Travel video with inaccurate, incomplete, outdated tips panned
If you don’t know enough about a country you are doing a “guide” to, expect some heat from its people.
An online video titled What You Need to Know Before Visiting Singapore! has rubbed some Singaporeans the wrong way.
It was posted on Facebook on Feb 1, but appears to have been taken from a longer version which has been on YouTube since late 2016.
In the video, one Mr Chris Raney dispenses tips on visiting Singapore, as part of a series called Yellow Productions Travel Guides.
Netizens have called out some of these as inaccurate, incomplete or outdated.
For instance, it was pointed out that the taxi surcharge at night is actually 50 per cent, not 50 cents as he says.
The biggest issue could be that he is assuming his tips are still valid.
When it comes to taxis for instance, there is no mention of Grab or other ride-hailing services.
And he says it is hard to manage without cash, at places such as hawker centres.
That is so pre-pandemic.
You don’t know Singapore at all if you don’t know how much the country can change in five years. And it is surprising that he hasn’t realised this because he had put up an earlier video on Singapore, in 2013.
People were also put off by his casual failure to mention Tamil as one of Singapore’s official languages. Other than English, he says they are Mandarin, Malay and "an Indian language”.
But Tamil is by no means so rare or little known. It has as many or more speakers as Korean, Italian or Vietnamese. It is one of the great classical languages of the world, with texts going back thousands of years. And its geographic reach extends from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to significant minorities in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore. Not to mention a global diaspora in the millions.
For someone doing travel guides to not take all that into account, is, well, asking for it.
Still, there were some who called on those commenting to cut him some slack.
And one has to admit, some of the things he mentions don’t really change - Singapore’s hot and humid weather and great hawker food.
Very well, he’s making an effort, and a few more page views won’t hurt. So here’s the video.
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