane!

You can almost always spot a South African travelling in the more expensive parts of the world because each purchase is always preceded with a bit of mental arithmetic, an inner guffaw at how much something actually costs and then reluctantly buying the item.

This process is always torturous and eventually you just stop converting because doing so is too painful.

I’m glad that my first forays into Europe where made at a time before the euro. Travel to Italy, Germany and Greece was a lot more appealing when their respective currencies all hovered around an exchange rate of three to one.

Learning about the Italian lire, German mark and Greek drachma was also part of the appeal of the visit.

I understand why Asia has taken some of the travel lustre from its more Westernised counterparts. It’s making the choice between holidaying like a prince or a pauper.

I, for one, would definitely choose spending a month jaunting in some exotic budget-friendly location over a few days where every purchase is a mini-heart attack to the budget any time.

Dustin Jordan | Image: Supplied

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