What’s the worst “tourist trap” you’ve ever found yourself in?

I’m an American who lives in Asia. Recently I was on a business trip in a rather undeveloped Asian country. I had a weekend free before returning home and decided to walk out my door and see where it took me. <br><br>I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but the hotel I was staying at was attached to a large shopping/entertainment complex. The hotel was miles from anything else, and no one spoke English, so I was a captive audience for tourist activities. After wandering in the heat for a while and getting tired of walking down a highway with no sidewalk, I decided to go inside the shopping center. I had no local currency and only a credit card. <br><br>Every single retail establishment in the three story mall refused my credit card, including a Kentucky Fried Chicken. KFC wouldn’t even accept US dollars. <br><br>While sitting in the shopping center sweating and eating my KFC, which I managed to get by transferring money from my debit card to my wife’s ApplePay, and then she sending it back to me, I noticed some colorful posters in the window of the mall. <br><br>One of the posters had a picture of a Ferris wheel. Another had a picture of a lake. I had no idea what this was or what was being advertised, so I went inside to investigate.<br><br>This is how I stumbled into “The Dragon Park”. “The Dragon Park” is an entire shopping center of tourist traps. There were people dressed up in cartoon characters. There was a “T-Rex” eating a “monkey”. There was a “dragon” breathing fire. There was an escalator that moved really slow through a hall of mirrors so it felt like it was “infinity”. There was a lake with paddle boats. Of course there was the obligatory photo op with a stuffed tiger. <br><br>What really took the cake was the “zoo”. I put quotes around it because it was the saddest goddam thing I’ve ever seen. There was a chicken coop with a bunch of chickens in it. Then there was a small enclosure with a goat. Finally, there was a large enclosure with a “crocodile” in it. What was sad about this was the only thing in the enclosure was a concrete statue of a crocodile, and what must have been a five year old emu. <br><br>They must have decided “hey, birds are pretty. Let’s throw it in there.” <br><br>I ended my excursion at the Ferris wheel, where I paid $3 for the privilege of sitting in the blistering sun for 20 minutes being slowly rotated around in a circle in a metal box that had been baking in the sun all day. For some reason, I decided to open the small door on the Ferris wheel to see if I could find a lever to turn on the call bell in case of emergency, and I found a small piece of paper with some writing on it in the local language, and underneath that, in English, the word “HELP”.