Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

A few months ago, the Singaporean newspaper Straits Times did a great piece on what is  called "beg-packing," a phenomenon whereby foreign tourists, often whites from developed countries, finance their backpacking trips across Southeast Asia by selling knickknacks like postcards or performance arts on the streets of their travel destinations.  Sitting on the street sides, these tourists get handouts from local people drawn by curiosity of foreigners practically begging on the streets.

Going on tours, I always have a dilemma. Does the tour guide expect a tip, or is the tip included in the service?  Does the guide earn a living from tips, or is it culturally taboo to give tip (yes, in many Asian countries, tipping can be considered an insult).  For a person new to a foreign country, the answer is not a simple one, often requiring careful observation to see how others behave so that one can follow suit accordingly.  But when everyone is looking at others for guidance on the topic, the dilemma becomes a collective one.

Uyuni, Bolivia is really in the middle of nowhere.  Surrounding the town is endless expense of deserts, themselves hemmed to one side by towering mountains that separates the area from the mountainous bulk of the country.  From the window of the bus that comes down from the mountains, the town looks like a mirage, a clump of civilization surrounded by inhabitable nature.  Indeed, the town abruptly ends at deserts, overlooking into complete nothingness.

Walking down the streets of major cities in Bolivia, one would come across an interesting phenomenon, almost all of the minibuses that serve as the main form of public transport for the local populace is decorated in the front and the sides with a series of Chinese characters, printed on in order but making completely no sense.  These characters add a sense of the exotic to otherwise bland one-color exterior of the busses.  Occasionally, the same is observed for trucks that carry products within the towns or across the country.

Look at any major tourist site in the world today, there is bound to be an adjacent area with hundreds of shops serving the needs of hundreds of thousands of travelers coming through every year. They do a roaring business.  People need to eat, sleep, be entertained, and have their laundry done. And away from home and unfamiliar with the local prices, the tourists are willing to pay much higher prices than the local residents for services and products, some of them so basic as to not cost that much to provide.