We’ve never been on a VJV holiday before but we’ll certainly go on another one. Right from the start it has been like a well-planned military operation.
We are a group of 25 with a tour manager and a tour guide. Our tour manager, Emma, has a charming bossiness about her which ensures that everybody turns up on time, small problems are quickly and efficiently resolved and everything runs to schedule. She’s very personable and this enables her to get away with ordering around hotel staff, drivers, porters and travellers alike. Our tour guide introduced himself as Bhupi and seemed a genial sort of fellow, an excellent English speaker with good local knowledge and a nice sense of humour. However, as the tour has progressed it has transpired that he is no ordinary tour guide. He is, in fact, an Indian prince, the son of a Rajasthan maharajah who appears to do this job as a hobby! His other projects include constructing a dam to provide a water supply for a rural community with the help of Richard Gere and building a hotel in Udaipur by transporting an ancient building brick by brick from a site 350 kilometres away! It’s going to be difficult to top this team on any future tours that we embark on.
In a group of 25 you might expect a few people who are difficult to get on with but this is not the case. It took me a while to master all their names but I had this problem when I was teaching! Ages range from 30s to 70s, with the median around 60. Retirees feature strongly but a sizeable minority are still in employment. Occupations and ex-occupations are quite diverse. The group is mainly middleclass, with a sprinkling of quite posh people. So, when you sit down for lunch or dinner it means that you can have a succession of interesting conversations about a huge range of topics with different people. I’m not saying that I’d like to spend the rest of my life with this group, but all of them I can easily tolerate for two weeks and a lot of them I’d be more than happy to remain in contact with.
The tour has been hard work at times because the schedule has been quite hectic – some days have involved up to 5 different visits – and there has been a lot of travelling (of that, more later). However, it has been well worth it. We have seen and experienced so many different things in such a short time.
We’ve always shied away from tours before, always preferring to do our own thing, so it’s congratulations to VJV and especially to Emma and Bhupie for making this one so enjoyable.
PS I’m not just saying this because I’ve given everyone the blog address!
4 comments:
As a fellow member of the tour with Keith and Sue, I was interested to read Keith’s comments about Emma, Bhupi, and the rest of our group. I agree with all he has said, but remain a little troubled by his reference to a sprinkling of quite posh people. On balance I think I am hoping I am not one of those he would include in that category. Keith, I wonder if you might be kind enough to give us a rough definition of what would count as posh.
All the best,
Stephen
The defining characteristics of poshness in my mind are a private education and a home counties RP accent. I think if you betray an anxiety about being posh you probably are but would like to pretend you're not!
My own experience was that the former occupations of tour members were less diverse than you suggest. I kept coming across school teachers. One of them was keen on Dylan Thomas. He would lean across the dinner table to recite Fernhill, or give me a chunk of Under Milk Wood while standing next to me in the gents. Another of them had a thing about getting apostrophes in the right place and was somewhat intolerant of local driving behaviour.
Stephen
Did anyone else find Bhupi's stories a little fanciful??
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