Thailands worse tourists are Chinese. They are also  the most ripped off tourists here.  So listen up if you are a Chinese tourist. Because only you can change things for the better. This is going to be the best advice I am going to give you.

So why are the Chinese Thailands worse tourists?

Let’s start with the loud rude behavior and the messy disgusting habits displayed  by so many Mainland Chinese.  Or their nasty habit of spitting.  But it’s the tour buses they use for their daily transportation that puts them at the rock bottom of the food chain of tourists    If a group of Chinese tourists goes out to dinner at night, they are taking the tour bus.  If they go to Alcazar to watch a lady boy show, they’re taking the tour bus.   I’m talking Mainland Chinese now.  If you are from Hong Kong, Macau,  I’m excluding you from this group if riff raff.

These tour buses are too large  for the narrow streets in so many Thai cities.

There’s few places for them to park so they park in lanes of traffic that are normally used to moving traffic.  The result is a three lane street becomes a two lane.  And a two lane becomes a one lane, and all because the police let them get away with it.   They are a menace to life and limb while being responsible for over 50 percent of the growing traffic congestion in such cities as Pattaya.

Most of their drivers drive far too fast, and do what they please.  So  if you don’t get out of their way, they are going to run you over. This huge proliferation of  tour buses that’s making the growing hordes of Chinese tourists the scourge of Thailand’s cities.

The solution is  to kick all the tour buses out

once they have discharged all their passengers to whichever hotel or resort they are staying at.  This is a terrific idea and not just for solving much of the traffic problems in Thailand’s cities,  but for all   Chinese tourists using them.

Their own tour guides victimize these armies of Chinese by ruling their bus groups with iron fists so that they can line the pockets of their bosses back in China.

The tour guides take their victims only to the restaurants, bars, etc that cough up commissions to “these fearless leaders”.

The Chinese tourists who  go where the tour leader tells them to go, will be  going to the worse restaurants, night clubs, and other venues.  This is because the best run businesses already have enough customers so they don’t have to resort to bribing the tour guides.  The members of the Chinese tour group get the shaft while those rich bastards who own the travel companies get the cash their tour guide lackeys send back to them.

The good Thai owners who run their businesses properly aren’t going to get much Chinese business.   This is due to the willingness of unscrupulous owners to split  commissions with tour guides who are exploiting their tour groups.

It’s a big win for practically everybody if Thailand are kicks all the tour buses out of town

once they deliver their passengers to whatever hotel they are staying at.

For example, if a group of tourists arrives in Pattaya from Bangkok, and the destination for that particular tour group is the Centara Grand Mirage Beach Resort, once the tour group is let off at Centara, the bus must get out of town by returning to Bangkok or going to special parking areas that are created for the sole use of tour buses. These parking areas could be built on the same order of the hundreds of truck stops in the United States that provide lodging, restaurants and other amenities for the truck drivers.

Not long ago, hordes of Russian tourists descended upon Pattaya.

However,  there’s a vital difference between the Russians and Chinese Tourists

from the Peoples Republic of China. Once the Russians come here, they typically dispense with their tour buses.  Then they are on their own using baht taxis, mini buses, motorbike taxis or  renting motorbikes for their transportation needs.

The difference is the Russians are individualistic enough to want to seek out their own favorite entertainment venues, restaurants, shops, and other recreational pursuits such as Koh Larne Island, Nong Nooch botanical garden, the Tiger Zoo, etc. Very seldom will you see very large Russian groups traveling together.

And they don’t plug up the traffic the way the Chinese tour buses do when they transport  large groups of Chinese run all day and night long.    More than anything, it’s the explosive growth in numbers of tour buses, and all that rottenness that comes with them that makes the Chinese Thailands worse tourists .

By now you might be thinking that I really hate the Chinese.

This is simply untrue.  I just hate the way they are doing things here in Pattaya which is where I’ve been living for the past 10 years.  I learned a long time ago how this corrupt business between tour guides and businesses that offer them commissions works.  It all started with a young Chinese tour guide from Hong Kong I became good friends with back in 1982.

His name was Larry.  Larry was a well dressed polite  Chinese in his twenties.  Our group started in Hong Kong. Then we went to Singapore and finally to Bangkok.

Out of the entire group in our tour I only hung around with Siegfried, a German who had been working for ten years in New York as a butcher and, Mary, an American woman who was about the same age as Siegfried and myself.

More than half our tour group were Jews from Los Angeles

who had all known each other for years. Then there was another Jew and his wife who were from New York City. I’ll never forget this New Yorker  whose name was Al.  Now they might all be Jews, except for Siegfried, Mary and me, but there was a huge difference between them.  The L.A. group was very cliquish. Whereas Al was his own man.

So the L.A. Jews never really accepted Al .  The L.A. group was also very profligate with their money, a trait which I found to most unusual for most Jewish people.

But Al was  a bird of another feather.  For one thing regardless of how the rest of our group was traveling,  Al was always finding his own transportation  whether on foot, by taxi, subway or bus.  For example, while in Bangkok, if the rest of us visited the Royal Palace, at $20.00 each through the tour guide and tour bus,  Al paid only five dollars by taking the bus or private taxi.

Much of the tour, whether we were in Thailand, Singapore or Hong Kong consisted of “cultural events”

such as observing glass vases and kitchenware being made starting with the actual blowing of the glass in small cottage factories. Then we’d go somewhere else to watch how shirts were being made, or artifacts being crafted from Jade. There were jewelry “factories” and so on.  But everyone of those little factories had a retail shop attached to it.

The Jewish wives of the Los Angeles men would go absolutely bonkers in all those shops.  I’d hear them exclaim, “Oh, these will make such wonderful Christmas presents for Bill, and Jesse, and Sally.  And I must not forget Cousin Erma and Bertha.

So I’d watch them gather up all the things they were buying, and then the men would have to arrange the shipping to Los Angeles. This is because all those women were buying so much shit that there was no way they could put all that stuff into their luggage.  And then just one hour later they’d be repeating their greedy performance at a little factory making decorations out of sea shells.

I usually ate breakfast,  lunch and dinner with Mary and Siegfried,

and once in awhile we’d all buy Larry breakfast or dinner at the hotel restaurant.  No one else would invite Larry because I think for most of the group he was just a lowly tour guide. The hotel food cost at least double what it would been at a decent American restaurant.  So Larry would usually go outside the hotel to eat at a Chinese or Thai noodle stand for a fraction of what the rest of us were paying for our meals.

Then Siegfried and I had started to hear about Thai massages, and how a man could get a full hour and a half’s soapy massage for around fifteen dollars or so.

When we asked Larry about the renowned soapy massages he knew exactly where to take us. A few minutes taxi ride out of the hotel took us to a large establishment where a Thai man dressed in a tuxedo escorted us to a large glass window through which we could view over thirty women, all of them wearing numbers to identify themselves.

It didn’t take me long to pick out a tall woman with a terrific set of breasts to accompany me to the massage room.  Here I spent the (up to then) best one and a half hours of my life.  After Siegfried and I returned from our erotic encounters we joined Larry at the bar where we all had a few beers together while we flirted with the Thai waitresses.

By this time Mary and Siegfriend had started sharing a room together.  Then one of them, I can’t remember which and it doesn’t matter, got sick, so the pair started spending a lot more time in the room.  This left me by my lonesome, especially when it came to breakfast’s and dinner because Mary and Siegfried were usually getting room service.   I often ate alone or I’d sit with Al and his wife.

But Bangkok’s world famous night life was not to be missed

and I found a very willing confederate in Larry.  On at least one night we went to a few bars in Patpong.  We were both pretty green when it came to the bar girls who saw Larry and me as two lambs they could easily lead to the slaughter.  Whenever we’d enter a new bar we’d suddenly have five or six bar girls sweep down on us. I’d find one girl feeling my dick while another girl would be massaging my back, and we’d be buying them all drinks or offering them tips.

It didn’t take Larry and me long to catch on to what was really going on, so we’d resort to putting most of our money in our socks so the bar girls would have no idea of how much cash we were actually carrying.  Then we’d each put around five or ten dollars in our pockets, and that would be our budget for the next bar we’d go into.  We’d last about ten or fifteen minutes and

when the bar girls thought we had run out of money they’d drop us as if we were lepers

and descend onto the next men to come into the bar. This left Larry and I  drinking with each other without any interference from the money hungry girls. Being finally able to drink our beers in peace we were able to discuss many things such as our girlfriends back home.  Or who we liked and didn’t like from the tour group, Thai bar girls, and what really went on in the tour.

Larry’s boss was a very wealthy Hong Kong Chinese who lived on Victoria Peak

where a lot of the very wealthy Hong Kong Chinese owned large mansions with expensive cars lining their drive ways. Larry’s boss owned not one, but two Rolls Royces. As for Larry, he barely got enough salary from the tour agency to be able to afford a decent dinner at an inexpensive noodle stand. Larry had a girlfriend but she was from Singapore rather than Hong Kong.  As for Hong Kong, Larry didn’t like most of the people living there, and he had absolutely no use for Hong Kong’s women who he regarded as a bunch of money hungry bitches.

Larry then went on to tell me how the commissions worked. Every time he’d take us to a restaurant,  it would be a restaurant that was paying commissions to his boss back in Hong Kong. The same applied to the Jade outlet, and the place that had sold all the L.A. wives all that artwork they were shipping off to their friends and family in Los Angeles. As for Larry, he wasn’t getting any of those commissions.

As I remember a deluxe tour to Russia cost something like $3000.

That was in about 1983 for an 18 day tour to Russia.  The Asian tour cost $2700.  This was one year before I took the Russian tour. The difference was that the Russian tour included just about everything. All our meals were included and with the meals so was the champagne and the wine, beer and vodka.  We even had the finest Russian black surgeon caviar and even that was included in the price of the tour.  We went to the Russian ballet which was included. Our entry fee to all the museums  was included. When I look back on it I think I paid only something like $100 over the initial cost of the entire tour package.

This was not true for the Asian tour that  paid for two Rolls Royces for its rich Chinese owner.

I had to pay for nearly all my meals most of which I ate at whatever hotels we stayed at (which left a lot of commission money for the Chinese owner of the tour agency).  We also had to pay for all those mini tours to the Royal Palace and similar attractions in Hong Kong and Singapore.  So a big tour bus took us  practically everywhere  so that we could support the wealthy Hong Kong Chinese’s Rolls Royce habit by having to overpay for all those little side trips.

I hope I have a lot of Chinese reading this so far.

Because by now it should be obvious that I am  really not anti Chinese at all. Larry had wound up becoming my best friend on the tour and he was Chinese and I certainly liked him a lot better than most of the Americans from LA who were on the tour with me.  So let me bring everyone to the present.  Which is what is happening in Pattaya today because of the huge proliferation of tour buses which are filled up for the most part by Chinese.

I’ll give you two examples of how the touring agencies you travel with are ripping you and your fellow mainland Chinese off .

Believe me, you will be far better off sending all those tour guides of yours back to Shanghai, Beijing or whatever other caves they just crawled out of.

My first example’s the Pen Bar here in Naklua. I’ve known Pen for over ten years now, and Pen’s a straight shooter all the way. She has a very loyal clientelle of Western customers for very good reason. Number one, she never overcharges any of her customers no matter how drunk they might become or how helpless they might seem to become due to overindulgence of alcohol. Number two….she will nearly always tell you what she really thinks, and not just what she thinks you want to hear or what will benefit her bar.

Anyway, when the subject turns to the Chinese invasion of Pattaya and the tidal wave of tour buses that is making a mess out of the traffic here,

Pen tells me, “The Chinese are really stupid.”

So when I ask her why, she tells me about how a Chinese guy once came into her bar, and when she asked the man what he wanted to drink, he told her, “Sorry. Cannot drink now. Must wait for Fearless Leader (our tour guide) who will tell me what to drink, whether he thinks my drink is poisoned or not and how much I must pay for the drink.  He will also tell us if we are safe here or not.  We always do what our fearless leader tells us to do.”

After a few minutes the rest of the tour group arrives, and at their head in walks the Fearless Leader.  Right off he strides up to Pen and asks, “You charge everyone in group 140 baht for beer,okay?  And you and I split the rest, fifty fifty, okay? Pen’s selling her bottle beer for 80 baht. This means the tour guide is wanting to get a sixty baht commission for each beer his group orders which means thirty baht for Pen and thirty baht for either himself or his bosses back in Beijing.  Pen, who’s an honest lady refuses, and the tour leader promptly orders his entire group away from the bar so he can take all his Chinese minions somewhere else that is willing to spill commissions into his rotten dirty hands.

Then there’s the five star hotel just down the beach from me. The other night, I was having dinner and drinks with my girlfriend and another Thai woman. It costs 900 baht for the all you can eat buffet and three hours of all you can drink. The hotel is at 70 percent occupancy and a large percentage of that is Chinese, but there’s not one Chinese eating here that night.

Our waiter tells me  the Chinese tour guide asked the hotel for commissions and the hotel refused. One can be sure that the tour guide took his group of subjects somewhere else that night,

and that the restaurant had been all too willing to enrich his Chinese superiors from whatever rock they had crawled out from.

The solution for all concerned is to kick all the tour buses out from Pattaya and similar Thai cities. This alone will make the traffic situation infinitely better. The tour leader will no longer be  able to  to confine his Chinese tour members to the tour bus.  Without the tour bus he can no  longer justify taking all his subjects to only those places he favors.

The Chinese tour members will now have to arrange for their own transportation to whichever bars or restaurants they want to go to

instead of their fearless leaders cherry picking those establishments willing to fork over commissions.  And when it comes to such wondrous attractions such as Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, the Siracha Tiger Zoo, the Crocodile Farm, the Khao Kheow open zoo, Underwater World, etc. large tour buses are completely unnecessary.

There’s a lot of tours one can get on where mini buses that can easily negotiate the narrow streets here show the tourists around. There’s motorbike taxis and baht taxis that are willing to take their occupants nearly everywhere they want to go at very reasonable prices.

Once a tour group arrives here, the truth is, the large tour bus is as useless as tits on a boar.

Meanwhile, the Chinese  will now have much more freedom of choice to choose for themselves the best entertainment spots, the best restaurants, and other top notch venues that Thailand has to offer. As it is now they get to have all those money hungry Chinese tour companies choose only those venues that are willing to pay commissions to the undeserving.