There will be few photos

My blog readers have been wont to say they like the photos I post on my blog. I’m sorry, but there won’t be many photos for these blog entries because Christine’s camera, filled with one month’s worth of traveling photos, was stolen on my last evening before I returned to Singapore. I didn’t bring my own camera, so all the photos were on her camera.

As the sun was setting during the last evening of my trip, Kata beach in Phuket, Thailand, was nearly deserted of people. We walked down to the water, leaving behind a shoulder bag on a beach chair at the top of the beach. It had been raining, and the chair was under a tree, out of the rain. Compared to other beaches in Phuket, Kata is not seedy at all, and being under a tree, the bag seemed to be out of sight of the few people at the beach. I felt nervous leaving the bag unattended, but being up on the chair, it would be out of the rain and out of the sand. As we were down at the water, I was keeping an eye on the bag up at the chair. A lot of f-ing good it did me. After the sun set, and we walked up to collect our stuff, our beach towels and sunglasses were still there on the chair, but the bag was gone. Inside were my wallet, the camera, both of our reading books, and the hotel key. My wallet had about US$30 in it.

Don’t ever lose a hotel key. This wasn’t the fancy magnetic swipe card. This was an old-fashioned mechanical key, and it costs US$100 to replace. After one month of having scams launched toward me from all angles, this was but one more of them. The tourism industry is just one big plan to remove people from their money. This is why at a Phuket beach resort it costs US$6 for a beer while at a shop in a Phuket city, the same beer costs US$1.50.

The scams are an annoyance of travelling. On this trip, I was scammed at least twice and robbed once. Even while this was happening, everywhere you go there are scams being hurled from you at all directions, and you have to be constantly vigilant. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, and sometimes you fall into a scam and/or get robbed. I’ll recount a few below.

Scam #1

Christine and I crossed overland from He Kou, China, into Lao Cai, Vietnam, which is a fairly remote point. She speaks Chinese but not Vietnamese, so once into Vietnam we would be out to sea unless there were signs in English. This being a route not heavily travelled by non-Chinese/Vietnamese speakers, there weren’t likely to be many, if any. Inside the Vietnam border crossing station, the process of immigrating to Vietnam was more disorganized than immigrating to or emigrating from China. A woman behind a counter in the border crossing station asked if we needed train or bus tickets. We planned to take a train from the Lao Cai to Hanoi. We were inside a freaking government building; I thought this wouldn’t be a place for scammers. The border guards were right there and could see us talking to this lady. She seemed official. She was behind a counter in a government building. We tried to buy tickets from her, but her English was bad. She said we needed to go to her office, which was outside the station. This was looking strange.

Outside the station was a crowd of touts, all saying, “Taxi!?! Taxi!?!” We stopped to collect ourselves and question whether we should really follow this woman. One of the taxi touts pointed to her behind her back and sliced his hand across his neck as if to chop off a head. We thought, screw this strange lady, we can get our tickets at the train station. We stopped following her, and at some point, she disappeared. We sat on the steps and looked at our Lonely Planet to try to figure out how to get to the train station, but I discovered there is no map of the Vietnamese border city, Lao Cai. There were no signs in English, and we had no idea how to get to the train station. All the while there is a crowd of people around us offering help and taxis for high prices. None spoke English well enough to point us in the direction of the train station, nor would they want us to walk there as they were selling taxi rides, after all. It’s my policy to never buy from touts out of principle. Still, I felt a little scared here on the steps of the border crossing station with no maps, no Vietnamese money, and with no signs in English.

We just started walking. We found a bank. We changed money. We asked where the train station was. No one spoke much English, but we figured out which direction it was, and we walked and walked and eventually found it. At first, the touts from the border followed us. I yelled at them to leave us alone. Eventually they did, but a white guy in a remote Asian town walking down the road with bags attracts an endless stream of new touts offering taxis. I yelled at some more guys who were invading our personal space. Skipping details, we arrived in Hanoi the next morning having not been scammed. Our taxi driver in Hanoi also tried to scam us. He said his taxi meter was broken. Yeah right. I paid him a fare I thought reasonable, which was about 1/3 of the fare he had tried to charge. He also tried to take us to a hotel that we didn’t want to go to. Hotels will pay taxi drivers a fee if the driver can direct people to that hotel. We ended up, though, at the hotel at where we had reservations, Mike’s Hotel, and it was probably the best hotel of the whole trip.

Scam #2

In Hanoi, Vietnam, the nice desk attendant at our hotel recommended we eat dinner at a famous restaurant in Hanoi called Cha Ca La Vong. It serves a local dish of fish that’s fried on the table, and you pull the fish out of the pan and eat it with some rice and green vegetables and spices. When we got to Cha Ca Street, there was a tout outside a restaurant called Cha Ca La Vong. It’s my policy to never buy from touts. Anyway, I thought a famous restaurant wouldn’t need a tout. It’s reputation should be able to draw in patrons. Standing in front of this restaurant, however, I could see that it was indeed called Cha Ca La Vong, and on the menu was our fish dish. Inside we were the only people eating – a bad sign. The servers were rude, and there was a fat Vietnamese boy playing a computer game and making a repeated and loud snorting sound like he had a disease. It was gross while I was trying to eat. The dish was tasty, but by Vietnam standards insanely expensive. After an annoying meal, we left the restaurant and walked the other way down Cha Ca Street, and we saw another restaurant called Cha Ca La Vong. This one had no touts out front and looked to be a more stately establishment. Back at the hotel I consulted my Lonely Planet guidebook and realized we had been scammed. According to the map, the second restaurant called Cha Ca La Vong is the old and famous one. We had eaten on the wrong side of the street at a restaurant with the same name. Their plan to scam us worked.

Scam #3

Fast forward a few days. I left Christine in Hanoi and met my two St. Louis friends, Noah and Adam, in Bangkok, and we made the overland pilgrimage from Bangkok, Thailand, to Siem Reap, Cambodia, which is near to the famous temples of Angkor Wat. I knew the trail would be filled with scammers, and I’d read up on how to travel the route without being scammed, but we fell into a scam of which I had never read. There’s no international bus service that takes you from Bangkok to Siem Reap. You have to take a bus to a Thai town near the border, then a tuk tuk scooter taxi to the border, then at the border you have to take a Cambodian bus or taxi the rest of the way to Siem Reap. It’s famous that tourists purchase package bus tickets in Bangkok, only to find that the bus wasn’t what was promised, or that it’s over crowded, not air conditioned, it breaks down, et cetera. And the bus will always take a very long time to get to Siem Reap so that once you get there, you don’t feel like shopping for a hotel and you just check into the hotel that’s in on the scam. I’ve heard and read ad infinitum to not purchase any package bus trips, so I wasn’t going to.

None of us three Americans had visas for Cambodia, and we planned to get them at the border. We took our bus from the Bangkok bus station to the Thai city near the border without incident. At the bus stop, we knew we had to get a tuk tuk to take us to the border, and we knew that we shouldn’t pay more than ~US$2.50 for it. We accomplished this also without incident. Our tuk tuk driver took us to a supposed Cambodian consulate, and some men there spoke good English and said this is where to get visas. We were right near the border, and I knew that we got our visas at the border. I wasn’t really in a position to argue. The place was broken down and very dirty, but Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world, so I reasoned that this is as nice as a Cambodian consulate would be.

My instinct was that this situation was awfully scam-like. There were some white people at the consulate, and my experience has been that travelers are experienced at avoiding scams, so if they were buying their visas here, this must be the right place. I had read that the visa fee is US$20, to be paid in US dollars, but the guy at the consulate said the price had to be paid in Thai bhat, and it came out to be about US$40. But this is where we buy the visas, right? What could we do? Argue? We needed these visas. They had all the normal forms you fill out for applying for a visa and crossing a border. Anyway, throughout the course of purchasing our visas, I learned that these white people were Americans, and they were idiots. They were not experienced travelers. One girl told me that they were staying at Angkor Wat, the giant temple complex near to Siem Reap in Cambodia. That’s so strange, I thought. I didn’t think they had hotels at the temples. I thought you had to stay in Siem Reap. I realized they hadn’t done their homework. And what were they doing? They were buying a package bus tour from the consulate. The most famous scam between Bangkok and Siem Reap.

Moments later, after we’d paid for our visas, and into our passports were placed what looked to be just like every other visa I’ve ever had to put into my passport, the consulate people were also trying to sell us the same package bus trip. I said no way, we were going to cross the border and then take a taxi. The people insisted and insisted we buy their bus tickets, and I said no, no, no. Finally I said, let’s get the f- out of here, I think we’ve already been scammed on these visas. Our tuk tuk driver was still waiting for us. No wonder he waited so patiently, he surely earned a fee by dropping us off at this scamming consulate. He drove us the rest of the way to the border, which was close by, and one of the consulate workers rode along with us. I was pretty sure by this point we’d been scammed.

Walking up to Thailand passport control, the consulate guy was still trying to convince us that we should buy his package bus tour. He spoke pretty good English and kept saying he wanted to help us. He kept insisting and insisting, and I was more and more sure we’d been scammed on our visas, and I was just becoming enraged at him. I said that if he was my friend, why did he just sit by at the consulate and watch us overpay for our visas (we’d paid US$20 too much), and he kept insisting he was my friend. I yelled at him, and said he wasn’t my friend, and I could see in his eyes that he was afraid of me. I was taller than him. So my two friends from St. Louis who hadn’t even been 24 hours yet in Asia saw me scare the hell out of a Cambodian guy. I think they were a little nervous by the roughness and poverty of the place and surprised I felt at home so much that I could stand up like this. However, dealing with the roughest part of the trip right from the beginning made them feel much more comfortable through the rest of their time in Asia (they stayed for 8 days).

After emigrating from Thailand, we saw the place to purchase Cambodian visas. The price was posted US$20, just like it was supposed to be. We’d been scammed. I was worried we’d bought fake visas, but no, our visas were real enough to get us into Cambodia. The consulate at where we bought our visas was indeed doling out official visas; they just overcharged for them. Crossing the border into Cambodia, the consulate man followed us, and we noticed at least two other people walking along with us. One of them was with the other Americans we’d met at the consulate. The Cambodian border city, Poipet, is dirty and impoverished. I think my friends felt nervous and shocked by the place. We were supposed to ride a free bus to a bus station where we were supposed to get a taxi. We waited for 30 minutes for a bus, but it didn’t come, and a Cambodian told us it had broken down. How convenient.

Skipping some details, we got into a taxi for the price the guidebooks said we should pay, which is too high and also a scam, but this is an unavoidable one. Inside the taxi, our driver told us in broken English that the mafia controls the border city of Poipet. The people from our consulate who crossed the border with us are part of the mafia. He said we mustn’t tell anyone he told us this information because he’s scared the mafia would harm him. It’s a mafia whose business it is to rip off tourists.

Scam #4

Taxi services in Phuket, Thailand, are controlled by a cartel. All taxi drivers agree to not lower their fares below a certain amount, and this way, all taxi fares will remain inflated. Imagine having your wallet stolen and you only have 646 Thai bhat. The taxi fare to the airport is 800. A taxi driver agrees to lower the fare to 700, but he and all the other taxi drivers in town would rather sit on the sidewalk than drive you for 646. It’s 7:30am and all the banks and moneychangers are closed. You’ve already walked across town, and no taxi driver will drive to the airport for 646. After this fruitless battle, I ran back to the hotel and changed 4 Singaporean dollars into 80 bhat, and by the skin of my teeth, we made it to the airport late but still managed to get on our flight home to Singapore.

Conclusion

There are scams coming at you from all angles all the time when budget traveling across less developed countries, and I wish I were wise enough to avoid them all.

I always thought it would be awful to lose a camera full of traveling photos. Those are irreplaceable. If only I would have brought the bag down to the water with me. If only I would have kept a better eye on the bag. If only things were different, I would have these photos to show you. I also really liked my wallet. It was made from crocodile skin, and my dad got it for me in Australia. It too is irreplaceable.

The day before flying back to Singapore was the day the Air France flight disappeared over the Atlantic, and it reminds me that while it may suck to lose a camera, at least I’m home safe in Singapore. Any number of bad things can happen to a person while traveling. The bag robbery could have been violent. My passport could have been in the stolen bag. I could have been in any number of traffic accidents. I could have been ripped off even more money in Cambodia. Still, next time I travel, I hope to avoid all scams and robberies.

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