I received a call from someone called Girish, who was enquiring about prices for a rafting trip for a group of 20-25 people. Assuming that this was a run-of-the-mill group of employees/friends, I provided the details with practiced ease. The conversation was comfortable, and once the basic details were sorted, we talked about other adventure tour possibilities.
He enquired about the possibility of participation of some elderly members of their group, and said they were reasonably fit and active. We talked about that some more, and then turned to discuss wildlife tours. He was also interested in a trip to the Pench Wildlife Sanctuary. This got me curious. The nature of discussions was quite free-flowing and non-sophisticated for this to be a corporate enquiry, and the number of tours spoken of didn’t suggest young people - in fact, older people were specifically mentioned, as were young people.
I asked him about the nature of their group. Imagine my surprise when he said that this was a family outing! A family this size heading into the outdoors with a specific interest in adventure is really rare to come by as is the willingness to rough it if need be in the quest for adventure.
To quote him, “We’d like to do something original and interesting, rather than the standard tours. The time now points to adventure sports as a very meaningful and constructive means of recreation. So we’d like to do that.”
If this is an upcoming trend among families as Girish said, I feel that this is a very welcome change in the overall Indian perception of “enjoyment”. This is indeed welcome news.
I still haven’t received a booking from him, we will be speaking about it in the first week of January, but I hope it works out. I would love to meet such an interesting family!
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