further adventures
We left our hotel this morning a little before 6am, in a cab the hotel called for us. The ride was smooth with no traffic, and the driver was playing decent Vietnamese pop. The airport and flights went like butter and as soon as I took leave of my friends I met a friendly Guatemalan girl traveling with her mother, the latter of whom proceeded to exchange the former and I's email addresses. I slept through most of the two hour flight, skipping over all those hellish 14+ hour bus rides only a few dollars more.
The first hitch in my plans was when I opened my hand-me-down guidebook to the Ho Chi Minh City section and found it missing. Unfazed, I walked outside and looked around for a bus for a bit before resigning myself to a cab. On the wall they had posted rates for each cab company so I figured, how bad could it be?
A driver from Saigon Tourist, the largest state run tourist company, approached me and convinced me to get in his cab. That was my first mistake: the one thing you must always remember about traveling on this peninsula (and probably most places where you stick out like a sore thumb) is that everyone who approaches you has a large financial incentive to do so. Sometimes this financial incentive can be innocuous and work in your benefit, like when we were beckoned into a very nice small hotel in Ha Noi. They tried their darndest to sell us a tour package (even calling up to us in our room) but in the end it was optional and the hotel was a great deal. Other times the services they offer, though expensive, are worth it, like the Easy Rider motorbike tours around Da Lat.
But the vast majority of the time people are simply trying to rip you off. The taxi I entered had a meter and the driver told me it was about 12km to my destination. I asked him to put on the meter and he said alright and started driving. He told me to pay him up front for the small toll to get out of the airport. I asked if he would deduct it from my fare, and noticed that he had not put the meter on. I hadn't noticed right away because it was in the sun and hard to see. I told him I had said wanted the meter on and he had already agreed to it and then not turned it on, and then I got out of the cab, figuring I could get a better one on the busy street right outside the airport.
As I was walking he drove back over and after assuring me that this time he would indeed turn on the meter I recanted and got back in the car.
At this point realizing that I wasn't going to just hand over some outrageous amount of money, and hoping to use my supposed previous stupidity to his advantage, he started trying to ask what I had paid to get to the airport last time. As this event had not occurred, it was not a tactful line of inquiry. As we drove under some shade and I saw the meter still said "HELLO", I finally realized he had no intention of using it after all.
He started claiming it was broken.
I had had enough and insisted on being let out immediately. He tried to ask for a fare, 2-4 times what I would have paid had I for some reason wanted a ride to half a kilometer outside of the airport. I explained to him that he had been blatantly lying to me from the start with no intention of honoring his end of the deal. As he pulled over I opened the door and stepped with a clean conscience and an unopened wallet. I walked away in the opposite direction of traffic so that he couldn't bother me anymore. I figured in the worst case scenario he would have a hard time explaining "HELLO" to the police.
Moral victories are few and far between when you are traveling in these parts, and the icing on this cake was that I immediately (with the help of several local youths) found a city bus straight to where I wanted to go.
Unfortunately I had a hell of a time finding my hostel from the bus stop, and ended up tracking a giant patty of dog shit into my room, but hey.
The first hitch in my plans was when I opened my hand-me-down guidebook to the Ho Chi Minh City section and found it missing. Unfazed, I walked outside and looked around for a bus for a bit before resigning myself to a cab. On the wall they had posted rates for each cab company so I figured, how bad could it be?
A driver from Saigon Tourist, the largest state run tourist company, approached me and convinced me to get in his cab. That was my first mistake: the one thing you must always remember about traveling on this peninsula (and probably most places where you stick out like a sore thumb) is that everyone who approaches you has a large financial incentive to do so. Sometimes this financial incentive can be innocuous and work in your benefit, like when we were beckoned into a very nice small hotel in Ha Noi. They tried their darndest to sell us a tour package (even calling up to us in our room) but in the end it was optional and the hotel was a great deal. Other times the services they offer, though expensive, are worth it, like the Easy Rider motorbike tours around Da Lat.
But the vast majority of the time people are simply trying to rip you off. The taxi I entered had a meter and the driver told me it was about 12km to my destination. I asked him to put on the meter and he said alright and started driving. He told me to pay him up front for the small toll to get out of the airport. I asked if he would deduct it from my fare, and noticed that he had not put the meter on. I hadn't noticed right away because it was in the sun and hard to see. I told him I had said wanted the meter on and he had already agreed to it and then not turned it on, and then I got out of the cab, figuring I could get a better one on the busy street right outside the airport.
As I was walking he drove back over and after assuring me that this time he would indeed turn on the meter I recanted and got back in the car.
At this point realizing that I wasn't going to just hand over some outrageous amount of money, and hoping to use my supposed previous stupidity to his advantage, he started trying to ask what I had paid to get to the airport last time. As this event had not occurred, it was not a tactful line of inquiry. As we drove under some shade and I saw the meter still said "HELLO", I finally realized he had no intention of using it after all.
He started claiming it was broken.
I had had enough and insisted on being let out immediately. He tried to ask for a fare, 2-4 times what I would have paid had I for some reason wanted a ride to half a kilometer outside of the airport. I explained to him that he had been blatantly lying to me from the start with no intention of honoring his end of the deal. As he pulled over I opened the door and stepped with a clean conscience and an unopened wallet. I walked away in the opposite direction of traffic so that he couldn't bother me anymore. I figured in the worst case scenario he would have a hard time explaining "HELLO" to the police.
Moral victories are few and far between when you are traveling in these parts, and the icing on this cake was that I immediately (with the help of several local youths) found a city bus straight to where I wanted to go.
Unfortunately I had a hell of a time finding my hostel from the bus stop, and ended up tracking a giant patty of dog shit into my room, but hey.
posted by ben at 5:40 AM
1 Comments:
Good for you for getting out and walking the other way. It's what we should have done that first ride we had in Manila. But that's how we learn.
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