Bangkok tuk-tuk ride

The Jardims, on their first day in Bangkok, fell for almost every tuk-tuk ploy laid out in print in the Lonely Planet (should have read it first)!
Here they are:
A young man with a Tourist Police badge informs us:
Royal Palace is closed today until 4 pm!!! Let me help you go to some other very interesting places such as....
and then proceeds to mark up our map. He says only take yellow (gov't controlled) tuk-tuks! He calls one over and bargains the guy down from 50 to 40 Bahts for us (so far we think this guy is on our side...)
We tell him where we want to go and he nods and off we go zipping this way and that thru traffic (tuk-tuk is glorified motorcycle with a covered seat on the rear wheel). We arrive at an amazing structure with no other tourists although we are pretty sure it isn't where we asked to go. We DO go to see the white Buddha, and the only other person there is Andy - a guy from Singapore who lives in England and used to work in Silicone valley. he explains about how the tuk-tuks get free gas for going to export shops, so we shouldn't be upset about getting taken to a shop.
Sure enough, next stop was the Sapphire Jewelry Co.. Then the next stop was Chin Jewelry Co.(picture below is of our tuk-tuk in front of the Chin Jewelry Co.)  Then the NEXT stop was - guess what???? A tailor! After a brief hard sell from an Indian immigrant, Philip managed to get away without a $25 custom made shirt. Finally, with my patience running thin, we made it to .a large temple complex which was fascinating - LOTS and LOTS of Buddha statues from different cultures, time periods and  poses. When we emerged our tuk-tuk was nowhere to be found. He had dumped us!! We had taken so long in the temple that his shift was up. But also, he did not mind giving up our 40 Baht because he made 300 Baht worth of free gas at the export shops!!
We were approached by the only taxi driver parked in front of the temple who offered to take us to the skytrain for a set fee. We bargained him down and were relieved to get into his air conditioned cab. When we got back to the hotel we read in the the LP: Do not get into a taxi that quotes a flat rate price instead of using the meter.

Amazingly, we weren't upset at all. It is possible that we may have been conned out of $3. However, we had a great, if unexpected, day whizzing around Bangkok. And the next day - when we were faced with the more official-looking scammers, I held up three fingers and said "yesterday 3 export!" and they immediately backed off.

Tomorrow we head for India - wish us luck!