Travellers should avoid this con

I was strolling down the Seine in Paris on the kind of summer’s day that may even have made Sartre smile when I felt a tug on my sleeve. A hunched old woman, possibly from a Monty Python sketch, was staring up at me and trying to convince me that the ring she held in her hand had been dropped, and was most likely mine.

What followed was a rambling story in which she attempted to lure me into a local jewellery store, where she said I could take the lion’s share of the good fortune that had just befallen us both, if I just paid her a small stipend now. This rang every one of my warning bells and like the Floyd Mayweather of con-artistry, I managed to duck and weave my way out of her clutches, and scurry down the river for an adrenalin-calming crêpe.  The incident did, however, remind me of a significantly more cunning ruse I had fallen into on my first trip out of the country some years previously. A con called Madame Tussauds.

One of the first stops on the UK tourist’s checklist, the wax museum Madame Tussauds is world famous. While the London store is the original, the museum of celebrity lookalike models has mutated and spread like measles in Jim Carrey’s neighbourhood. There are now 21 different branches and Madame Tussauds can be found from Beijing, to New York and Sydney. But what makes it a con?

Well, for starters, tickets to this “museum” start at £23.00 each if bought online in advance and head up to a head-clearing £33.00 if you decide on a whim that today looks like a lovely day for staying inside with a range of man-sized candles. While in South Africa that much money could probably buy you a midrange Nissan Bakkie it’s also nothing to sneer at in London where it will still buy a meal for two in a local pub.

For this towering price one expects to get a series of carefully curated Instagram experiences, in which your every photo looks like it was shot with real world-famous celebrities. Your friends back home should thumb through your social media gasping with awe at the way you are shaking the Queen’s hand or gripping Jason Momoa’s biceps. Their jaws should drop as you slap Ariane Grande’s back in jest, or casually brush Tyrion Lannister’s cheek in an obvious gesture of flirtation, but Madame Tussauds allows no touching. Or “Berühren verboten!” as the Germans would say.

Instead of the envisaged opportunity to make their friends back home crawl under their beds and die with the FOMO, the average Madame Tussauds punter gets to spend time in a room full of artist’s impression sex dolls, their waxy faces leering blank-eyed like a politician during the budget, and surrounded by other people all pretending the £23.00 they spent was worth it.

Witnessing Madame Tussauds is to wish that the bomb which struck the street nearby at 4.20am on 9 September, 1940 “destroying 352 head moulds, scattering waxwork figures from their places and demolishing most of the Tussauds Cinema” hadn’t done a better job. It is in short, the very definition of a tourist trap. It was a horrifying waste of money, and also a very valuable lesson.

To this day when someone suggests going somewhere simply because the tourism brochures say you should, I think of Madame Tussauds, the crowds, the ghastly, clawed hands on the mannequin of Angelina Jolie and I go to the local pub for two lunches.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.