Getting touristy
Humour
For many people, it’s a once a year affair. Two weeks’ leave is to be celebrated with a tour to foreign parts.
You fork out a wad of hard earned cash for a vacation, and, in order to get your money’s worth, you feel compelled to cram as much sight-seeing in as is humanly possible.
So, you’ve booked your holiday, and you are there. But, each day soon begins to feel like the previous one as they blend into a non-stop misery fest of traipsing through the dust and heat to tick off monument after monument. At each sight, after a five-hour stomach churning journey, you are herded off the bus to listen to some tour guide droning on and on about the historical importance of some or other stone carving that looks like the seven other stone carvings you have already been lectured on that day.
After 15 minutes, you have completely lost the will to live, but you thought it would be wise to try to find out about the significance of what you came to photograph. The trouble is, after the lengthy boring babbling monologue, you have forgotten most of what was said and are hardly any wiser. You then begin clicking away at pieces of stone as your brain turns to mush in the heat.
Not to worry. You have the fantastic opportunity to have bangles, ornaments and all manner of useless souvenirs thrust in your face by a horde of desperate, persistent hawkers as you make your way back to the bus. Relief at last as you get back onto the bus, which has during your absence turned into a raging furnace from hell beneath the rays of the baking hot sun.
Next stop, your third museum of the day. You find yourself surrounded by people who probably hardly ever visit museums in their own country. Why do they feel obliged to visit a museum in Peru, Belgium or wherever else it happens to be just because they happen to be there? But it must be done. If it isn’t, the guilt complex will kick in. Just imagine — spending all that money to get where you are and feeling like you’ve missed out just because you didn’t visit a bunch of museums that you never wanted to visit in the first place.
And after each day’s endurance test of self-imposed, forced sight-seeing and museum-hopping, there is the need to text message or log on to Facebook or Twitter to inform the world about the marvellous time you are having. After a punishing day of incomprehensible tour guide monologues and endless rides from hell inside the oven-bus, you type in the words to brag about your vacation while secretly wishing you were dead.
When not on Facebook, Twitter, text messaging or listening to the tortuous ramblings of your guide, you have your camera glued to your face. It gets to the point where if you are not clicking away, you think you will have nothing to remember your trip by. The fact that you won’t remember you trip anyhow because you lived half of it through a camera lens will matter neither here nor there.
And year after year it continues. Different places visited, same scenario played out. Eventually, you begin to spend your annual vacation closer home and ditch sightseeing and tours. You finally realise the wrist slitting futility of previous holidays and start to appreciate the simpler things in life. All you want to do is head a few kilometres out of town to some quiet location to feel the sea breeze, gaze at the empty sky or enjoy the silence of the countryside. No touring, no endless sight seeing, no headless chicken tourist-run. Not even a camera or cell phone will be taken along to try to convince yourself and your friends that you are having the trip of a lifetime.
If you really are inspired, you may just end up throwing away your passport and never feel the need to set foot beyond the front door ever again. All you really want to do is sit back in your armchair and while away the hours thinking about past holidays spent on endless buses, in stuffy museums and being herded from here to there and everywhere. At that point, enlightenment may finally dawn — been there, done that… never again.
