Imtiaz Muqbil, a travel columnist for the Bangkok Post, wrote (June, 2002) that tourism officials admitted that “cheating and fraud is the biggest source of complaints they get internally. Jewelry shops overcharge visitors by several times the actual amount, mostly in order to pay the hefty commissions given to guides, tour bus drivers and the owners or managers of tour operating companies.
“Shopkeepers generally know they have that one chance to squeeze visitors; a tourist is not generally considered a repeat customer. Even though they blame themselves for not having been more careful, they exact revenge by going back home and spreading the word among friends and colleagues.”
What my friend was talking about is worse. It’s not just a tired old con that includes telling the tourist over-valued gems that will kill the golden goose, but the constant hassle of walking along a shopping street, where vendors—whose stalls already occupy most of what should be pedestrian space—beckon and call and hold out their hands as if to say hello; the automatic response is to shake hands, but then try to get yours back. Making eye contact or glancing at the goods brings the vendor to your neck like a hawk.
Patpong at night may be the worst. Many visitors go there exclusively for the night market, but that doesn’t deter the touts who stand outside the sex venues. “Come inside! No cover charge! Take a look!” they cry. And if you’re a single male or in a group of males, touts hold up brochures for massage parlors or merely whisper, “Want lady? Want man? Want boy?” While others hold up signs announcing ‘PUSSY PING-PONG SHOW, PUSSY CIGARETTE SHOW, PUSSY COLA SHOW…” Numerous bars in Patpong and elsewhere also station women outside whose job it is to physically pull and push men toward the doors.
I’m not without compassion. I’ve lived in Thailand long enough to know that the touts and cabbies and street merchants are extraordinarily poor. One of my closest friends is an American Catholic priest who has lived and worked in the slums for more than thirty years and I’m down there nearly every week with him, so I know how many of these people live, and how precarious their survival may be.
I still don’t like being pestered and hustled, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. Thailand seems to be growing ravenous in its attempt to pull more and more money from its visitors, in ways that seem not just larcenous, but mean-spirited. National parks and numerous privately operated tourist attractions now have a double tier system where foreigners sometimes pay several hundred percent more to enter than someone with a Thai face. Dress codes for some of the most popular visitor destinations—the Grand Palace, for one—require foreigners to wear sandals that cover the heel—“approved” sandals are for rent in a shop nearby—while Thais may enter wearing any sort of footwear or none. (The barefoot Buddha, an Indian by birth, would have been turned away.) Until Summer 2002, a foreigner’s mobile phone wouldn’t work in Thailand, part of the fallout from the monopoly that controlled the industry, a concession held, incidentally, by the man who is now the prime minister. Many laws are enforced only for visitors, police usually accepting a small contribution, for instance, instead of the full two-thousand-baht fine for littering. When shopping on the street, a foreign face automatically doubles or triples the price.
It is as if every form of banditry is directed against foreigners, not just by the greediest of freebooters who probably think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but also by the authorities. For a time, many visitors from China—Thailand’s fastest growing source of tourists—were being taken such advantage of, the Chinese government threatened to put Thailand on a don’t-go-there list for its citizens unless the independent package tour business was cleaned up.
That put some agencies out of business, but complaints generally go nowhere. “The Thai police are usually of no help whatsoever, believing that merchants are entitled to whatever price they can get,” said Lonely Planet. “The main victimizers are a handful of shops who get protection from certain high-rankling government officials. These officials put pressure on police not to prosecute or to take as little action as possible.”
The foreigners are not totally blameless. Most shoppers buying designer gear and computer software and other counterfeit goods at flea market prices know the stuff is bogus, so they have no legitimate complaint when the forty-dollar Rolex watch stops ticking as soon as the plane takes off for home. While many gem buyers, motivated by personal greed, choose to believe the lie that the stuff will have greater resale value back home.
Still, for more than a decade, tourism has been one of Thailand’s main revenue sources and since the financial collapse of 1997, many officials have come to regard its expansion as the economy’s savior, rather than institute the reforms that might fix some of the problems that led to the crash.
Change sometimes comes to Thailand as slowly as it can come rapidly, depending on what’s to be altered and who benefits. Because they’re so rampant, and pervasive, dishonesty and fraud will not be easy to tackle. “Yet,” wrote Imtiaz Muqbil, “it could have a more devastating impact on the country’s image because it flies directly in the face of tourist propaganda which generically presents Thai people as being friendly, hospitable and good-natured.
“Having thus been lulled into a sense of complacency, visitors find themselves doubly shocked, annoyed and frustrated; they feel cheated by the incident itself as well as by the official literature which sought to convince them otherwise.”
The Bodysnatchers of Bangkok
The sounds of windscreens shattering, car parts crumpling, skulls bursting, guns banging away, screams sailing into the night are still echoing when the city’s bodysnatchers arrive. These are the Buddhist “rescue” crews who scrape up victims of violence on many of Thailand’s city streets, helping the police identify the still warm deceased, arranging and paying for final rites and cremation if no one claims the corpse. The Buddhists believe they make merit this way.
Call it instant karma.
Most modern cities elsewhere have public ambulance services. In Bangkok, and in other Thai cities, where only a few private hospitals have such modern conveyances, a number of Buddhist foundations take up the considerable slack. In Bangkok, the largest and oldest, Poh Teck Tung, is located in Chinatown. For eighty years, this outfit has kept its vehicles on the road, using pickup trucks to transport the bodies to a hospital or the morgue until they were replaced a few years ago by air conditioned vans equipped with sirens and flasher lights.
The second largest and oldest is Ruam Katanyoo, which is more Thai than Chinese in its membership and until 1995, its members competed for bodies with Poh Teck Tung, the rival teams sometimes getting into fist-fights over who got the corpses and the merit that came with the higher body count. Finally, the city government divided the metropolitan area into zones and gave the foundations schedules whereby they’d alternate coverage so no one would miss a regular turn in the most active areas.
My plan was to spend a night with Poh Teck Tung with a photographer for an English magazine. Our driver—wearing a mustard-colored jump suit covered with Thai and Chinese lettering— explained the routine. The crews worked eleven-hour shifts, six days a week, and waited for calls at assigned locations, usually petrol stations where there were convenience stores for buying coffee and snacks. There, they monitored their police radios and sped off to any crime scene or accident in their zone, often arriving before police. Victims were taken to the nearest hospital, dead or alive—the deceased to be collected at the end of the shift and transported to the city morgue. They were called “rescue” teams, but they only received five days of paramedic training and there wasn’t so much as a first aid kit in the van. Meat wagons was more like it; in Thailand, better than no wagon at all.