Money Matters

Prior to leaving on our trip… the last few days we were concerned about the “state” of our bills – forgot the official terms, but most of what we ended up getting from our bank in town was not ‘new’, even though that’s what we had asked for. After getting in contact with a couple of other families who had traveled recently – all who said that in Karaganda they recommended ‘new’ based on their experiences of folks being very selective and particular about the bills – we spent more time that we had planned on going around to banks trading bills around. Invested a lot of time looking at individual bills, looking for marks (stamp marks, pen/pencil, dirt, etc), folds/creases, tears, holes (even from a staple); even pulled out the iron. We thought they looked pretty darn good when all was said and done. Would recommend taking new bills, as much as you can - once you are there in KZ, it would be harder to deal with than just taking the time to get them here in the states. I recall hearing something about holidays (e.g. around Christmas & New Year) is one of the few times when new bills are available in larger numbers - might be worth checking out with your bank.

Now all that said, I don’t know what they would have done in the region/Zhez if they didn’t like some of our bills. We only saw our regional coordinator once, for about 20 min, since she was not based in Zhez. She came to town in the morning, left in the afternoon; I suppose that day she could have raised an issue. Maybe they were just fine, but maybe it just was not convenient for her to make an issue of it either. We honestly don't know.

In Zhez, there were no credit cards accepted – just ATM or exchange. The only exception we can recall was the Baykonur hotel, they told us they accepted Visa (not MC or AmEx). We had not brought enough cash to cover our expenses, so were thankful our ATM card worked. Would recommend checking with your ATM provider as to coverage, and bring a couple cards with different networks if you can.

Yes, we did carry around ’the cash’ with money belts; and it certainly felt much better to have that burden lifted when we met with our region coordinator. Given that the regional coordinator did not live in Zhez, we ended up having this on our persons for a longer time than we anticipated. After that we kept cash on our persons and hidden in a couple places in our room.

Also worth noting is that Tenge take ‘a fair amount of space’ in your wallet. Recommend keeping what you think you need readily available, and the rest that you are carrying around more secure location.