Bargaining

Bargaining was fun although I don't think many of us were much good at it. I think Jono may have been the exception, having lived in Cape Town in South Africa, although perhaps he was just lucky! On one occasion he managed to get the price of something from 3000 rupees (about £36) down to 1600 just by saying repeatedly (genuinely as it happened) that he didn't want it! Unfortunately for the shop keeper he still didn't buy it! One of our team, on being giving the price of something responded with, "That's cheap!", at which a couple of us who heard it just groaned and exchanged glances!

You could bargain for most things, the exception being some of the government emporiums and more expensive shops where prices were marked on things. If you knew what you were doing, even a fixed price wasn't necessarily a fixed price, but it took someone more familiar than us with the culture to know when this was or wasn't the case! My best results were:

1. A rural Indian scene, hand-painted on black cloth - bargained from 2000 down to 1500 rupees.
2. A couple of souvenir elephants, hand-carved - down from 800 to 600 for the pair.
3. A leather wallet - down from 450 to 270.

As you can see, I was getting slightly better towards the end! If I'd had a bit more idea what I was doing though, I think about half the original asking price would've been a reasonable expectation, and this is assuming the prices hadn't been inflated even more for the benefit of us tourists! In one of the homes we visited in Ana Nagar, I managed to knock a mobile phone onto the floor and break it. I offered to replace it and my offer was initially refused but later taken up when I left it open. The phone in question was on sale new for 3000 rupees but Felix (our Indian guide) bargained it down for me to 1550!

It's also normal to bargain for tuc tucs, but this is hard work and they charge a lot more for western tourists! A big part of the art of bargaining is knowing when to walk away - or at least when to threaten to! Another part though, is knowing when someone is only faking it! There are plenty of tuc tucs around so if you say no to one you should usually be able to find another. I think though that most of the drivers have got the idea that they do better by turning down westerners who refuse to pay high prices, so that we tourists get the idea that we have to pay more if we need to get anywhere. It's also normal apparently, for tuc tuc drivers to charge more after dark, although without knowing what normal prices really are it's pretty hard to know what is and isn't reasonable. All this aside though, I think the most we ever paid for a tuc tuc ride was 40 rupees for 3 people, which amounts to about 50 pence, so it's all pretty relative!