Love or loathe the English? The latest Rough Guide for England has a few choice things to say about them. First the bad news: It says that English people are quarrelsome, contradictory and "obsessed with toffs and C-list celebrities."
The good news is more, well, quaint, than good. The Rough Guide people decided that England is
A country of animal-loving, tea-drinking, charity donors, where queuing remains a national pastime and bastions of civilization, like Radio 4, are jealously protected.
We've heard a few complaints about the British before so this quirky Rough Guide assessment comes as no surprise. But since we love a good cup of tea, we haven't struck England off our visiting list just yet.
We're smart travelers. Really we are. But when we read the UK Times list of the 14 best travel scams last weekend, we realized that we might be smart but the scammers are sometimes smarter.
This list should be compulsory reading for all travelers, just so you're aware of how nice-but-nasty some scam artists can be. Among the usual phony free trips, credit card theft and drink-doping "buddies," there were a few scams we hadn't heard of yet.
One of these was "the metal detector shuffle," where the scam-artist, without baggage, waits until you've put your bag on the conveyor belt, but then rushes through ahead of you. With enough coins or other metal items in his pockets, he gets held up and has to go through the detector several times; meanwhile your bag has gone through and the scam-guy's accomplice, in front of him, has taken off with it.
And finally, there's one we can't imagine we'd fall for, but apparently some people have:
You are approached by someone in a bar who guarantees you thousands of dollars if you join in a scam by getting on a bus that they will rear-end somewhere along its route. Most of the passengers, you are promised, will be in on the fraud, and will all protest that it was the driver's fault, while rubbing their hips and necks. And the bus company will start handing out cash and liability-waiver forms immediately.
We hope we don't have to tell you to beware of strange men promising a bus crash.
Fijian tourism is suffering, and it's not just because of military coups. Nope, the thing that's really killing 'em is an incident last year in which a drunken Fijian soldier urinated on a Japanese tourist on board an Air Pacific flight.
Believe it or not, said the Fiji Times:
Urinating on a tourist on an international flight is a high-profile incident which gains global notoriety.
And getting peed on is only half of it. From cab drivers who overcharge tourists, to shop vendors working the hard sell to gum-smacking customs officers, the tourism industry is doing everything it can to give the country a black eye, the newspaper says. While there aren't any quick fixes listed, we've gotta figure that making it to the airplane lav in time would be a good start.
We're getting the message from all directions this week: Bulgaria is the new place to ski. Whether it's an EasyJet flight tip or a recommendation for the ski resort at Bansko, we're not surprised that an Irish tourist named David Gibbons decided to take a holiday to ski in the Pirin Mountains.
But we are surprised about where he chose to sleep. After drinking too much to find his own hotel, Gibbons decided to force open the door of a furniture shop and take a nap on one of the showroom beds. Staff arriving for work the next day found him snoring away and called the police.
This would make a great holiday tale to tell his pals back home--except for the $4,000 fine he's now facing. That makes it quite the alternative to a night in his cheap Bulgarian hotel.
We once thought that Australians abroad were considered a bit exotic, and perhaps even cute and cuddly like those koalas they have down under. But a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald has painted at least some Australians as the world's worst tourists.
Turns out that some of the Aussie visitors to the Japanese ski slopes are behaving badly. Take this example, from a bartender in Niseko:
They get drunk, take off their clothes, sometimes smash glasses and have fights--like it's fun.
Last Japanese ski season there were numerous reports of vandalism and bar brawls, with Aussie tourists throwing both glasses and punches. Worst of all, some drunken Aussies were parading around the Japanese ski resorts knocking the heads off snowmen. We reckon that should be a punishable offense.
A tourist who was 12 beers deep decided it would be a good idea to go for a late night drunken swim. Matt Martin was camping in northeastern Queensland, which everyone knows is the land of saltwater crocs (thanks Steve Irwin!). When he jumped into the river at Cow Bay he landed on a crocodile.
After a tussle with the mini dinosaur that only helps to grow his legend, Matt went back to his campsite to sleep it off. Thing is, mangled bloody croc-eaten faces tend to make passing out in peace a real bitch. Eventually, after seven hours of rest, Matt ended up at the hospital where he received 40 stitches.
Matt admitted his face was "pretty messed up," but being 12 beers deep he just wanted to catch a small nap before dealing with it. C'mon, replace "croc eats half your face off" with "drink and dial" and we've all been there.
The US is a big, mean bully--or so many seem to think: Since 9/11, tourists are skipping the States because border security is so tight and uninviting. So the US travel industry is making a big push to work on its image. And they've hired Tom Ridge, the former Homeland Security chief who made getting into the country so damn hard to begin with. He says that tourists shouldn't avoid the states:
People, I think, have a sense that they're not quite as welcome in America as they were on September 10, 2001, and that's the furthest thing from the truth. So, we have to dust off the welcoming mat.
While the New York Times covered the other side of this story last week--with tales of surely border guards, etc.--today's the day that lobbyists are headed to Washington, DC to hype the Discover America Partnership, which was created last year by industry heavies like Disney and Marriott.
The group hopes to streamline the visa application process and add customs agents to make it easier to visit the States. The industry is also hoping to score $200 million to promote foreign tourism to the US. Hopefully they use it to buy a better tag line than Australia did.
Sometimes it's no particular nationality that makes our list of the World's Worst Tourists, but a whole bunch of idiots from all over the world who just have no idea how to behave. Like the case of the elephant harassers in southern Africa.
In bygone days, tourists who went on safari in Africa were more likely to be khaki-wearing, binocular-carrying scientific types with a keen sense of animal rights. Not anymore. The tourist minister in Namibia has had to issue warnings to tourists to behave more appropriately around elephants, after a number of tourists were killed by irritated, trunk-waving beasts. An experienced guide complained about situations like this one:
This big old bull (elephant) was drinking on the Kwando River, but he wasn't active enough for these tourists. So they started revving their engines, blowing the horn and banging the doors to attract his attention. Result? He charged them. Next time he sees a 4WD, he'll charge that, too, because these boys don't forget.
It's the self-drive tourists who reckon they don't need a guide that cause the most problems, so if you're traveling in southern Africa watch out for these elephant harassers.
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by amandak
