Scams crossing the Cambodian border.
By Ross. Filed in Cambodia |
My good friend Vince joined me in Bangkok. We met during my central America trip last summer when we were both recruited by a couple of terrible southern Americans looking to bring their taxi fare to Antigua down. Once they found out Vince had no cash on him (neither did I but I wasn’t telling them that), they tried to ditch him whilst he was searching for an ATM. Being the nice guy that I am and almost 99 times out of one hundred prefer the company of Dutch people to people from Texas, I stayed with him instead. The good deed was returned when my hostel had over booked and whilst I was walking around aimlessly trying to find a bed for the night I bumped into Vince who took me to his hotel and I found the last dorm bed in all of Antigua.
We traveled around Guatemala together, sharing stories, none of which can really ever be relayed over this website. In fact traveling with Vince really makes me wish I had a travel blog written under an alias name that my mum would never read. Since then we have kept in touch visiting each other in Edinburgh and Amsterdam respectively and countless emails swapping stories from our rather complex personal lives.
It was good to finally catch up with him in the flesh on the roof top pool of our hotel in Bangkok. He was just as I remembered him—tall, Dutch and placed next to the nearest semi-naked women he could find. It was also good to have someone with me who was on holiday and in a rush and had a planned itinerary. After a few months of planning, researching and gathering as much info as I could about new places I was about to visit it was nice to just sit back and let someone else do all the hard work. One day here, two days there, I couldn’t have cared less.
We set off very early from Bangkok taking a tourist bus to the border. Both of us being seasoned travelers (Vince is a tour guide in his spare time in the summer holidays) we were keen to avoid the obvious scams taking place.
While the direct Bangkok-Siem Reap bus tickets are cheap, the bus operators make their real money from the commission they receive from guesthouses for bringing guests. Their goal seems to be to make the journey last as long as possible because if you arrive in daylight at a relatively early time you will have the energy to go look for a cheap place that suits your budget but after a long journey that finishes in a strange new town in darkness you are more likely to stay in the guesthouse that the bus operator has dropped you of at even if it’s twice the amount of the place you actually wanted to stay in.
The bus operators will offer to get your Visa for Cambodia, making sure of an easy passage and scare you off with tales of having to wait hours if you try it on your own. For 37 dollars they would do all the hard work for you, We knew it only cost 20 dollars at the border and when the tour company stopped to have an overly long lunch outside the border town, which of course we recognized as the tactic above, we jumped on a tuk tuk to the border ditching are greedy operator and feeling superior to our fellow travelers who were signing up for the scam like sheep.
Our joy however, was short lived. You see, even Tuk Tuk drivers are in on this scam and instead of taking us to the border as we had instructed him, he drove us to his mate’s visa application centre to which he would be getting commission for bringing our stupid asses to. Left god knows where and a little too tired and unwilling to fuss about dealing with trying to get the border ourselves, we bit the bullet and paid the 37 dollars. We left one scam and walked straight into another one. At least a poorly tuk tuk driver would have been getting a little commission out of it.
Our annoyance grew as we got to the border. Not only was it as simple as any airport visa application and took a matter of minutes but the sheep we had left on the bus had also managed to get there before us. Except they did not have a baby sitter from the visa application outlet like us shadowing our every move looking out for us treating us like teenagers before bundling us into a taxi.
Our feeling of smug superiority had well and truly vanished. It’s almost impossible not to get scammed when traveling, be it small things like paying over the odds for simple things or like a scam I heard happened to a friend over a card game in Malaysia which one day will get a blog all to itself.
Being scammed is all part of the fun, it happens even to the best of us, even me!
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.