As the autumnal equinox approaches – it’s less than six
weeks away – I start thinking about South America. At the moment I’m doing a
desk update on my National Geographic Traveler guide to Argentina, but from
early November I’ll be doing a field update of Moon Handbooks Patagonia.
There’ll be more on that, including some novelties, in the near future.
One topic that comes up whenever my travel season is
approaching is money and, it appears, southernmost South America could be a
little cheaper this year, what with Argentina’s
“blue” dollar and lesser declines in the Chilean and Uruguayan pesos, as
well as the Brazilian real. That, in turn, caused me to think of other
currencies, and the fact that Chile did not always call its currency the peso.
Thus, I’ve decided to award free copies of the new fourth
edition of Moon Handbooks Chile
to the first two readers who can tell me the name of Chile’s previous currency,
which lasted from 1960 until 1975. As a clue, I include an image of the Chilean
coat-of-arms, which displays the huemul (Andean deer)
and the Andean condor on either side of the lone star (no relation to Texas)
and the motto “Por La Fuerza o La Razón” (“By Might or Right” or, translated more
gently, “By Strength or Reason”).
Please do not send your answers to the comments box, but
rather to my email address, southerncone (at) mac.com. You’ll then have one
more tool to plan your holiday in Chile (and southernmost Argentina, as El Calafate and the
Argentine side of Tierra
del Fuego both appear in the book as well).
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