One of the things about travelling which is both fascinating but also frustrating is money: how to get it, what to get, how to make sure you don't run out when you're away etc. At least now, with debit and credit cards and the widespread availability of ATMs, we don't have to take travellers cheques and have the hassle of cashing them (I once spent a whole morning doing just that in a French bank being sent from one counter to another). And as there are no longer any capital controls (remember them?) there is no limit on how much money we can spend (apart from our own bank balance or credit card limit, of course).

But that doesn't mean the whole money thing is hassle free. Take ATMs for example. Here in Ecuador they quite often either don't work at all, won't take our particular cards or charge for taking out money. Often they only provide instructions in Spanish, most will only dispense a maximum of $200 a day and some only eject your card after you've taken your money and receipt which makes walking off leaving your card still in the machine all too easy.

The $200 limit in Ecuador is a particular problem because most places charge a service charge for using credit cards. Our hotel in Cuenca was going to add 14% to our bill if we paid by card. So most things here work on a cash basis which can be challenging if, for example, we're paying for a multi-day trip. (We haven't been able to work out why some places charge so much and others don't charge at all).

The availability of ATMs has also meant less need to use money-changers, always a slightly dodgy activity. But in some countries it is still necessary to do so. In Iran, which is completely cut-off from the world banking system because of sanctions there was no option. We were there just after the Brexit vote and most money-changers were refusing to exchange sterling regarding it as too great a risk. Ha! So much for the world beating a apth to our door. Not even a pariah nation wants our currency!

Even in Iran what people wanted most was American dollars. Yes the dollar is still king. In India money changers only accept brand new notes, surprisingly hard to get from UK banks. Exchange rates are usually quoted against the dollar but some countries go further and peg their currency to it. Argentina did this from 1991 until 2002 and it is considered that this was a significant cause of the major economic depression that gripped the country between 1998 and 2002.

But Ecuador has gone one step further. Here the dollar is the currency. Not only are prices quoted in dollars but the notes are genuine, all-American greenbacks. Which is great for Americans visiting but kinda weird for the rest of us. Ecuador changed from using its own currency, the sucre, back in 2000, in an effort to stop recurrent, rampant inflation which stemmed from politicians in the country using its central bank to print money whenever they ran into economic problems. At the time I imagine it was a very unpopular move because it would have meant that the value of people's savings declined dramatically overnight but, apparently, now no one wants to go back to having their own currency because the change has generally worked well. Or rather I imagine it does as long as Ecuador runs a foreign trade surplus. Because of course it can't print its own dollars, it has to get them from the US and the only way it can do that is by selling goods, especially oil, for US dollars. Fortunately it has a plentiful supply of oil. Unfortunately it is in the Amazon rainforest and the need to produce oil is in constant tension with the need to preserve the forest. Using the dollar also means Ecuador has effectively given up pretty much any ability to mange its own economy and if the economy does take a turn for the worse it will not be able to stimulate a recovery by printing money as, for example, the UK government has been doing pretty much since the financial crash of 2008.

Interesting but surely purely academic in the UK context? Not necessarily so. Remember the arguments about Scotland continuing to sue the pound if it had voted for independence?