So you land at the airport safely in South America and make your way downtown to a reasonably priced youth hostel or hotel and get ready to charge up your laptop that was drained on the flight in and you come across something nobody mentions in their travel reports:

WTF? The upper plug is what you will see in Santiago Chile and the lower plug is what you’ll see in Buenos Aires Argentina. Immediately you are realizing square peg, round hole, no bueno.

Sure you can find adapters for U.S. straight prong plugs in most ferreterías (hardware stores), but why not get a couple delivered from Amazon.com while you are sitting around goofing off before you leave.

Here is what they look like:

I like to bring a dirt brown (doesn’t show the dirt) 6 foot extension cord to plug my laptop and battery recharger into since outlets can be far away from your bunk in a hostel and it’s nice to be able to come prepared to plug in a few items without hogging too many outlets. Here is what it looks like plugged into the Chilean adapter:

And the Argentina/Uruguay adapter ready for action:

more later…