CITY TRAILS
Peacock Trail. Image credit: Author
SELECTING A TOUR Let us try another tactic. All of us have planned our holidays at some time or the other. How do you decide what is a good tour? What do you look for in a tour experience while booking? We have all grown up looking at tour services as a commodity. And so typically, our mindset while evaluating a tour is to check HOW MUCH we are getting to see. More is better. It has to be. We are determined to get the utmost value for our money. Essentially implying we are willing to drive that extra hour to see but one more monument at the end of an otherwise tiring day - if, of course it can be included in the package at the same cost! Are we are interested in the monuments in the first place isn’t a question of any importance! Coming in a close second in tour decision making is one which can give you bragging rights.. ‘Oh you should have been there – they had this amazing troupe of dancers who perform a local traditional
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CITY OBSERVER | June 2016
dance for an hour. It was mind blowing.’ At the end of it all, you may just have been bored out of your mind during that one hour. But, hey! You have been there and done that! You have earned yourself a right to brag incessantly, you think! While there may be nothing wrong in that notion, in that when we visit a new place, we want to check off the ‘must sees’ and the ‘must dos’, it clearly can’t be the only way. As a disclaimer, I am not suggesting that this kind of tourism is evil, at all. But say, you are in the mood to peel off a layer and dig a level deeper. That’s when the options start magically drying up. Then you start doing insanely adventurous things like sitting through a classical concert in the hope that you will soak in some local culture just by being in such an environment, or aimlessly wandering through a busy market. Or worse, you sign up for a ‘cultural immersion experience’ where soon after the expert introduces himself, you start wondering about the lunch menu.