While researching part one– There’s poo on your shoe!– of this travel scam series, I ran across a couple more travel scams that tourists should beware…

You want how much for that pot of tea?! Here’s one from China: English-speaking tourists are approached by “Chinese students” at popular tourists sites in Beijing and Shanghai, for example, who want to “practice their English.” Because this isn’t so abnormal, sans scam, the tourists aren’t on guard. The Chinese students then ask the tourists if they want to go for tea, or to see a traditional tea ceremony. Why not? Seems innocent enough, right?

Wrong.

The bottom of the tea pot leads to the bottom of your wallet– when you slurp down the last drop of tea, you’ll find yourself staring down the barrel of a big, big bill that adds up to hundreds of dollars. Said one blogger, who was a victim of this scam, “there seemed to be an extra zero on the total.”

And what is there to do? You don’t speak Chinese, they barely speak English. Most people just cough up the cash and move on.

The bus station scam: my travel mates and I fell victim to this one in Delhi. One of my travel mates had only two days before she flew back to London and was desperate to see the Taj Mahal before she left. We went to the bus station to get tickets a day in advance. As we approached the counter, a well-dressed man approached us (and, yes, alarms started going off in my head at this time) and asked us if we were going to Agra. One of my travel mates said yes. He told us that there were no seats left on the public buses, but hey, we were in luck! We could book a seat with his company. He promptly hustled us out of the bus station and into his travel agency.

“You guys,” I whispered under my breath as we were filing into the office just a stone’s throw away from the bus station, “the Lonely Planet warned about this. We’re being had.”

But my travel mate really, really wanted to see the Taj Mahal before she went back to London.

Despite my protests, we ended going on a “tour” the next day. It cost us double what going on our own would have cost… and we felt like we’d been kidnapped. The “tour” lasted over twelve hours and included not only the “obligatory” stop at an Agra marble store, but also stops at various Krishna-related temples and sites. At one of these temples, we were strongly urged to donate money (which we didn’t).

We were the only Westerners on the bus and the Indian tourists seemed equally appalled at being scammed– by Krishna worshipers, nonetheless.

This leads me to my last points…

Remember that you can be fleeced no matter where you are in the world. Just as the Indians on our “tour” were scammed in India, you can be scammed in your mother country. And not all travelers are fellow innocents– travelers can be scammers, too. Stories abound about tourists who have been had by other tourists.

With all this said, I wouldn’t recommend going through your travels overly concerned about scams and strangers. In fact, some of my best travel experiences (including sleeping in an old man’s bed in Syria) have involved total strangers. Travelers must walk a line between weariness and openness.

OK, now it’s your turn! Share your travel stories– good and bad– with me…

Travel scams run the gamut from elaborate and well-orchestrated (think Agra food poisoning) to simple (giving incorrect change back). Here’s a few I’d like to avoid:

There’s poo on your shoe! Some travelers say that this is a rite of passage in India, especially in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai. I think, however, that I can get to know the country quite well without fecal matter on my feet.

Here’s how this one works: the bleary-eyed traveler is walking around a busy, crowded area. Scam Artist #1 (hmmm, maybe we should call him Scam Artist #2) squirts some poo on your shoe.

Scam Artist #2 points it out to you. “Sir! There’s poo on your shoe!” Coincidentally, Scam Artist #2 happens to be equipped with everything needed to clean the poo off your shoe… for a price.

This begs two questions for us. First, what can you do? Not a thing, really. Chalk it up to bad luck, you’ve just been had. Chances are you won’t pay much for your impromptu shoe cleaning, so try to have a sense of humor about it (you have to admit, it is a pretty good trick).

The second question is: how did they get the poo into a tube to begin with? We’re not sure we want the answer to that one.

Those samosas cost how much?! This has to be one of the more outrageous Indian travel scams I’ve heard, in part because of how nervy and blatant it is: a Dutch couple visiting India were recently charged 10,000 rupees—the equivalent of over 200 dollars—for four samosas, the deep-fried pastry-stuffed-with-potato. That’s right, as in the snack.

What shocks us is that the Dutch couple actually coughed up the dough. (Read the full BBC story about the incident).

That reminds me of another food-related scam that can leave your pockets slim: the Taj Mahal (Agra) food poisoning scam. This one is a few years past, but you never know if and when it will resurface. In fact, when I was in India in the summer of 2007, several Indian friends cautioned my travel mates and me not to stay overnight in Agra and advised us to avoid the food and water there.

So, what was the scam? Allegedly, restaurants were serving unwitting tourists bad food. OK, you can get food poisoning anywhere in the world, but it didn’t stop there. In Agra, the restaurants were in cahoots with local doctors who then charged the sick tourists exorbitant fees for necessary medical treatment. The doctors then gave a commission to the restaurant.

Yikes.

Have you ever been scammed while traveling? Have you ever been a victim of the poo on the shoe scam? Share your story here…

It was my last day in India, and I’d just had lunch with an Indian friend. As I was walking back towards my hostel, I noticed a foreigner standing in the middle of the sidewalk—a rock in a river of pedestrian traffic. He wore raggedy khaki shorts, a green t-shirt with the collar cut out, and brown sandals. His dark curly hair was messy and the shirt was askew—one side of the collar all the way against his neck, the other falling off his shoulder. He was glistening with sweat and he looked obviously distressed.

For whatever reason, his eyes were pinned on me.

I should stop and tell you here that I have a bit of an unwritten traveler’s code I live by:
1) Whenever I’m in a group, if I see a traveler who isn’t, I invite them to join me/us.
2) If I ever see a traveler in distress, I approach them to see if they’re OK or if I can help.
3) If someone approaches me, I always try to be as friendly and helpful as possible.

But seeing this guy on the street made me hesitate. He looked like he was crazy or on drugs, or both. And I had a plane to catch that night… what if he dragged me into some sort of bizarre situation I couldn’t extricate myself from and I missed my flight?

As I approached him, I thought to myself that I had two simple choices in this situation: I can avoid him or I can be Buddha-like and karma-minded and stick to my traveler’s code.

Not that he gave me much of a choice. As I passed, he grabbed my arm and launched into his story, babbling away at me in Hebrew. I stopped him, telling him I don’t speak Hebrew and the story came in a gush of English instead: he needed to find a cheaper place to stay than the one he was in because he was almost out of money and he was sick and his girlfriend had left the day before and they’d been traveling together in India for a year and he didn’t know what to do without her and…

You get the idea.

So I took the poor guy, Amit was his name, and lead him to the Salvation Army Hostel. When we arrived there, Amit stood, wordless at the check-in counter. The clerk looked at us expectantly. I looked at Amit expectantly. Nothing.

“Do you have any beds left in the dorm?” I asked the clerk.
The clerk wobbled his head in response, a gesture that can mean a hundred different things.
“For him,” I added, pointing to Amit.
The clerk wobbled his head again and asked for Amit’s passport.

We both waited while Amit watched the air around him.

Finally, I said, “Amit, your passport, please.”
“Oh!” he snapped to attention and fished through his money belt, producing a beaten looking passport and some tattered rupees.
“Where’s your stuff?” I asked him as the clerk took down Amit’s information.
“Gone.”
“Just gone?”
“Gone,” he repeated.

I thought maybe he was gone, too.

Once Amit checked into his room, I never saw him again. But I like to think that I helped him in some way, however small. It was my duty as a fellow traveler.

What about you? Got some stories about a time you helped a traveler or a traveler helped you? I’d love to hear them…

And if you ran into Amit, let me know how he’s doing!