Round The World Tickets
Bus tours are great once you get used to that one maddening feature
When on my RTW trip or when I just travel in general, I tend to go a bit faster than most other people do. When you tell people you are going to Bangkok you’ll hear some people say you should spend at least a month in the area in order to truly appreciate its diversity. I have a short attention span, so I did Bangkok in 4 days, which is a day or two longer than I’ve spent in many other big cities. Anyway, the point is, that bus tours often offer an incredible value as long as you know how they really work.
I’ve been on dozens of these things and you can find similar ones in most places around the world, but I’ll use Bangkok for this example. I booked a half-day bus tour that left Kho San Road early in the morning and went out to the Floating Market, which is about an hour outside the city by bus. I think I paid around US$6 for the tour, which seemed damn cheap for 5 hours driving around the Bangkok area in a van full of other bewildered Westerners, especially since it also included two boat tours once at the market. And it was cheap and a great deal, for a very good reason: Bus tours like this around the world are gimmicks to get tourists into overpriced souvenir shops.
But those of us on RTW trips don’t want any souvenirs because the last thing we need is extra weight in our packs, especially in the form of some crudely-carved statue of something you don’t even recognize. So of course the trick is to take the tours but never buy anything. The driver and/or guide won’t mind, even though the whole reason they do these tours is they get to keep 20% of every inflated purchase you make at every shop they drop you at.
You’ll be on a few of these tours soon yourself, and there is no reason to fear them like you might a timeshare sales presentation. There will be no hard sell on these bus tours, but there is also no chance of getting out of the souvenir part. At the Floating Market the people powering the boats they put us into kept going straight toward these certain selected merchants with whom they had a commission deal. We’d go from one to another, and only to the places that had been pre-selected. I don’t think anyone in my group bought anything, but that didn’t slow down the tour people.
On the way back to Bangkok there were 12 of us in the van and our driver told us the final stop was at a woodcarving center just up the road. We all unanimously agreed that we weren’t interested in the woodcarving stop and our driver nodded that was fine with him. Five minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the woodworking center and were told we’d have 45 minutes to shop here. There’s no getting out of the sales stops no matter how much you beg, but if you have a zen-like attitude going in you can have fun on those tours anyway, spending almost nothing the whole day.
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