Indochina 2006: Deep Fried Farang

I’ll save the funnies for a couple of days from now. Instead, I’m going to give you a, by my standards, lightly cynical account of the “dark side of travelling”.

Yesterday, I got cheated so badly that even now, the shame and anger I feel over the incident is nearly unfathomable.

Amber and I were walking over to the compund of the Grand Palace, a series of temples and buildings whose spires and roofs were encrusted with gold and mosaic tiles in such intricate and extravagant patterns as to defy belief. More on this another time.

A little gap toothed old lady accosted us on the way. She was dirty, squat as a marsupial, and vaguely reminded me of a side-show attraction- very dwarf-like in her appearance and as about aesthetically pleasing. She was feeding the pidgeons… hordes of emaciated, fluttering feathered vermin- not at all like our plump specimens. She literally threw packets of bird
seed at me, instructing me to feed the birds. A pair of equally grungy street rats accosted Amber and did the same.

Some of you know doubt know what is coming next.

We threw the seed, flinging whole packets into the the air, watching the birds fly up and down. I found it fun, and of course I felt that vaguely nagging alarm in the back of my head… the one that sticks like a thorn in
your mind… that uneasy feeling that something is out of the ordinary. But I did nothing. Humans are quick to react to what they know to be familiar and damned slow to react to the new- and this situation was so novel that I simply scattered bird seed in the most amused and unthinking way.

Afterward, the lady demanded money. I had expected this. She demanded 150 Thai baht. This is about 5 US dollars- maybe less. I did NOT know this at the time… I was unused to the exchange rate and thought it amounted to 50 cents or something… my North American mind simply could not comprehend the possibility that a beggar could have the sheer audacity to demand 5 US bucks for throwing bird seed at tourists.

She saw I had 500 baht in my hand, snatched it, and told me she had change. She gave my 20 baht in return and said smugly: ” Now, you go.”

This is where my brain clicked, and in a slow, almost casual way, my brain said: “You witless son of a whore. You just got swindled by a beggar so low on the social hierarchy that you would not allow her to haul away your garbage.”

I started to bellow at her, demanding my money back. She backpeddled, giving me more and more change back, until she had given me a bunch of smaller notes back that amounted to 220 baht. But my 500 baht note was still in her hand, and I did not have the presence of mind to grab it out of her palm. I was so befuddled and shell-shocked by the entire proceedings that I could not think straight, and was happy- YES, HAPPY- to get out of the whole affair having lost 280 baht for NO REASON.

The worse part is that I retreated from her. Yes. I turned my back on a woman who had CHEATED ME and LEFT. If I told my father this, he would demand that I change my skin colour (probably by ripping it off with his own hands) and disown me. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was because we were being hounded into utter submission by three filthy street people who kept
demanding MORE money from us. Maybe it was because I thought I had already been robbed, knew it, and decided to fold my cards while I could. Maybe I was afraid of being stabbed or clawed by someone with possible HIV. But I was accosted with an infantile scheme, lost money, and ran away.

Oh. I know a lot of you think I’m rather dreamy and am prone to getting gyped in things like this. Amber fell for it too. She lost 400 baht.

The thing about the 3rd world and the dark side of travelling is this. To the locals, you are a walking wallet. You can allow this to sully your experience of a new culture and locale, or you can deal with it as a simple byproduct of a free-market world where people like us own the machine and people like them turn the cogs. We have turned them into paupers, low wage labour, and souvenir shop owners, and then we come and take pictures of their monuments and dare to object when their climate is too hot or their beggars are too unsightly.

I am slowly getting used to the fact that “friendliness” in non OECD countries means that the people being “friendly” are trying to get your money- often in very unscrupulous ways. When I get back, I will detail the scams that businesses try to lay on you, without a HINT of shame or self-reproachment in their demeanor, just because you have a backpack and therefore are from places with money.

This is something you don’t read about in Lonely Planet travel guides, let me tell you. I hate the locals who constantly try to get me to ride their overpriced taxis. I hate the locals who try to sell me postcards and watches I don’t want or need. I hate the locals who show attention on me before crowds of their gawking peers in the hopes that they can force me to shell out some money to them by the sheer weight of insistence.

At the same time, I understand that by going to work at Moby Dick Fish and Chips, by having an IPod, and by taking this holiday, I have directly participated in a socioeconomic leviathan that has made it impossible for these people to live without trying to cheat me.

Now, I am going to eat some delicious Thai food. In two days, I will be in Chiang Mai, and you will get to hear about some of the mind-blowing shit that has thoroughly shattered my senses over the last few days.