10 Scams We Encountered in India/Nepal

Ryan and I were duly warned by the Lonely Planet and other sources about possible scams one might encounter in India or Nepal, but it wasn't until we re-read the Lonely Planet that we realized we had encountered every single scam 'in the book', so to speak. Despite having met with all number of scam artists, however, we have managed not to be taken by them at all, except maybe one or two heh heh. So here is a summary of the scams we dealt with here.

1. The Police
This may or may not have been a scam where two mean looking men approach innocent travelers at night and demand to search their bags for drugs, or harass you for some other useless reason like why Ryan and I are traveling with a "native" or why we could possibly want to swim at night, ridiculous. They wear ordinary clothes and sport an ID that looks like it came from a cereal box. The ones Ryan encountered last night tried to actually physically take him to the 'station'...yeesh!

2. Milk Women/Children
There are plenty of poor people in India, so it is very hard to say no to a shoeless beggar when all they want is Rs.10. In Toronto, we often offer food or clothes instead of money, so this seems like quite a logical scam to direct at foreigners. Starving women and their babies, or just a child, will come and ask you to buy them milk "no money, just milk". When you buy them milk they take it and bring it back to the store and they get a piece of the profit as a commission for bringing in customers. Luckily, Ryan and I have become just jaded enough here to say no to everyone and everything that requires any kind of money or donation.

3. Jewelry Smugglers
This is the one where a shop owner will befriend someone (my experience was a little different) and invite the foreigner over to his family's home and whatnot. I just met the man in his actual shop. Once trust is established they ask you to do them a favour by bringing back jewelry or carpets to your home country to avoid paying customs fees. The man approached me this way by saying (and this was very odd because we were talking about something completely unrelated) that I would make a great sales person. He kept asking me whether sales interested me and telling me how successful his friend in Canada had been at selling his jewelry. I didn't realize at first thought that this was a scam moment, but I just kept saying how much I hated working in retail and customer service haha. Good thing!

4. Taxi Drivers
Aside from ritually scamming tourists by severely overcharging for rides, the drivers have a few other tricks up their sleeves to boot. They tried to take us to the wrong hotels so that they get a commission from the hotel that actually books us. They do this by telling us that our hotel is full. We prevent this by always saying that indeed we do have a booking even if we don't.

Our driver in Jaipur overheard us mentioning that we wanted to go to a specific place to look at carpets. Of course he takes us to another place first, where we "can just look and if you don't like I take you to your shop". ARGH! This carpet "factory" is supposed to show you how carpets are made and all this cool stuff. The driver and owner claim it isn't a shop, it is where retailers purchase their carpets for resale. FALSE! This place was basically a showroom with 3 looms outside to show us how the carpets are made "to avoid going in to the actual factory". They also said that the place where they wash the carpets happened to be under construction right now, so we couldn't see it either. We did end up getting a great deal on beautiful carpets, but we were quite frustrated with our driver after this.

5. Drug Dealers
On a multiple-times-daily basis in Anjuna, and occasionally in Mumbai, Ryan (mainly, but myself as well sometimes) gets asked if he wants to buy any number of drugs by men on the roadside. The scam here is that many of these men work with police. It is a good thing Ryan and I aren't drug users because the police scam would have gotten us in deep doo-doo.

6. Ear Cleaners
Men often try to walk up to people and pierce their ears with a rusty piece of metal, without asking first, but they also try to "clean your ears" by magically removing a stone from inside your head. It is a little like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The ear cleaners are sometimes legit though.

7. Maoists
Call it a scam, or politics, or both, Ryan and I (along with thousands of other tourists and locals that go from city to city in Nepal) were forced to pay a fee of rs. 500 to young boys that sometimes carry large guns. We were given a receipt but we still have no idea why they do this. Now the maoists and the government of Nepal have made 'peace', so this practice has stopped for now.

8. Drum Sellers
These guys are by far one of the most harmless but ruthless scam artists of all, because they make it so obvious. These guys sell those bongo drum things that everybody thinks are cool and would love to play (at least all the tree huggers in India anyway) and they are everywhere. In Mumbai, they will follow you for blocks, even if you say no a thousand times. First they start at about Rs.450 and as you keep walking away saying "no, I wouldn't take the drum if you gave it to me for free" they keep dropping the price. Without even haggling we managed to get the price down to something absurdly cheap like Rs. 20 or something. Too bad we really didn't want one.

9. Train Thief
On a two-day overnight train from Delhi to Goa, I was peacefully sleeping, happy to finally be on something more comfortable than the back of a bus or jeep in Nepal. At 3am I felt my sheets gently rub against my foot, and awoke to some guy trying to get into our bags. He ran away, but later, when I was watching out for him, he came back! The nerve! But this guy was obviously stupid because the whole night some girl in our bunk left the lights on, so I could see him plain as day...he should have chosen a bunk with the lights off...

10. Tight Rope Walkers and Others
Well, I can't really think of a decent tenth scam that we met with, so I'll include the general kind of ripoffs you meet on a daily basis. On the beach, for instance, two children will set up a makeshift tight rope and do tricks and walk the rope. When they are done, whether you watched or not, they expect money. The same goes for porters with our baggage. People take your bags even if you say 'no' three times, and then demand "baksheesh" which is a tip of sorts, except they wont take small bills so you often have to argue with them that you didn't even want their help and leave angrily. Small children walking up and talking to you while casually directing you right into their mothers' shops...so frustrating. And finally, there are all number or religious men or "traditionally dressed" women, who put things on you, or try to get you to take pictures of them and then demand lots of rupees.

Well from all the things we have learned in India, these scams have given us a thicker skin, and have made me far more assertive. Good thing we didn't really get ripped off though...

Return to Mumbai and Other Things

Hello!

Yesterday was a sad day in the lives of Leanne and Ryan, as we walked away from our friends at Lilliput Cafe to head for the train to Mumbai, and the impending end of our journey in India.

There were a few fun things that happened though! We spent the last few nights up late partying with people that we met and we decided to go to a club for the first time in India. The thing about Goa is that many travellers, particularly in Anjuna, are hippies/former hippies/dancefreaks and heavy drug users, so the dance clubs all play dance/techo/trance music. The club was just about the weirdest experience, with everything painted in glow-in-the-dark paint and people dancing terribly to terrible music all as if they've taken many different drugs (you have to have taken drugs to enjoy that music). But we did it, and it was an experience.

On the way to the club we were walking with Raj, one of the waiters we met that we like, and the "police" stopped us. They mainly wanted to harass Raj by asking him questions like "why are you with tourists? did they invite you?" and the like. But not knowing they were police officers because they were wearing shabby clothes, Ryan and I were really lippy when they grabbed at our friend. Ryan and I both had our respective run ins with the police the following evening after swimming at night. They were in what appeared like janitors uniforms and had no ID this time, but they searched my bag. They didn't take any of my money or charge me with anything, so I'm pretty sure they were real police, but who ever really knows.

Yesterday, our last day, we went to the Taj Hotel Jiva Spa for a luxurious 2-hour massage and exfoliating spice wrap. Were it not for a few minor problems the massage would have been complete bliss, but it was close anyway. Ryan and I were like jelly afterwards. Neither of us had much sleep this week so it was an exhausting day to be saying goodbye and take the train.

We are in Mumbai now and have met some nice Brits in the lobby of our hotel where we had to wait 3 hours for a room to open up, so we might go meet them for dinner. We wanted to see a Bollywood movie but the only one playing here is only in Hindi and I just can't sit through 3 hours of something I don't understand at all. So the rest of our time here will be spent eating, sleeping, and arranging things for London and Paris, which I am really looking forward to (except the cold and the thought of losing my fabutan).

Cheerio!
Leanne

People...People Who Meet People..la lalaaaaaa

Thanks Barbara....(ignore this for those of you too ignorant to understand my reference, bah ha haha)

I'm gonna cut to the chase here since it is my last night in Anjuna and I want to shower and get back to Lilliput Cafe to spend the night having drinks with friends. This blog is about the people we met this week.

Well first of all, crazy Vicky never ended up reappearing in our lives, which is probably a good thing. But we did manage to meet some wonderful people aside from him this week in Anjuna.

Let's begin with Marco, the circus performer. We first noticed Marco because he bore a striking resemblance to someone from toronto and as we were remarking about this, Marco began to do crazy things. He started by letting his friends climb on top of him in the water and do back flips off his shoulders. He followed with some acrobatics and finished off with a little magic and juggling. This guy was Italian, spoke very little English, but was one of the most enjoyable people we met here. He even drew a picture for Ryan (I am jealous).

The next day I met Lars (Germany), Dima/Liena/Roman/Marina (Russia), An Israeli guy whose name I always forget, among others. It was incredible the cultural exchanges that happened that evening. Today I met Innes from Spain/London/Germany, a Canadian from Yellowknife and his American girlfriend from Chickagah! Man, so many weird, interesting and different people in one place. But, some of the best people I have befriended are the guys that work at Lilliput Cafe who are all Nepali. They take good care of me and Ryan.

Anyway, this entry was more for my own memories than entertainment for the masses, so I apologize if it is a little dry, but the reality was soooo unbelievably rich that I couldn't omit this point.

Alright, Im off to scrub off sand again and get ready to say goodbye to all my friends here and the beautiful beach. A la prochaine!

Castles in the Sand

we are soooo burnt!

HA HA!! Actually, our daily burns are very mild and turn into very sexy tans youpie!

All we have done for the last two days is sit on our royal beee-hinds and swim leisurly-like. We attempted to have dinner with Crazy Pants that I mentioned in my last entry, but he was a no-show. We enjoyed our steak dinner at Tito's, the really fancy resto he asked us to meet him at. I particularly enjoyed when I asked the waiter for a side of bbq sauce and he brought me blue cheese dip. This slight error turned out to be heaven for me. It was nice to taste something like good cheeses from home...Ahhhh fromaggi.

Today Ryan built a great sandcastle. I tried to build this really cool spiral one but this little girl who is always at our regular place destroyed it midway through and I decided to give up heh heh. Anyway, so Ryan made this really "arty" castle and everyone came to look at it. Even the dogs appreciated it as not one, but two dogs decided to make it their territory, so to speak. Then we let Kushi (the aforementioned child) destroy that one too a-la-Godzilla.

Tonight our big plan is to return to Lilliput Cafe (the only place we ever go cause we love it there mucho mucho) and open our bottle of red wine from Nepal and eat shark or some other yummy fish.

Guess there won't be much going on this week aside from more swimming, tanning, and looking at people in bathing suits. So I'll do my best to bring back some sunshine to Canada, as they say, but I think this just means that I'll still have leftover sand in my hair that is impossible to wash out...

bye bye