Another Tet has gone by with thousands of people again getting ripped off by transport operators while visiting Chua Huong (Perfume Pagoda) to pray for a prosperous and happy year.

Located 60 kilometers southwest of Hanoi, Perfume Pagoda has long been a premier tourist spot and holy site for pilgrims, with a complex of cave-pagodas and Buddhist shrines built into the limestone cliffs of Huong Son mountain.

But local authorities failed to fulfill a commitment it made at a press briefing a few days earlier as 45,000 people who took cable cars and boats were fleeced on the first day.

At the Thien Tru Cable Car Station, illegal brokers gouged passengers making the 1.2-kilometer trip to Huong Tich Station on the mountain. Despite the high prices, many cars carried eight people though they only have a capacity of six.

Passengers who preferred to go by rowboats on a one-hour journey up the Yen River through a beautiful landscape of mountains and streams, had to pay two to four times the normal fare of VND25,000.

Some boatmen refused to take passengers who did not pay extra. Thanh Nien also found many overloaded boats without license plates. Many boats with a capacity of five passengers were carrying 10 and those designed to carry 12 had 30 people on board.

Organizers, who patrolled the river regularly, did nothing to stop the gouging and overloading.

Some people had to pay VND20,000 to park their motorbikes at private parking lots.

“Since Yen River is shallow, a boat could sink if overcrowded but no one will die,” organizer Nguyen Xuan Sinh told Thanh Nien. “We have to allow it because people chose to get on overloaded boats and the boatmen agreed to carry them.”

Sinh said the number of visitors on the opening day was 10,000 higher than last year, adding that the number of security guards and police has been doubled this year.

In more fleecing elsewhere, sightseers and pilgrims visiting Ba Thien Hau Pagoda in the southern Binh Duong Province had to pay VND10,000 to private contractors to park motorbikes at the site.

Deputy chairman of the Phu Cuong Ward people’s committee, Nguyen Minh Quang, said organizers have set up a parking lot that charges only VND5,000.

Reported by Y Nguyen