Welcome  Contact
FAQs  Links  News

Nepal

In this section we have a collection of pages with all sorts of background information about Nepal.

Full map of all Nepal background pages

Other Things

Translate & Share

Path: An Introduction to Nepal > 3-Weeks-Have-It-All Travellers
Tags: Nepal  Background

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:

(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:

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.


$updated from: Background.htxt Mon 04 Mar 2024 16:04:46 trvl2 (By Vero and Thomas Lauer)$