Jon the monkey man, why did I call him that? It was mostly in jest.
I think he was in Taiwan only a few days when I ran into him at Santos cussing up a streak in taiwanese down in the basement at the PacMan machine.
He was from a well to do family in the east coast and he was on some sort of sabbatical because his grandfather gave him a wad of cash and told him to go explore the world so he busted out of college and bought a ticket to Asia, landed in Korea for a few days and then Taiwan. I asked him why Asia, he said that he threw a dart at the world map and it hit Asia.
He said upon landing in taipei he found a hostel and went pub hopping. Went into one pub and a girl waited on him (he later married her..be careful going into pubs you may end up married).
Jon became one of my best friends ever. He ran into a malaysian dude looking for recruits for his “boutique runs”. Back in the day Taiwan and Korea , especially Korea restricted a lot of luxury goods with high tariffs. Ostensibly to conserve foreign currency. Thus were born the boutique stores where fancy goods can be had for less. These were usually “brought in (smuggled)” past customs and thus were cheaper. Korea was especially tough as they really restricted foreign luxury good. Anyway Jon went on a few of these adventures, said it was fun and i decided to tag along..What can happen with a little smuggling right?
HK was the first stop to load up on goods. Our little team consisted of Jon and me and Larry (some american guy we picked up on the streets in taipei) were going to meet up in HK on separate flights. Landed in HK and finally got to “Paris Villa”. Which turned out to be in an infamous high rise in downtown HK with many small hostels and what not. A real quagmire of dwellings housing all sorts of businesses , some of ill repute no doubt. Very shady sort of place. Made me ashamed to say “Paris Villa” on the arrival card as my destination. Went in , found the place and located Jon and larry. We were going to stay in HK for a week. The monkey leader gave us all 30usd/day for our excusions while he went on a shopping spree and played mahjong all day. He did take us all out to a Malaysian restaurant with his wife on one occasion. So the gang of three set out to explore HK and we even went to the sleepy enclave of Macau on a Boeing Jetfoil the Sao Jorge, which may still be plying the waters between HK and Macau? Macau was very sleepy. There was the Lisboa, one of only two casinos in all of Asia. In Korea we would be visiting the other one in Seoul. Very interesting place, we spent the day in Macau and got back to HK late at night on another Boeing jetfoil.
The few days in HK went by fast, it was a lot of fun. Then we came in to Taipei where customs was a breeze we kept half of the stuff in the storage area pre Customs and the rest we just walked through customs and that was it.
The next day we got on a Korean Airbus A300 to Soeul. Our leader walked around the plane and said half of the passengers were fellow monkeys (thats what they called themselves the people doing these boutique smuggling runs). Apparently it was no big deal bringing in these items, you were not going to jail or anything just the items would be impounded or confiscated. Just dont bring in Gold or Diamonds , those may get you in jail. So i checked my luggage carefully hoping there were no compartments containing anything like this.
to be continued (if y’all want me to continue that is …anyone interested in this little semi illegal smuggling run?)
