THREE MONKEYS AND A MILD REALISATION

2025-05-10

In a market somewhere in Thailand, I asked a stall owner how much he would charge for three small monkey statues. He answered, 600 baht, and I took this as my chance to try out my haggling chops. Eventually, I whittled the price down to 350 baht, and forked over the cash.

As I walked away, apes in hand, I realised that I had just parted with the equivalent of two decent meals for some monkeys. However, I also realised that 350 baht was much less than the statues would have cost in my home country.

This experience made me think: tourists need to be rid of their fixation on "getting ripped off," and by extension, the romanticised idea of authenticity: the laughable idea that tourists can somehow experience life like the locals do.

As a westerner, my home country is considerably wealthier than the places I've visited, and as such, prices are cheaper abroad, giving me far more purchasing power. This is the case for many tourists coming from the west.

In this light, the idea of being ripped off seems silly when you realise that your meal or souvenir or transportation cost you 0.0002% of your salary rather than 0.0001%. Haggling over such a small amount seems less like travel savvy, and more like greed.

Worse, that small amount of money could mean a great deal to the person you're bargaining with. In many cases, it might be the equivalent of a day, or even a week of their labour. Seen this way, insisting on a "better deal" becomes a moral question, not just an economic one.

Needless to say, it's also important to avoid genuine scams or theft. However, if you have the opportunity to help someone by sharing an iota of your relative abundance, you have the obligation to do so.

Beyond questions of fairness, there's another force at play: the pursuit of authenticity. So, why do western tourists obsess over haggling in these countries? Novelty, for one; haggling is mostly a foreign concept to a lot of westerners, it is simply not performed in most settings. But it also ties into a deeper desire to chase "authentic" experiences abroad.

Being the Anthony Bourdain wannabe I am, I love taking the metro, eating street food, and pretending that I'm part of the city. But no matter how much I blend in, I'm still just a visitor. I won't work, commute, pay rent, or grow old here.

The concept of a "tourism industry" is contrary to the idea of authenticity. Tourism will always be a simulation of life in another place, not the real thing. And that's okay, as long as we're honest about it.

I don't regret buying those monkeys.