The Organised Tour

There is much to be said for organised tours. They allow you to take in the sights of various tourist attraction and destinations, with only the necessity of organising your ticket. Everything else is done for you - if you're lucky, they even feed you and take you back to your accommodation at the end of the day.

A key feature of an organised tour that is sometimes neglected, and rarely makes it to the company's brochure, is the possibility to view and even interact with an extremely undervalued species; a "Tour Freak". Tour Freaks often travel in groups of more than two, and sometimes comprise an entire 'family'. The leader of one of these Tour Freak Families (TFF), predominantly the male of the sub-species, is usually aged over 50, wears large wrap-around sunglasses, socks to his knees, sandals, a bum-bag, and more often than not has a branded t-shirt from the last tour he went on. Close to his side we see the matriarch of the TFF; she wears a sun-visor, and carries a large backpack containing copious amounts of SPF50+ sunscreen, sandwiches, a guide book, juice cartons and insect repellent. She runs after the aforementioned leader of the TFF, rubbing sunscreen into his balding head and taking photos of anything that moves.

The 'children' of a TFF vary across the world. I have been privileged enough to witness many different versions of this sub-species, from India, Egypt, Jordan and now, Australia. In particular, I can now lay claim to the sighting of a Jewish TFF Child. That's right, I have seen the clustering, and now the division of a sub-species by religion.

The Jewish TFF Child I encountered had the following distinguishing features: Abnormally pale skin, a Jewish summer camp t-shirt, very short shorts, a large box of strawberry and yoghurt crunch cereal, and an even bigger bag of pretzels. This was all topped off by a skull cap decorated with small red flowers. The Jewish TFF Child didn't stop eating the entire day, but appeared to never require a toilet break. This leads me to assume that this particular sub-sub-species has no bladder or bowel and does not produce urine or stools in the usual manner. This is probably an evolutionary adaptation to its usual environment of an Organised Tour, where toilets can be sparse and can also be hygienically questionable.

In conclusion, the TFF is a highly entertaining, yet somehow disturbing cultural phenomenon, which I feel requires further study. If any of my readers have witnessed a TFF, please send me the name of the country in which it was last spotted, and any dissimilarities with the norm which may help me in my research.