The joys of package holiday deals

When you are in a hurry to experience as much as you can before you grow too old to carry backpacks and walk all day, your eyes tend to gravitate towards holiday package deals. Experience tantalising Thailand in five days and four nights (or thereabouts), explore mysterious Malaysia and sunny Sri Lanka in that many days or soak in the splendours of Singapore in even less time!

You run through the itineraries and you wonder: how do you get to see the best of a country in four or five days — a large part of which is spent in clearing passport and immigration queues, air travel from the country of origin to the country you are visiting and then in those endless waits and chaotic transfers from airport to hotel and from hotel to the first place on your packed programme?

And whose idea of the ‘best’ of a country is it? Can you really do it all at breakneck speed? Or — do history buffs wind up feeling cheated of many of the sites they know are lurking just a short distance away but for all practical purposes, thanks to the lack of time, are totally inaccessible; do environmental enthusiasts consider themselves deprived of experiencing nature’s choicest wonders because the itinerary overlooks some that are considered ‘minor’; and are seekers of retail therapy disappointed that they get to walk around just one mall or along one side street with wares on display, because (what else?) they are following those culture enthusiasts around?

Frenetic pace

In the process of carving a happy mean, it could mean that no one is really happy — unless you set off on your jaunt without expectations and without googling the many attractions and Facebooking for months in advance to check out what your scattered friends and family (and their friends) did when they went to the same places.

Invariably, most of us do all that and set up a frenetic pace, determined to see everything and do everything. Lucky you if you can manage it!

The rest of us just allow some dreams to slide — and if we never get to touch the tigers at Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua (the tiger temple) or travel on the ‘death railway’ across the bridge over the River Kwai, well maybe we’ll do it on our next visit!

After all, in our own home environment, even if we have lived for years in places that boast of numerous historical sites and ‘must-sees’ for tourists, we rarely experience those places ourselves.

Missing the point

Each time visitors from abroad come over, we send them off with rosy tales and knowledgeable guides while we make sure they can return to a memorable home-cooked Indian meal – and in the process we put off seeing what is practically in our own backyards.

That is how despite being residents of New Delhi for almost a decade we never visited the National Museum, the Art Gallery, the Qutb Minar, or Raj Ghat; and in all the frequent trips — long and short — that are made to Mumbai, a visit to Elephanta caves is not factored in. We make sure we go for boat rides along the River Li in China and take a boat ‘bus’ on the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, but we have not been on the waters of the Husainsagar that separates the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, practically a stone’s throw away from where we live!

We tell ourselves that we can go at anytime, but invariably, we never do. Perhaps we need to douse those home fires for a day and take a hop-on-hop-off sightseeing tour of our hometown before we sign on for our next package deal!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.