the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
tuk-tuk sun and the jewelry scam... ~ October 29, 2002 - 11:41 p.m. I'm all over the place tonight, and I doubt I've got enough time before this cyber cafe closes to say anything halfway coherent... I'm in chiang mai, which is feeling like a really good place to be. definitely a hell of a lot better than pattaya, which is famous for its better than 100,000 prostitutes working at any given time. maybe that's why men were shouting at me on the street all the time when I was there. pattaya was kinda creepy... chiang mai feels like a good wash after that. I had a fully authentic bangkok experience... a tuk-tuk driver (tuk-tuks are the little zippy things kind of like an overblown motorbike melded with a rickshaw, a canopy over the whole thing) named "tuk-tuk sun" tried to rope me into a jewelry scam. I'd heard about the jewelry scam, it's a common con sprung on farang... farang being white westerners. they're told that the thai government is running a special promotion where they can buy jewelry tax-free, export it to the united states and make a lot of money selling it. I guess the deal with this is, once you buy the jewelry, they ship it to the states for you. you don't find out until you get back that it's worth a fraction of what they told you it was. and the thai government doesn't offer one-week-tax-free promotions. tuk-tuk sun picked me up at the end of a really frustrating day, where I got to a couple of key places too late to see the sights, and I didn't feel like I'd gotten in enough bangkok stuff to tell the kids about. tuk-tuk sun was wildly merry, with a hysterical girlish giggle that he'd unleash at a moment's notice. thai folks, in general, love to laugh. he laughed all through telling me that he'd take me around to four different sights and back to my guesthouse, all for only 20 baht-- that's about fifty cents. hey, deal. he made me laugh... he took me to a little temple with a reclining buddha and a lucky buddha, told me to go in and check them out, take my time, he'd be waiting in his tuk-tuk when I was done. when I went in to the temple, a man was just finishing praying. as he left, I saw that his wallet was still lying on the rug. I picked it up and called out to him, and he came back and we started chatting. he told me he was a teacher, praying today because he was flying to america tomorrow with a group of students... we talked about this and that-- and then he got on to jewelry. I knew something was up when he flashed me his "government ID" (a laminated card with his picture and some thai writing on it), and then he started telling me that the government was running a special promotion for students who were going to study in america, selling them jewelry tax-free to take with them, so that they could sell it in the states for a big profit and live on it while they were studying. and guess what! this week only, they were allowing tourists into the government import center too! I told him I don't buy jewelry, and he didn't give me the hard sell, he just told me that I should check it out. he said that on the second floor of the government import center, they had free information about how to spot fake jewelry, etc., and that it would be valuable for me to share with my students. riiiight... like I'm gonna tell a bunch of third graders all about how to spot fake jewelry. so I knew he was scamming, but I didn't realize that tuk-tuk sun was in on it until the next place he took me was the "government center"-- a jewelry store. I almost started laughing when we pulled up to the door. I was amazed that I was in the middle of an attempted scam. the jewelry store was gleaming and heavily air-conditioned, with an excessive amount of sales people standing around staring at me, the only person in the store. the head guy started pointing things out to me, and I said I really don't have money to buy jewelry, and he said oh, but you can make money with this, and I just played dumb. I really don't have it to spend, I told him. they had a nice shrine in one corner of the store-- they all have them here-- and I asked if I could take a photo. no... said the head guy, with a tight smile, and then they held the doors open for me, and I was back on the street and into the tuk-tuk. tuk-tuk sun was decidedly less merry after we left the jewelry store. I spent the rest of the ride trying to figure out how he'd coordinated it with the guy in the temple-- and then I remembered how he'd stopped at a mobile toilet trailer right after he picked me up. he must have made a cell phone call while he was in the toilet. and then the guy waited for me in the temple and planted his wallet... I was impressed by how elaborate the whole setup was. tuk-tuk sun never took me to the rest of the sights he'd promised. he dumped me at a temple that was just about to close and pointed out that khao san road was just across the way. I didn't bring up the fact that my guesthouse wasn't on khao san-- farang nightmare town-- I just laughed and paid him the 20 baht. it was worth at least that, just for the story.
(((rings))) |