The Twenty Minute Video

Every forum says the same thing about Phuket jet skis: film everything. Nobody tells you to also ride it.

Patong beach, a Monday, 10:05 a.m. A 39-year-old Canadian in a rash vest and a GoPro head mount walks up to a jet ski rental desk with a printed checklist.

He has read the threads. All of them. The scratch scam, the "you broke it" scam, the guy from Ohio who paid for a whole engine. He has a plan. He's paid for thirty minutes.

I've lived here eleven years and I'll say it plainly: the threads aren't all wrong. That's why the smart operators changed how they work. The farang still runs the old script.

Call him Dale.

Behind the desk is Nok. She's twenty-nine and runs the desk for her uncle. She has a clipboard, a stopwatch app, a tablet full of photos, and the calm of a woman who has seen every possible version of Dale.

"Before you go," she says, "we take photos together. Then you sign."

Dale doesn't hear "together." He hears the start of a scam. He starts filming.

He films the front. He films the back. He kneels in the wet sand and films underneath. He films the seat, the mirrors, the footwell, the serial number, Nok's desk, Nok's clipboard, and the water, in case the water is part of it. He narrates: "Small mark here, 10:09 a.m. Another one, 10:11."

Nok waits. She has already taken forty photos of the same jet ski at 9:30, with the time on every one, and they're on the tablet in front of her. She offers to show him. He says, "No offence, I'll do my own."

At 10:24 he says, "Okay. Documented." He hands her the phone to film him getting on, for the record.

Nok looks at her stopwatch.

"You have six minutes," she says.

Dale stares at her. "I paid for thirty."

"You did," says Nok. "The thirty started when you signed." She turns the clipboard around. His signature, 10:06. "It's written here. Under the part about the photos we take together."

Here's what Dale's threads never covered: in Phuket the Thai side has usually fixed the problem the forums are still angry about. It just didn't post about it.

He does six minutes. It's a very fast six minutes, mostly in a straight line. When he brings it back there is a new mark on the side, from a buoy. Nok shows him photo 31 from 9:30, and photo 31 shows the same mark. "Old one," she says. "You're fine."

Dale sits on the sand for a while afterwards and watches his own footage. Twenty-two minutes of a parked jet ski and six of the sea.

The next day he books again. Sixty minutes this time. He leaves the GoPro in the bag.

Nok starts the stopwatch when he signs. She's always fair. She's just faster than the forums.

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Film the jet ski, or trust the desk? Tell us in the comments.

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