VELTRA tours & activities, fun things to do

I have mixed feelings about this tour.

The good:
- This tour did not offer pickup from my hotel, but CityDiscovery gave great directions as to alternative pickup points and means of transport to them, so I was still able to join after a ride on the Metro.
-The bonus visit to Wat Arun was nice.
-I greatly enjoyed the trip through the canals to see some of the more rural living conditions.

The bad:
-Roughly half of the tour time (when including driving there) was dedicated to taking our group to a jewelry shop!!! This was not appreciated by anyone in our small group. We were driven there, given a free welcome soda, and then shuttled to watch a 10 minute movie (with about 1 minute of actually interesting information about the gem mining process). We then were made to walk through the jewelry display cases. While the sales agents made it clear that we did not have to buy anything, it was just for advertising, it was still an unwelcome use of our vacation time and not appreciated. When we were finished browsing (probably ahead of schedule) we again had to wait for our tour guide to be called back.
- The tour guide, while friendly, was not very good. She provided basic information, but was not very good with answering questions, and left us to wonder around Wat Arun by ourselves. Neither did she explain anything we saw during the canal tour. While this would have been hard to do with the boat in motion, a few stops here and there with some short explanations of what we were seeing would have been appreciated.

Overall:
-The canals and Wat Arun are well worth the visit, but I did not at all appreciate the extra use of my vacation time, and I don't feel that the tour guide added much, if anything, to the experience.