or: Sometimes it is good to wait and sometimes it is not

Many oreigners living in Hong Kong take the opportunity to explore Asia during their stay. Sometimes it is for work; sometimes it is for pleasure.

Some countries are so big that you know you need to go more than once to explore it properly. As an example, Indonesia has over 17,500 islands and the Philippines has over 7,500, so seeing a couple of places doesn’t really do the country justice (HK has just over 260 islands, in case you were curious).

For this reason, most of us either convert some cash before we go or take it out at the ATM on arrival and when we return, we keep our excess currency in labeled envelopes or ziploc bags. We know we’re likely to be back.

The last time I was in the Philippines was in 2013. I knew I’d be back. It has some of the best diving in the world and the people I met were all incredibly friendly and helpful.

I didn’t realise that it would take me 6 years to return.

I also didn’t realise that in that time they had changed their notes.

We found out by using some of my cash to pay at a small roadside stall. When we were initially being told “no,” we thought it was because we were buying too little for the size note we were using so we looked to buy extra. It took a little bit until we realised the problem.

Lucky for us, one of my travel companions had a small bit of the notes that were now in circulation.

I was a little concerned that I may not have enough cash with me to pay for other things while there as we were a long way from any ATMs. Turns out we didn’t need to spend much anyway and the time we did, it was in a place we could use a credit card.

Returning to HK and in the spirit of sorting out all my bits and pieces, I figured I should take all my foreign currency to my bank (formerly known as “the world’s local bank”), convert it back into HK dollars and put it in my account before any other currencies went down the same path.

I decided to keep out USD, Euros, AUD, Chinese yuan and Mauritian Rupees since it was unlikely to happen to these currencies and I’d be using some in the not too distant future.

The others consisted of Russian rubles, South African rand, Indian rupees, Nepalese rupees (clearly I like to go to countries that have rupees), Thai baht, Indonesian rupiah, Japanese yen, Korean won and I can’t remember what else.

I’ve found out the bank doesn’t accept all of these either. It turns out there are some currencies they won’t take back even if they are in circulation and they were the ones that issued it to me in the first place.

I also found out I had been sitting on a foreign currency nest egg.

The exchange rate had swung well into my favour for a lot of the currencies I was converting.

I asked my bank what I can do with the rest since it seemed to be fairly useless to me now. They told me to go to a money changer as they would accept them all.

Including the non-circulation Philippines peso.

I will see if this is the case over the next week or so.

Thanks to Abba for the title to this post.