We spent an inordinate amount of time getting Rupees.
We had informed both our bank, Bank of America and our Credit Card Company, Capital One that we would be in India. Actually, Capital One does not let you tell them where you are going. They say the card will just work. But of course they cut the card off as soon as you start using it.
The heart of the problem is old age. Young people do everything on their phones. I don’t. Luckily our daughter had a world enabled work phone that she could use! I have a “spare”, unlocked, iphone. You can read all about how I acquired that phone at This Link. Early in this India trip, but not yet, our driver took us to a “Cell Phone” stall where I got an India SIM and number. However, the last thing I wanted to do was connect all my accounts to that number which of course would stop working once I returned to the US. And I did not want to connect anything to my normal Cell Phone which stayed in airplane mode while in India and was only used to GPS and as a camera.
So, basically we had the laptops and the logins to fight the “your card has been blocked” attacks. They reoccurred whenever we switched towns. Sometimes we would get an email or find a link on the sites where we could assure the provider that we were who we said we were.
The trick that really saves us is the family cell phone account. All 4 of our phones are under the same account at Verizon. Our older daughter has looked at “getting out of this stupid family control” but reports that it is a bad financial move. It really saves our goose in situations like this. At some point, the bank or credit card decides that not only has the card been stolen but since the ip address of the laptop login keeps changes, the password to the company must also have been compromised and we will need to use the dreaded “cell phone confirmation code” catch 22. Luckily, God has provided a work around. The providers will allow us to “add a phone” as long as when they check with Verizon, Verizon confirms that the phone is also under Tom Pears. Soooo, we set up communication with the daughter in LA. We have to figure out the time of day when we are both awake. This usually is done with Whatsapp but it could be done with Elizabeth’s work phone. We then enter the presently in the US daughter’s phone as the login conformation code recipient, she gets the code, tells it to us and we enter it in the laptop.
DaDa, money flows again! Another work around is to pass the entire username password combination to the daughter with a US ip address and she logs in as us and effects the steps. I don’t know how other old people survive. One couple I met in India uses an Indian or international debit card. They load money on that and use it as they move around.
Our biggest hurtle, if the above was not daunting enough, was that the tour company, who provided our drives and railroad tickets, waned to be paid in cash. One option would have been to pay them up front. Having never used a tour company before, this did not occur to us. Kim, Elizabeth and I each have Bank Of America cards that allow for 10000 rupees a day withdrawal. Each day the driver would stop at a bank ATM and all three of us would go in and take out the maximum. Even with this routine we found that coming up with the $1000 tour company money was going to leave us too short of funds. We could have forced the tour company to take a credit card.
I always try to plan for the worse case. I travel a fair amount for pleasure and always take $500 in $100 dollar bills and at least $500 in old old American Express Travelers Checks (Remember Them?) that are left over from the 80s and 90s. Knowing I had daughter Elizabeth along, I brought $500 in American Express checks that she had carried as emergency backup in France when she was like 16. So, with a lot of “no we do not cash traveler’s checks”, our driver finally took us to the Thomas Cook office in Delphi. We left Elizabeth there to fight the bureaucracy and 15 minutes later she came out with $500 in Rupees!