FIGURE CON ARTISTS' BITE IN TRAVEL BUDGET.

Byline: John Flinn San Francisco Examiner 

``Please, my friend, your luggage,'' said the helpful Moroccan man amid the jostling, sleeve-tugging chaos of the Casablanca bus station. We handed him our two duffel bags and watched as he climbed to the roof of the bus and lashed them down with rope.

When he climbed back down, he held out his hand and said, ``Seventy dirham, please, for the two of you.'' Bleary-eyed from a trans-Atlantic flight and wary of being taken, I'd done my homework and knew this was the exact fare (about $9) to Al Jadida, our destination. I handed him the money and he walked us to the bus door before disappearing into the crowd.

As my wife Jeri and I boarded the bus, the driver barred our way.

``Seventy dirham,'' he said.

``But I already paid,'' I protested.

``Paid who?''

``The guy who put our luggage on the roof.''

``I'm sorry, my friend,'' said the driver, ``but this man does not work for the bus company. You must pay me for the fare.''

It took a moment for me to realize I had given this ``helper'' the full cost of our bus tickets just to lift our bags onto the roof. I got off the bus and looked around the station, but our new friend, of course, was long gone.

Befuddled by jet lag and overwhelmed by strange sights, sounds and smells, I'm a pathetically easy mark for hustlers and rip-off artists my first day or two in a new country. I suspect I'm not alone in this. The world's con men (and women) have long ago figured out that wide-eyed, newly arrived travelers make the most profitable targets.

I try my best to guard against it, but I rarely get through the first 48 hours without being cheated at least once. It's become so common that Jeri and I now budget for it in our trip finances.

There was, for example, the taxi driver who picked us up at the Athens airport late at night and drove us around the city for nearly two hours, allegedly searching for the budget hotel where we had reservations. He kept stopping at addresses that clearly were not the one we'd given him. Finally, around 3 a.m., at perhaps the 11th hotel we stopped at, we consented to take a room. The owner quoted me a per-person price in drachmae that my addled brain had trouble converting into dollars.

The room turned out to be dank and fetid, with saggy beds and threadbare towels and a shower nozzle that sputtered and quaked before spitting out a few spurts of brown liquid. Unable to sleep, I stared at the water-stained ceiling and worked out what this little slice of paradise was costing us: $75 a night. I wondered what the taxi driver's cut was.

Another time-honored rip off is the admission charge to the pyramids at Giza, usually a traveler's first stop upon arrival in Cairo. There is no admission charge, but hustlers outside the entrance have nonetheless been collecting it from gullible visitors, probably since Cleopatra's time.

Count me among the victims. But at least I fared better than the Scottish couple who paid $50 for a cab from downtown Cairo - about 10 times the going rate - and an equal amount for a camel ride that ended with them being bucked off in the sand and abandoned.

Another traveler has told me of the Cairo cab driver who proudly kept a book of comments from his riders. Obviously he couldn't read English, because when the woman opened the book the first comment she read was, ``Beware

This man will not take you where you want to go and will try to overcharge you. Have him pull over and get out right now!''