The pitch sounded simple. Sixty baht for an hour. Three temples, one shopping detour, back to the hotel. The driver smiled. He nodded a lot. He pointed at a laminated card with photos that I would later learn was the equivalent of a witness-protection alibi: pictures of temples nobody actually goes to anymore, with prices written in a language I couldn’t read.

I climbed in. The tuk-tuk roared off in a direction that wasn’t any of the directions on the map I was holding. I tried to ask. The driver said “yes yes,” which I would learn is the universal Thai expression for “I have heard a noise from the back of my vehicle but I will not be acting on it.”

The first stop was not a temple

It was a tailor shop. A small, slightly damp tailor shop, full of slightly damp suits, run by a man named Steve who insisted that I, specifically, was an excellent candidate for a custom three-piece. The tuk-tuk driver had vanished. The shop owner produced tea. There was a measuring tape involved. At no point did anyone mention a temple.

This, I would later learn, is the famous Bangkok tuk-tuk scam. The driver gets a commission for every tourist they deliver to a partner business. The tour is a ruse. The temples are theoretical. You will see one if you’re lucky, on the way back, briefly, through the window.

Stop two: gem store

I made it out of the tailor with my dignity slightly bruised but my wallet intact. Stop two was a “government-certified gem store,” which is not a phrase the actual government of Thailand has ever said. The driver gestured at a building that looked like it had been built last Tuesday and waved me in. Inside, an aggressively friendly salesman explained that I had been chosen, specifically and only today, for a “tax-free export discount” on rubies.

I declined. The salesman became less friendly. I declined again. The salesman became significantly less friendly. I left through what I believed was the main door, which turned out to be the staff bathroom, and exited through a back alley containing several confused chefs and an open drain.

Stop three: the actual temple, briefly

The driver was waiting. He looked surprised that I was alive. We drove past a temple, technically. I saw it from the window. He pointed. “Temple,” he said, with the satisfaction of a man who had successfully completed his contract.

I asked, in a calm and measured tone, to be returned to my hotel. He said “yes yes.” We drove for forty more minutes through traffic that defied the rules of physics. By the end I was no longer on the route to my hotel; I was on a tour of every karaoke bar in old Bangkok at three in the afternoon, none of which were open, all of which had a man out the front who waved warmly at the driver.

The lesson

Cheap tuk-tuk tours are not tours. They are commission machines wearing tour-coloured paint. The two-baht-per-stop driver makes far more from your reluctant suit purchase than from your fare. If you want to see temples in Bangkok, walk, ride the metro, or hire a car for a flat hourly rate from a service with a real address.

Or just take the tuk-tuk anyway, the way I did, knowing it’s a scam. Treat it as performance art. Pay the sixty baht. Refuse everything they try to sell you. Use it as a ride-along through the city’s underbelly. You’ll see more of Bangkok than the temple-only tourists, and you’ll have a much better story.

One of about 50 stories in Travel Fails & Epic Tales. Most involve me losing money or dignity, sometimes both.