A Phuket apartment owner took to the internet yesterday to share horrific photos of a room he rented to a Chinese couple for just two nights. The Thai man went so far as to allege that the property’s CCTV showed the tourists bringing garbage bags — believed to be from the public dumpsters — into the room.
The owner, who requested to be identified only as Ton, said that the tourist couple stayed at the apartment near the Phuket airport on Sunday and Monday nights.
Ton said the couple, both in their 40s, seemed friendly and well-mannered when they came asking for recommendations for seafood restaurants and fruit vendors on the island during their stay.
Apart from saying “thanks but no thanks” when offered housekeeping service, nothing seemed out of place about the stay until a bewildered housekeeper came running up to Ton after the couple had checked out early yesterday. The housekeeper demanded he “come and see himself.”
What awaited him was the disturbing scene below coupled with a rancid smell.
“In the 10 years that I’ve rented out this room, I’ve never seen anything like this” he told Coconuts, adding that, as a Phuket resident, he’s seen plenty of questionable tourist behavior over the years.
To his horror, Ton said he checked footage from the surveillance cameras and saw the tourist couple unloading five garbage bags from their rented Toyota in the middle of the night before taking them into the room. Oddly, Ton refused to to show Coconuts reporters the footage, saying it was to protect the privacy of his guests.
With scattered crab shells and empty plastic containers on the floor, Ton believes that the couple was eating out of these trash bags. He said he thought that when the couple was asking him for seafood recommendations, they were aiming to collect trash outside nearby restaurants.
“I caught a glimpse of their wallet when they were paying the THB1,600 rent. They had plenty of money in there” the baffled apartment owner told Coconuts.
In the end, Ton didn’t attempt to track down the couple to collect extra cleaning fees, despite the fact his housekeeper took an entire day to clean the room.
“The room is still smelly, I have to leave for at least two days for the smell to go away,” he said.
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