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VISA revenge
- Older in Altai Bike Expedition, 2006: Noey and Jon in Almaty - Newer in Altai Bike Expedition, 2006: Ust Komenogorsk
When I inserted my Fidelity Visa debit card into an ATM machine on Sunday, the machine alerted some Dickens-like clerk in a dark cobwebbed room. The clerk quickly leafed through his big ledger book and snorted, "Huh, this is funny. Last time Jon Turk used his credit card, he was in Danbury, CT." Then he turned to another musty book and said, "Huh, this is even stranger. Jon Turk didn't book any international flights with his credit card. (Noey paid for the airline tickets with her credit card.) But now someonw is demanding cash in Almaty, Kazakhstan. And then he pulled the big red lever on the wall and the machine did not give me any money.
Two days later I tried the card again in another ATM machine. The clerk, now tired, grumpy, and overworked, alerted a horde of gnome soldiers and they raced to the second ATM machine, grabbed my card, and sequestered it in dark tunnels of the corporate/facist netherworld, guarded by fierce trolls with gleaming battle-axes.
Seventy dollars in phone calls later, an ultra-polite receptionist in a mud hut with geaming electronics in the slums of Bombay pulled the green lever on the wall to dispense some money for us.
Expeditions are a compression and amplification of "real" life because you are more vulnerable, more alone, and with less stuff. But the goal -- both in expeditions and in real life -- is not so much to avert disaster, because that is impossible, but to have enough redundancy, back-up, and maybe luck to absorb the glitches and move on.
We have a guide, a map, and money. Today we board the train to the north to start riding.
Dated: 07/03/2006
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