i’m in thailand! or am i?

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: i’m in thailand! or am i? 🤨 

i forgot tourism is huge in thailand. as soon as i touched down in the phuket airport i had to double take at the amount of foreigners at every corner.

in korea, i only saw a handful of foreigners each day. i quite liked it that way — i could witness and experience the culture for how it is without heavy influence from tourism and catering the entire region for it (tell me why there are more pasta restaurants than thai ones here ….). in patong, the region i’m staying in, its clear that tourism runs the place. 🪩

hotels take up entire streets, street vendors are beckoning us over to sell thai massages and hair braiding services, tour booking stands randomly being set up anywhere, the influence is clear and i haven’t really been able to get a feel for the actual country.

i was, however, able to experience a taste when i visited an elephant sanctuary and took a walk around town, but the two best moments have been when i wasn’t surrounded by tourists at all:

1. taking a motorbike taxi to old town phuket and enjoying the stunning views while speeding and weaving between cars on the busy streets. 🏍️

2. waking up before dawn to catch the sunrise. there was practically nobody outside. i loved watching the sky turn orange and locals set up shop for the day.

another thing i noticed was the stark difference in between tanzania and thailand versus korea.

in tanzania, i was accustomed to the marked up prices and tiring necessity to haggle for everything. prices were never consistent, and that was a mental (+ financial, obviously) load the whole trip. we were primarily doing touristy things in tanzania and the locals could clearly see we weren’t from tanzania, therefore we’re easy targets. 🎯

in korea, this was completely out of the picture. safe for some increasingly scammy spots like gwangjang market (which, again, is one of the most touristy areas), i found pricing to be mostly the same across the board — it was standardized and this gave me a huge peace of mind. very little foreigner-targeted scamming was going on throughout seoul, because the city is built for their citizens. tourism has little influence.

thailand, so far, has been a repeat of tanzania’s, price-scam culture. the light at the end of the tunnel is that the cost of anything in both these countries is so low that it doesn’t really hurt the bank that horrendously, but it still doesn’t feel good to be overcharged. my first realization of this was yesterday when i was in the market and wanted to buy an adorable strawberry bag. i asked for the price and was told 250 thai baht to which i thought, “okay, solid.” i gave him 200 thb and said that’s the best price i can do, and secured the bag for myself.

at the next store, i saw the same bag being sold for 150 baht. 😭

the haggling era begins once again.

tourism has a heavy influence on a region’s culture, from the accessibility of food and transportation to the proportion of scamming incidents.

daily opportunity + resource drops 🔍️