#150 – The Expat Files: Life in Latin America – Real Stories, Real Advice

Automatically transcribed from the original recording; names and wording may contain errors.

[00:03] Hi everybody, I'm Johnny Mueller and you're listening to the expat files living in Latin America. The show that tells you what it's really like to live, work, play and or retire in Latin America. I tell it just like it is, not the version they give you in those glossy travel magazines or the picture they paint for you in those international traveler websites where they're only trying to sell you something. What's it really like for expats living in Latin America? Well, if you stick around a while you'll find out, so let's get started. Now before we get into the good stuff today, I'd like to remind you that I have a new website www.expatwisdom.com and if you go there you'll find some new audios, some tweets, some blogs and some all round really good and cool information about how to live the good life down here

[00:51] in Latin America and how to live, work, play and or retire in Europe if that's your preference. And of course it'll be me talking about and blogging and tweeting on everything Latin American and for those of you who've got questions about moving to Europe, my friend and expert expat on Europe, Robert Culpepper will be blogging and doing audios on the site too. So be sure to check it out at www.expatwisdom.com and of course once you get there on the homepage you'll have a lot of choices but you should also take a look at my big free report, 17 undiscovered paradises in Latin America and these are just 17 of the off the radar places that I recommend. All great places to live, work, retire, start a business or just hang around down here and these are 17 places that I've explored personally and they're way off the gringo tourist trail. So have a look at the report and see just what I'm talking about and sure I could recommend

[01:38] a thousand other places but you have to start somewhere so get the report and see if you've ever even heard of any of these places, maybe one or two but I doubt it. And just for that reason alone these places hold great opportunities for expats and expat wannabes. And you know sometimes people ask me, what makes a person an expert expat? How come when you talk to some expats they look to be settled well enough in their new Latin lifestyle and obviously they wouldn't be down here if they didn't like it and get a hell of a lot out of it and a lot of the long term expats that I know that are very successful are pretty low key about it and they don't like to go around telling their secrets. They really don't want the rest of the world to find out about the gringo advantage and sometimes I can't blame them but when you talk to some of them they don't seem to be a fountain of information like certain other expats are. You know with some expats you ask them a question like, for example, what are a few of the things

[02:26] you had to do before you built your house? Or what kind of pointers can you give me before I buy one? Well some expats will give you a three sentence answer and others will give you a full blown description that takes an hour and a half. Well it turns out that they're really expert expats, like my friend Robert Culpepper who knows everything and anything about moving to Europe. Well he's just one of those guys that's a massive fountain of information on whatever subject you want to ask him about, in regards to living, working, playing and or retiring in Europe of course. And you know it's not enough to just be a good observer to be an expert expat and you don't have to be an Einstein either. Look at me. Just like you don't have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to be extremely successful down here. Look at expat Eddie and don't tell him I said that okay? What I'm saying is there's a wide range of successful expats down here, from the really brilliant ones to the ones that look like they can't even tie their shoes.

[03:13] But still most of them end up being quite successful. And if I could make an analogy it would be this. Let's take medical doctors for example. In every graduating class of a hundred medical doctors there's the top ten in the class and the bottom ten in the class. And they all graduate with their doctorate degree right? And they all get the same nice diploma to put on the wall and none of their patients really ever know if they graduated at the top, the bottom or the middle of their class. Though wouldn't that be cool if that information was on the diploma right? Well the thing is that top five or ten percent of the class are the guys who are going to have most of all the answers when you need them. Or at least you can make a damn good guess that they have a much better handle on medicine than the bottom five percent of the class does now don't they? And you can look at expats that way too. You take a hundred expats living down here in Latin America, they all wouldn't be down

[03:59] here if they could do better up in the first world, or have less stress and more opportunity up there, that's what they're down here for. But you're not going to get the real detailed expanded dirt on everything that happens down here in Latin America, or how to go about playing all the angles from most of those expats because sure they're all adventurers but the majority of them just aren't great observers and are knowledgeable only in their own narrow area of expertise. For example an expat couple may have come down from the states to open a bed and breakfast in Panama. That's their small limited area of expertise. They probably haven't built their own house or houses from scratch. They haven't imported or exported machinery or containers back and forth from the US, driven a car or truck down from the states through ten different borders, hired and fired and managed dozens of Spanish speaking locals, handled payrolls, dealt with government bureaucrats

[04:46] and lawyers, etc. etc. You get what I mean, the average expat that comes down here has his ideas and he has his narrow range of interests and he may be the expert expat in his own particular little niche like owning and operating a mom and pop bed and breakfast, but you ask him about import taxes or driver's licenses or water purification or farming or solar energy or mining, he's just going to shrug his shoulders and give you a funny look because those aren't his areas of expertise. And though he might know a little bit about some of that stuff, you really want to get the dirt from the most expert expats you can find. Expats who've been down here a very long time, not people who've only got a couple of years experience in the third world. People like that have only just scratched the surface, believe me. And as for me, I've been down here 21 years now and I certainly don't know everything and I don't claim to, but I do have the curiosity and I've got my boots on the ground down here

[05:34] so I can dish out advice with the best of them. A sort of an expat and landers, that's what expat Eddie calls me. I mean, for example, if you've got a health problem and you need an operation, wouldn't you much rather go to a doctor who's done a few thousand of those operations over 20 years rather than go to a guy who's been out of school just a few years and who's done just a dozen or so operations like that? You know, I look at some of the expat blogs sometime on the internet, there's thousands of them, believe me, with the vast majority of them written by guys and gals who've been trekking through Peru or Bolivia with only four or five months under their belts as expats and now all of a sudden they've got a blog site and they're the experts. Hey, you know, I'm not dissing them because they've got something to say, they're traveling and they've got some experience, so good, tell us your experiences. But me and a lot of long-term expats know these guys only have a limited amount of knowledge

[06:21] about things. They should just stick to the travel log and please don't tell us how to build our houses down here or give us pointers on how to hire an architect or run a farm. You can go ahead and blog about that stuff after you've been building and constructing things down here in Latin America for about 10 or 15 years. You know, I read stories on the web all the time about someone who's built a house or a condo down here. Yep, just one little house or one little condo and they're telling you what to do and what not to do like they're the experts. You can be the expert expat on that after you've built about 10 or 12 of those projects, but until then these guys should just stick to travel logs and funny one-of-a-kind personal anecdotes. I don't want to know about how to deal with the Latin bureaucracy from a guy who's only been living in Costa Rica for two months, but I'll take some advice about bureaucrats from expat Eddie because he's had 9 or 10 businesses down here.

[07:08] Plus, he's spent a weekend or two in a Latin jail, which is a great qualifier too. So I guess I'm saying you have to be a little bit leery of so-called experts blogging on the internet or people with their own websites, especially those promoting certain Latin American countries or cities in Latin America. For example, every Latin American tourist destination has first world gringo style weekly or monthly publications, little booklets, papers, or magazines that are sometimes free on the newsstand and in tourist bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. And they usually have a nice fold-out map of the area in the center seam. So all the tourists pick them up because they're in English and they're great little guides. And what these little glossy magazines and papers are are simply promotions for all the tourist joints in town. And in between all those ads are articles written by so-called expert gringos who've

[07:53] been living in that little tourist town for some time. Now the whole object of magazines and publications like those is to entice first world gringos and tourists to patronize the advertisers. And the gringos who write the little articles in those magazines are specifically instructed to say only good things about that little tourist area. Their orders are to spin it nice and dish no dirt. They won't talk about the contaminated water or the raw sewage being dumped into the lake nearby or the recent cholera epidemic in the capital. Or if you start a business or build a house that the price of electricity per kilowatt hour is twice or even three times what you pay back in Cleveland. Nope, you won't read about that because that would be bad for tourism and development. So who's the real expert expat then? The expat who's writing all that positive fluff in the tourist magazines? Or long-term expats like me who mix in reality with the fluff?

[08:42] It's your call but if I was an expat wannabe I'd want to hear the good, the bad and the ugly before I ever decided to come down on a long-term basis. Okay enough said about that. You know lately I've been getting emails from people asking me about how to travel down in Latin America if you don't have a car and they know that I don't recommend chicken buses. I've certainly made that point clear enough on my show. Not only are chicken buses dirty, unsanitary and overloaded, smelly and in terrible mechanical condition, they often have bad if not non-existent brakes and none of them, I mean none of them, have a complete set of working brake lights or headlights all the way around. And not the least of it is that they blow huge clouds of smoke. And it's obvious that Latin governments don't give a damn about any of that because if they really cared they'd have to pull in every single one off the road and completely repair

[09:29] the ones that they could and buy brand new ones to fill the rest of the routes which they're never going to do. And on top of all that, the drivers are absolutely insane or at least it looks that way. But the fact is they're dangerous and they take a lot of chances because of the pay structure. They don't get paid a straight salary, they get paid by the number of people they rack up by the end of the day. So they're always racing and packing in as many people as they possibly can. That's how they make their money and it has bad consequences. They pass people anytime they want, they ignore double yellow lines and they even pass on blind curves. So whenever you're driving a car yourself, you have to really be on the lookout. So keep this in mind if you're ever in Latin America. When you're driving and you're coming around a curve, you have to slow down and hug the inside lane because there's just no telling if a bus is coming from the other direction

[10:15] and of course you can't see them yet. You can't see around the curve yourself because this is mountainous country and often it's impossible to see the whole length of the curve, not to mention what's coming the other way. Well there's a good chance that a bus could be coming and passing someone at the same time on that curve. Now I've seen dozens of head-on collisions like that and I've seen people pushed right off the road trying to avoid a head-on collision with one of those buses. The fact is every time I've taken a little weekend car trip down here in Latin America, I see at least one bus rolled over in a ditch with its front end beyond recognition because it's been so smashed in by a head-on collision that it looks like how they draw head-on collisions in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Accidents like that are so common that you just get used to them and I mean really heavy duty crashes where the bus is on its side in a ditch or part of it simply flat like

[11:02] a pancake. Then I gotta think that every Latin that rides the bus every day to work after a certain amount of time has to himself have been in one of those buses during one of those terrible crashes. And you know lately I've been thinking about that and I've been asking some locals about it too. And it's true, every Latin that I talk to who takes the bus regularly has been in one of those crashes. And luckily only the passengers who are hanging out the doors and windows ever get really severely injured because in the cities at least the buses can't get up a lot of speed. When they have those crashes they're usually going 10 or 15 or 20 miles an hour luckily. But on those county roads that's where people get killed all the time. That's where those buses take blind curves at 50, 60 and 70 miles an hour. The fact is when I did my trial seminar back in February in Guatemala and we were tooling

[11:47] along in our own little van, well just as we got about 10 or 15 minutes out of Guatemala City, we came across a terrible bus accident that must have happened about 5 minutes before we got there. It was obvious a chicken bus had tried to pass on a blind curve. It was very obvious. The bus was smoking in a ditch. The front end smashed in like a pancake along with a destroyed car and a pickup truck. Obviously somehow all three made contact in that curve. A neighborhood gapers block was forming as usual and the cops had just arrived to direct traffic. And as we slowed down all the people in my little chartered bus started taking photos and gasping. Oh my god look at that. What a wreck. And to them well it was quite a show. But to me just part of living down in Latin America I see something like that every week or so. And you know things like that never happen to smart expats like me because we never ride

[12:36] chicken buses and when we're driving our cars when we go into a blind curve we always hug the right side of the road. And get far far away from that center line if there is a center line painted at all which there usually isn't. Because so many times you'll encounter a bus or a car taking up half of your lane and there's too. A recipe for disaster. So once again don't ride those chicken buses even though they're quaint and those tourist rags and magazines advise you to try one. So that brings us right back around to that question again. How do you get around in Latin America if you're not supposed to ride the chicken buses? And if you're backpacking around a lean budget you don't want to take taxis because even though they're a lot cheaper than they are in the states if you have to take one everywhere you go it's still going to cost you some bread. So in big Latin American cities just what do taxis cost?

[13:21] Well I can tell you this. If you're going to take a three mile taxi ride let's say which is about five kilometers and by the way 98% of the taxis down here don't run a meter you just tell them where you want to go and they give you a price. Though strangely enough once in a while you will see a meter in a taxi. But only in the big city. But the problem is like I've said a hundred times there's no such thing as the word maintenance in Latin America and the more complicated and high-tech things are down here. All things electronic and digital that is like meters in taxis with digital readouts well as you might imagine these guys maintain their meters as well as they maintain their cars which means no maintenance at all. Not until something breaks and when the meter breaks it's broken usually forever because guess what if your meter is broken the car still works right and you can still pick up fares and make money and it costs real money to fix a piece of electronics you can't take

[14:09] it to that corner mechanic he can't do a thing with it. So taxi drivers figure if their meter breaks why pay for a dead horse so it just sits there sometimes all lit up like a Christmas ornament but that's all it is is an ornament. So if you're used to staring at that meter in a New York cab forget it you're out of luck down here but no need to worry because cabs down here are very cheap unless you're really down here on the cheap yourself and doing the low-rent backpacker thing and you've got one of those old 60s travel books that says you can do Latin America on five bucks a day and you know it's true Latin America is cheap but five bucks a day maybe if you're in the jungle eating strictly plants and roots and communing with the monkeys but not in the real world. But what about those taxi prices for example a five kilometer or three mile ride will almost always be under five bucks sometimes only two or three dollars now if you're in any

[14:58] big first world city you're never going to get away with less than fifteen bucks for a ride like that so you're looking at taxis being three or four times as cheap as they are in the first world and by the way there's always room for negotiation too so if you're going across town and a guy says he wants eight or ten bucks for the ride if you offer him five or six he almost always will take it but you don't want to insult a guy by only offering him half of what he's asking for then he might just say screw it and go but it's perfectly reasonable to offer him about three quarters of what he's asking and here's a little trick if you know any Spanish at all you can always get a cheaper price than if you'd asked him in English because somehow they think that if a gringo knows Spanish he's pretty astute and he's not going to easily fall for gringo prices and by the way down here in Latin America off the tourist track off the first world gringo track you'll almost never get stiffed with gringo prices from the taxi drivers except at the airport because

[15:47] obviously even in big cities off the tourist trail a certain number of gringos come in by air because you have embassy workers and conventions and stuff and the taxi drivers learn awful quickly that if they see a gringo they can jack up the price because he won't know the difference and almost never complains no matter what the rate is because the inflated price is always somewhat cheaper than what he'd pay for the same service back home so even when you're off the tourist trail you have gringo prices from taxi drivers at airports and you have gringo prices from taxi drivers at big international hotel districts because remember now they don't have meters and if they do they're not working so even if it says on the side of the cab so many boulevards pesos lampitas colonas or quetzales per kilometer there's really no keeping track of that stuff without a working meter now right and like

[16:33] I told you in past shows all big Latin American cities whether they're off the tourist track or on have a big commercial business district with all the major hotels Marriott, Holiday Inn, Radisson, Hilton and of course any gringo is coming to town are going to land at the airport and get taxied right into one of these hotels because that's usually the ones they book for conventions conferences business meetings and embassy events and that's why taxi drivers like to hang out right in front of those hotels because they know if they snag a gringo they'll be able to nail them with gringo prices which are often double what the locals will pay for the same ride that is unless you know how to tell them where you're going to go in pretty good Spanish because then he'll figure he can't nail you with gringo prices because you're pretty astute and you know that game but you know in the smaller Latin American towns off the tourist trail

[17:19] of a hundred thousand people or less there's no such thing as gringo prices because they just don't see many gringos at all and haven't figured out they can squeeze them and you know there's a whole psychology to gringo pricing in those tourist towns like down in Costa Rica those local taxi drivers and tour guides and such know just how far they can push a gringo by just looking at him they got a price for gringo backpackers a price for middle class gringos with kids a higher price yet for high class gringos with designer khakis and jungle trekking equipment and they got a whole different set of gringo prices for gringo women coming in groups singles and pairs and that's why Costa Ricans don't much like certain European tourists like Germans who'd rather walk the four hours to the volcano than to pay gringo prices and get stuck for ten dollars extra on a taxi

[18:04] but that's another story and by the way that's why people who work at restaurants on the tourist trail like Costa Rica Panama etc why they totally dislike customers that are backpackers the Germans the French and other Latin American tourists from adjacent countries because they just don't tip and I should add Australians and Canadians to that too though not as cheap as Germans and backpackers they tip about half as much as US citizens and it turns out that US citizens tip as well as Lindsay Lohan parties because they don't get much vacation like Europeans do you see US citizens only get their usual two or three weeks a year whereas Europeans get double or triple that so naturally Americans try to pack as much fun and good times as they can into that two or three weeks and no matter how frugal they might have been back in the states during the year they pull out all the stops

[18:51] when they're on vacation especially when they're in a foreign country and they've got all their plastic on hand and remember ladies that come on vacation down to places like Costa Rica have been dieting and exercising their asses off for the last few months most girls and ladies come down there for the beaches so they work overtime before they come down to look their best in those bikinis and because those ladies have worked so hard and they look better than they have all year they get those winks and nods from all those macho latin guys and that's the kind of attention they may have never gotten up in the first world and the truth is they needn't have worked that hard at all because latin guys love gringas in any size shape or form anyway that's yet another reason why gringos tip so well okay so i gave you a little bit of the dirt on taxis and with regard to taxis if you're staying in one of the big cities you definitely won't break the bank if

[19:38] you use taxis and walking as your only means of getting around but remember you're probably not going to stay in a city exclusively you're going to get out and about and hit the highway or the jungle or the pyramids or the beaches or the volcanoes or whatever and down here in latin america taxis don't take you from one city to the other they're all very local and won't hit the highway so other than flying how do you get from city to city then well as luck would have it every latin american country has a number of private bus lines somewhat based on the greyhound line up in the states though much cheaper and better and some of those private bus lines even operate internationally like for example one called tica bus and the other called king coach by internationally i mean the bus lines routes extend through many latin american countries and they even have their own little hotels along the route or they've made deals with hotels along the route so that passengers

[20:27] let's say that want to go from mexico city to panama city which means the bus has to go through mexico guadamala salador honduras and costa rica before it even gets to panama well a trip like that is usually an overnighter so these bus lines will promise you a nice clean safe hotel when they do make that overnight stop and i've done quite a few of those bus trips myself and though those hotels are by no means luxurious they're safe and they only run about 20 bucks a night and the bus is parked right outside now one of these private lines that goes from mexico down to panama and all places in between is called the tica bus and here's the nice thing if you're going between borders you don't even have to get off the bus you just hand your passport to the driver and he does all your paperwork for you while you sit on the bus and he walks into the border and customs

[21:13] office and does the deal the bus line provides that as part of its service they're used to cutting through all the red tape because they come through once or twice a day through each border and what's it cost well last time i checked you could go all the way from mexico city to panama city for about 125 dollars and those are real luxury buses plush seats bathrooms and air conditioning that's a must and they all have first run movies with spanish subtitles pirated of course and when i talk about the fact that it's safe and there's smooth sailing through all the borders once in a while there will be a customs inspection and they'll make you get out and they'll look at your luggage but the only time that's really ever happened to me was on the border of mexico and guadamala and the border of nicaragua and costa rica and in fact it's happened to me every single time i've ever taken a bus into

[22:00] costa rica the costa rican officials like to make everyone drag all their luggage off that bus then they poke through it and ask you all kinds of questions all because costa rica has very high import taxes compared to the adjacent countries and people traveling by bus into costa rica namely costa ricans coming back into their own country are notorious for buying stuff like stereos and cd players and tv's and microwaves and stuff in countries where the prices are much cheaper like in nicaragua then they scuff them up a bit and try to get them back into costa rica as used personal items and sometimes that works by the way but a lot of times costa ricas will press their luck and try to bring too many items like that back through then the custom officials just won't buy it and they'll nail them for a tax right then and there so if you're a gringo traveling on a bus like

[22:45] that you get all your stuff picked through too so just know that if you're traveling in and out of and also know that if you're traveling through land borders in between latin american countries the little government immigration buildings that you have to stop at are all horribly dirty and scruffy and there's all manner of dirty sweaty humanity hanging around with most of them just trying to get their own papers in order trying to cross and under the circumstances the only advantage that they have over you is that they speak spanish and they get to cross the border usually for free since latin american governments have agreements with each other to that effect and you as a gringo depending what land border you're traveling through will pay anywhere from 15 to 30 bucks to get into the next country and by the way when you're passing through any land border in latin america expect confusion noise heat people bugging you to buy stuff bad smells

[23:33] tons of litter huge lines of trucks blowing clouds of smoke every which way and talk about heat it's usually sweltering because those border crossings are almost always at sea level or near it and for some odd reason they always seem to be in the ugliest nasty looking regions of the country and if you're not in one of those nice air conditioned buses you're gonna suffer because then like i said you're gonna have to haul all your stuff over to customs wait about a half an hour or 45 minutes until they process you through and don't forget you're a captive audience and there's gonna be a lot of people standing around with wads of cash yelling cambio cambio these are the money changers and they always seem to give very good rates but you have to watch out these guys are experts at ripping off foreigners and gringos some of those guys use little folding tricks where they count the same bill twice and you'll never know that until you pull it out later at a hotel or a tn and

[24:22] you start going through and you found out you've been stiffed believe me these guys are experts at stiffing you i mean they won't rob you blind if you change a hundred dollars they might stick you for five or ten and of course not all of them will do it but quite a few can and they all know how especially when they see stupid clueless gringos all miserable and sunburned like lobsters wearing bermuda shorts and their legs looking like a mosquito war zone i mean that's a sure sign to a local money changer that you're new in these parts easy pickings and of course they're waiting to see how you speak too if you speak nothing but english and your spanish is absolutely miserable well you better make them count your money out really slow they know you don't know one country's denomination from another much less the exchange rate within 20 or 30 percent but the other thing is this those money changers have a habit of slipping in counterfeit bills on you too just

[25:10] one or two counterfeit bills slipped in with every naive gringo transaction makes for a pretty good business for a gray market guy at the border now doesn't it because you see nobody's regulating these guys nobody needs a license to do that they just show up in the morning with a lot of bills and start in with the combio combio bit once again just don't trust those guys because if you do get ripped off the guy's gonna disappear in a hurry there's swarms of scruffy looking low-class people at the border believe me and he'll slip away like water through a crack you'll never see him again but even though there's loads of low-class people at the border you don't have to worry about being robbed they're jumped because there's also a lot of government officials hanging around the border and policemen and it's not good business at all to jump or rob tourists or truck drivers and believe me the truck drivers outnumber the tourists like 10 to 1 in fact sometimes when

[25:56] you're heading towards a border as you get closer and closer within two or three miles suddenly the roadside will be just filled with trucks big semis and trailers and tankers you name it you can count dozens of them and you know truck drivers are tough up in the first world but you should see them down here in latin america they don't take any crap from anybody i'm not saying you're gonna have problems with them you won't at all they're nice as can be to tourists but they're kind of like a club and if one of them was ever to be jumped or robbed word will get out fast and they'll find that guy and he'll end up in the bottom of a ravine somewhere that's for sure and that's why border crossings are actually pretty safe and you don't have to worry a bit despite the horrible ambience and what they look like though remember this many of them closed at six o'clock at night and you don't want to stay out at one of the really crappy hotels at the border and that's what they are really crappy so make sure you get there during the daylight hours

[26:44] for sure and by the way what i just said about the safety of the border only applies during the daytime now if you're in any city in latin america and you want to go to another city within the same country take a private bus line there are always nice big spacious buses with comfortable seats and bathrooms and air conditioning and never even 10 is screwed up as a chicken bus is inside there's no comparison at all anyway the common man who pays about three or four bucks to take a chicken bus ride from city to city could never afford to pay the 10 or 15 bucks it might cost on a private bus line and by the way if you're wondering what it costs to ride a chicken bus within a city the fare is 25 to 50 cents and by the way here's another reason you might not want to ride a chicken bus just close your eyes and stick your head into a parked chicken bus one day and take a whiff that's what you might call vintage high school gym locker south of the border

[27:38] you've been listening to the expat files living in latin america coming to you each week from somewhere south of the border and don't forget you can email me on anything at all about latin america the expat files at gmail.com once again the expat files at gmail.com see you next time