Thai Lies: Don't get Scammed

Post date: 14-Dec-2009 16:07:03

Before going to Thailand, it's important to do your research and read your travel guides about the many Thai people who make money by lying to tourists. This post will discuss Bangkok specifically, but I'll mention a few other annoyances we've found in Phuket on a later post. There are some local people who live to scam tourists and deprive you from seeing many beautiful sights in their country. For example, while bargaining for a tuk tuk ride to the Grand Palace we were told these 3 lies:

Tuk Tuk Driver 1: "I can take you to the palace for 20 Baht, if you help me. If you stop in stores on the way there then I will get gas coupons. See this gas coupon (driver takes a coupon out of his wallet)." Our reply: "No, we want to go there direct."

Driver: "Okay, I will take you for free but just shop first and I'll get 20 Baht for each store you look in. You don't even have to buy anything."

Our response: We walked away and found another driver that would take us directly there.

What's in it for him: Well there was some truth to the conversation. The driver would receive a commission for taking us to stores and getting us to look in them. However, most of these stores would be out of the way from tourist destinations and if we abandoned the tuk tuk it probably would have cost more to get where we wanted to go and there would be a risk of not ever ending up at the tourist destination we wanted to see.

Tuk Tuk Driver 2: The roads by the palace are closed so you can't access the palace by tuk tuk. You can only access the palace by taking a 90 minute boat ride down the river. I can take you to the place where you catch t he boat.

What's in it for him: The driver will receive commission from the boat company that takes you to the palace.

Tuk Tuk Driver 3: The palace is closed today for a national holiday, but I can take you to see the Big Buddha instead.

What's in it for him: Commission and depriving you from seeing what you want to see in the hopes of making money. Pathetic.

From our personal experience and I am not generalizing about all the tuk tuk drivers in Bangkok, but from our experience, the younger drivers did not pull any bullshit with us. We found someone who took us directly to the palace for 1oo Baht. It seems that the younger drivers that we hired were willing to make more runs in a day for less money. Whereas, the older drivers would not negotiate with us and said 300 Baht to anywhere and would not run after us if we said no to this price and walked away. Again this is not always true but was just our experience during our 7 days in Bangkok.

Wat phra Kaew

Once you arrive at your tourist destination, people who are dressed like legitimate tour guides will try to deter you from finding the entrance to your destination. For example, a guy outside the palace tried to tell us we had to come back at 1:30 PM because there was a special event taking place. It's all lies. A few people for some dumb reason just don't want you to enjoy your time in Bangkok and well I think they see tourists as rich people and feel they deserve a handout. The guy who was telling us that the palace was closed for a special event didn't even try to gain anything from us. He didn't try to sell us on anything to do for the 90 minutes we supposedly had to wait. I mean doesn't he want us to see how beautiful his city is? I don't understand.It's aggravating. After we saw the Grand Palace, Colin helped another couple that was being pointed in the opposite direction of the entrance to the palace by another helpful fake tourist guide.

Once you finally get in, the Grand Palace is definitely worth seeing. Here are some random palace pictures:

Temple guard and me in a rented sarong (you can't even show an inch of your ankle if you want to enter the palace grounds). No shorts, no capris or skirts.

The temple guard's feet.

Caryatides

Half human/half bird mythical beings

Temple Guards

These columns are made up of many tiny tiles

The ducks admiring the shiny tiles

Palace Guards

There are also separate shoe racks for foreigners and locals. I found this a little offensive. I understand if they are doing it to prevent crowding at the shoes racks but I doubt that is the reason. Now I respect that to a Thai person the feet are considered the dirtiest part of the body and that is why you remove your shoes before you go into a temple, but really are my shoes going to be dirtier than a Thai perons's shoes?

Also, once you are inside the palace grounds, do not complete any tourist surveys. We were approached by a group of young girls asking if we would complete a survey to help them improve tourism in Bangkok. I almost agreed to until I saw that one of the questions asked for my room number at my hotel. I did some research and discovered that a sales person will show up at your hotel and will try to take you to a time share talk. Unless you want people stalking you, don't fill out a survey no matter how innocent and cute the school girls may be.

The government is aware of most of these scams and I believe that must be why there is the tourist police. There are warnings about being scammed by buying boat trip tickets off the street. We took a water taxi for 13 baht each and we paid on the boat. We did not need to buy a ticket ahead of time.

We saw the emerald Jade buddha and this buddha was made of green jade. We saw a jade buddha in Shanghai that was white. I guess not all jade is green and there are actually many different types and colour of jade.

Other random photos from around Bangkok:

They have 7-Eleven and slurpees!

Rice burgers from 7-Eleven

Tuna for the street cats

Antique Store

After our day of touring we stumbled upon an Antique store with a really nice owner who restored our faith in people. We bought a few coins (scam free) and he showed us what year the coins were from and told us the history about them [Dad, one of the first two coins is for you]. He gave us the complete history of where these coins came from and their significance to history. He also gave us a nice Thai art lesson all about their beliefs and how it relates to Thailand's neighboring countries. No scams, no frauds, I don't even think he wanted us to buy anything. He was happy just to talk to us and really made us remember that not everyone is out to con you.

You can view the rest of our 178 pictures here: