Obviously, when you go abroad, you should be aware that everyone is just waiting to rip you off. Bartering over prices has actually been invented since the advent of backpacking just to make tourists uneasy and vulnerable. In fact, there’s probably a price list freely available to everyone that knows how to ask.
This attitude, I think, is called culture shock if it’s someone’s first experience of a culture foreign to their own. If it’s not, if they are coming back for the fourth time, then it is just narrow minded. Stay at home, please.
Travel, I think, can teach you much more about your own culture than another. But only if you are open to thinking critically about your own, and rethinking behaviours that are deeply entrenched.
In the UK we believe that everyone, rich or poor, in the same store you should pay the same amount of money for an onion, for example. A cleaner, struggling to feed three children on minimum wage, should come in to a store, pay 21 pence for that onion, and the next person, the CEO of the company next door can also then come in and be charged 21 pence. Because it would be wrong, criminal almost, to charge them more just because you knew they could afford it. Because they’ve worked hard for their money, haven’t they?
In a lot of cultures, many of which have, at their core, a strong belief in the responsibility of society to look after less fortunate, people do not believe this. It is each persons responsibility to know how much an onion is worth, to them. There is no ‘real price’, there is only a flexible agreement over how much each the buyer and seller can afford.
If you do end up in a situation where you realise you have paid over the odds, what are you going to gain from getting angry? The more times it happens the less likely it is happen again.
I don’t buy train tickets from anyone without checking the ticket office is really ‘closed’ or ‘burnt down’, I don’t get rickshaws for 10 rupees without knowing that some kind of carpet store will be involved and I never pay money for a ‘connecting bus’ across a international border.
The first time I went to Varanasi I went straight from the train, backpack and hotel touts included, to see the Ganges, the most scared river in India. I was so enthralled by my first view, so taken in by all the incense, prayers and offerings going on around me that when a saddhu (a holy man but, like many things in India, pretty flexible in sticking to any particular job description) came up to me with a little leaf and flower offering I took it gratefully. Getting into the general vibe, I put it in the river, and listened to him chanting while it floated off. He pressed a powdered blessing onto my forehead and motioned to follow him. To pray ‘for my family’.
Only turning away from the Ganges, did it occur to me that I was going to pay, financially, for this experience. I laughed, out loud, at how obvious it should have been to me from the outset.
He suggested that 60 Euros was a normal offering for ‘the family prayers, saying every day for rest of life’. I gave him 30 rupees, which was all I had in my small money purse (it’s very useful to have small and big separate, for situations such as this).
Bear the fact that a ‘real price’ is a figment of your western imagination in mind, and the fact that as someone on a foreign holiday you are immensely privileged, no matter how many tightly you have chosen to stretch your budget. It is your responsibility and yours alone, to know how much you are willing to pay for something.
If you pay 5 pounds for a 6 hour train ride then it’s pretty unlikely you’ll pay the same for 2 bottles of water. If you are staying in a 4 star hotel, water and coffee in the stall down the road are going to be a lot cheaper than in your mini bar. If someone asks you for that much, laugh quietly, in the same manner that you would if you’d caught someone trying to play a practical joke on you. This will get you respect, and a more reasonable price. Ask someone that has nothing to gain from your purchase how much they would pay.
And enjoy your trip a whole lot more 🙂
Backpacking for Grown-ups 
I like this. You will pay more than a loyal local, but you can say no if it’s outrageous. The time element in haggling is really more bothersome than the prices.
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