Detail from Island of Illusion

To fill out the pages of a lengthy magazine article, sometimes editors ask the illustrator to create one "mothership" illustration that can be broken into several smaller "spot" illustrations. The mothership appears with the headline; the "spot" illustrations appear alongside the text that introduces that small illustration's character or action.

For "Island of Illusion", the main illustration contained four or five themes from the article. This smaller excerpted "spot" illustration contains "Jetski JJ", made infamous as the posterchild of Thailand's tourist jetski rental industry. That industry is chock-full of scammers.

What happens is this: the jetski operators use duct tape to cover an old fiberglass scar on the rental jetski. The tourist rents the jetski, then the duct tape falls off in the ocean water. The jetski company claims that the tourist caused the damage, and demands immediate payment of US$1,000 to cover repair and income lost while the jetski is repaired.

You can see this type of scam by searching YouTube for excerpts from a British reality TV show segment called "big trouble in tourist thailand".

Sadly, part of Thailand's response to this scamming is to.... COVER IT UP by demanding that the makers of the TV show pay a huge fine for not having sought clearance for this TV segment from "TAT" (Tourism Authority of Thailand).

Thailand...land of smiles? No way. It's the land of guilty crocodile grins. Come, be fleeced, go home disgusted.