3-Weeks-Have-It-All Travellers
(thomas;2013-Aug-11)
The inexorable rise of the Three-weeks-have-it-all traveller
Most people with a “real” job at home and/or with kids who still go to school do not enjoy the luxury of going on an extended holiday. For many, there are three, perhaps four weeks to spare; understandably, they try to squeeze as much as possible into these three or four weeks. (We certainly did the same in our earlier trips, but since then we have slowly come to the conclusion that a crucial thing about travel is not so much how many things you see and boxes you tick, but how deep and intense your experiences are. But that's another story.)
An interesting sub-group of people with three-week holidays are those we regurlarly meet all over Nepal. These tend to be young professionals with more money than time on their hands. So they come to Nepal, guidebook firmly clutched in their hands, and want to do and to see everything. E V E R Y T H I N G. In three weeks, please.
And their guidebook (which is invariably from Lonely Planet) lays out all the alluring possibilities in great, in mouthwatering detail:
- Trekking: the two world-famous treks of Everest and the Annapurnas, plus many minor ones
- Whitewater rafting: a veritable smorgasbord of celebrated class 4 and 5 rivers
- Paragliding: either via Tandem jumps or with a beginner's course
- Wildlife and/or bird watching in various renowned ex-Royal National Parks
- Mountain-biking around the Kathmandu valley and the valley rim
- Lazy days in Pokhara, spent with shuttling between the shore of Phewa Lake and the Lakeside restaurants
- The enticing possibility of travelling overland to Tibet and Lhasa and fly back
(And this list leaves off such desirable things as mountain flights or climbing the summit of an actual 6000+m peak.)
The challenging question now facing our new arrivals is this: how on earth do we squeeze all these things into our three weeks? Because one thing is clear: since all those things can be done, we have to do them. In three weeks, whatever the stress, whatever the strain.
So they set out on an “optimized” trek: flying to Lukla, hurrying up to Namche Bazaar and further up and up to Everest Base Camp. Then they race down to Lukla, fly back to Kathmandu where a waiting bus carries them to the Chinese border (so they can say they had at least a quick peek into Tibet) and a then to a set of hot springs. Next comes a gruelling (but not too gruelling) whitewater raft or perhaps a Kayak trip, but of course no longer than three days. This is followed by a flying visit to Chitwan, the most famous of the Nepalese National Parks, on a two-day quest for rhinos, tigers and leopards. Pokhara and its beautiful lake are nearby — and as luck would have it, Pokhara is also the paragliding capital of Nepal. And finally, almost as an afterthought, more or less on the way to the airport for the flight back home, they rush to some of the World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu valley. Whew!
The funny things about the people on these whirlwind tours is that, over the years, they take in more and more. Since 1994, we've been to Nepal on a regular basis and for over a decade now, we're observing this trend, to pack more and more and ever more into a stay that was never designed for such an overload. (This is a little like Nepalese buses: however many people they already carry, you can always squeeze in one more person. That's true, we've seen it many times.)
Up to a point, we can understand this urge to squeeze as much as possible (and then something more) into those three precious holiday weeks. Then again, if we mention casually that Nepal won't go away and that they could easily return next year or even the year after, many of these tourists gaze at us as if we have just invented the wheel.
If we step back a little and look at this whole issue in a wider context, it's clear that the Three-weeks-have-it-all traveller is just one of the many aspects of our desire:
- to have everything (or at least “as much as we can eat”)
- and to have it now — and not later
We are now trying consciously to limit this attitude in our daily lives, but it can be hard going: Western societies are to such an extent constructed around consumption (often of the conspicuous sort) and gratification that all too easily, without thinking, we just slip back into those ingrained habits and behavioural patterns.
$ updated from: Background.htxt Fri 16 Aug 2024 15:40:15 trvl2 — Copyright © 2024 Vero and Thomas Lauer unless otherwise stated | All rights reserved $