Our party of 8 including 4 children ranging in age from 8 to 11 recently returned from a vacation to India arranged by Quivertree Family Expeditions.  We only had 9 days to tour, so we packed in as  many venues as possible.  We toured the major tourist sites at New Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra and most of these are really spectacular and worth the trip itself.  However, our favorite locale was most definitely Rathambore National Park where we went on tiger safaris in an effort to catch a glimpse of the magnificent Bengal tigers.  What a unique experience!  Quivertree arranged for our party to have small open air jeeps which were ideal for viewing the tigers up close.  Our guides were really incredible as they listened for the wildlife around us to alert them to the presence of the tiger.  Our kids loved this.  The hotel here also had a family of monkeys on the grounds which fascinated the kids as well as the adults.  Our oldest son sat down by a monkey and actually reached out to touch him (never touch an animal in a foreign country!) and the monkey hissed at him.  It was awesome! 

Tiger in Rathambore National Park

India is by far the craziest, most chaotic, but vividly memorable country that we have visited.  The roadways are inhabited by cars, buses, camel carts, motorcycles, pedestrians and cows.  Seeing a cow standing in the middle of a major roadway chewing on his dinner is really an unbelievable sight to behold.  In fact, the kids never got used to this sight and they would shout out 'cow!' from the back of the van at regular intervals. There is no way we would have attempted to drive ourselves around in India.  I think that without our wonderful driver, we would have never left Delhi.  He was fantastic and we appreciated his safe driving skills and plentiful bottled water. 

Our most memorable venue was the magnificent Taj Mahal, but the Qutab complex in Delhi and the Amber Fort in Jaipur were certainly fantastic.  Our kids loved the snake charmers in Jaipur as well as an amazing elephant ride that we took outside the city.  The elephant ride was a five star experience with a dinner following the ride where the wait staff doubled us in number and we were serenaded by live music.  And then there was the train ride...where else would a stranger hand you his 8 month old baby to hold so he could take your picture with his child?  Our pale skin color got us in many photo albums in India.

Snake charmer

Despite its beauty, India is certainly a country with problems. The poverty and lack of health care is a tragedy and the sight of 6 year old children entertaining tourists for handouts is extremely sad.  The population has outgrown many of the country's resources and the garbage and filth and slums are not an easy fix.  However, we found the Indians we met to be very upbeat and friendly and happy to interact with us.  And the TV programs are so fun to watch!  This country is one of contradictions, beautiful colors, fantastic wildlife, historic architecture, and constant movement.  Thanks to the folks at Quivertree for making this a great experience!     

Amber Fort

 Therapy or Family Travel?

(Disclaimer: This is not intended as a recommended option for families dealing with serious psychological or psychiatric problems.)

In today's world, when every family member has at least one electronic device and it's not uncommon to have a "family" meal where multiple electronic media are running all at once-TV, iPods, telephones, etc., it can be difficult to feel as though the family has any quality time together. An independent media-oriented dinner is not much of a shared experience in my opinion, despite the recent article in the New York Times about the improvement of quality family time through the use of individual electronic devices. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/fashion/01FAMILY.html 

So, what to do-battle our teenagers to get them to put their media sources away? Create an unpleasant mealtime because no one really wants to have quality time together (however we all define that)? Would family therapy help us all get along and have better mealtimes? Probably-but traveling together probably would too and it's much more exciting to fly to an exotic destination than go to the therapist's office. And may be easier to get teenage buy-in (although that does depend on the teenager-after all an hour once a week with one's family can sound much less deadly than 2 weeks...) 

Quivertree family in Vietnam

Our family is not particularly unusual-3 kids (currently 3 teenagers), lots of hormones, periods of moodiness, complete lethargy (how can they really not want to do anything but watch NCIS for hours on end?), downright nastiness (Get out of my face level of unpleasantness), etc. Every now and then I get completely fed up-why do they fight all the time? Why can't they just like each other more and want to spend time together? What did we do? What didn't we do? And then there are those times when I feel frustrated that I don't have more in common with my sons, we don't seem to have much to talk about....

We clearly needed to do something to improve our family dynamic-either family therapy or, perhaps, more excitingly, family travel.  Despite the fact that our 14 year old daughter cried all the way to the airport when we were leaving for a 3 month adventure in Asia, Australia and New Zealand bemoaning that we were ruining her 9^th grade life-she would lose all her friends, it would be awful being stuck with just the family for so long, etc. At some point during the 30-minute ride, she realized that we weren't going to turn around or leave her home by herself no matter how loudly she cried. Later on, when the trip was already a fairly distant memory, she once said that she'd wished been more engaged with our trip and had not been so worried about how it would impact her future (it didn't). At another point, during the trip she said, "we now have so many in-jokes as a family" (What could be better than that -having in-jokes with your kids?) Four years later, experiences from that trip still come up in conversation.  Who would have thought we'd get so much comedic material from a fairly uneventful rafting trip on a river that seemed to be primarily composed of elephant poop? Or spend so many hours reliving the time when one of our boys fell into a filthy, disgusting hole on a Chiang Mai street or the endless imitations of the guide who was only able to answer, "Yes, yes, of course" to any question we asked including ones beginning with words like where or when....  

Bonding in Cambodia

A few years later, we went on a trip with just our sullen, disagreeable son who was barely speaking to us. (His siblings were at summer camp.) On one hand, it didn't feel good to be rewarding his unpleasantness with foreign travel-on the other hand, having this forced time together really improved our relationship and gave us common experiences, and adventures (disasters?) to share and a lot to talk about. At those times when we find each other particularly annoying--we (hopefully, he as well) can remember that special time when we found a bizarre landscape straight out of Dr. Seuss,  or froze on snowmobiles or found smoked fish hanging on our door knob--to remind ourselves how we really can have a good time together. We probably could have reached that point through intensive therapy, but intensive travel seemed to work okay (although we haven't figured out how to get it covered by health insurance...).

Mom and teenage son bond in Iceland

Our kids might spend little time at home spending "quality" time together-to the point where I have those second-thoughts about the parenting mistakes we must have made, but lock them in a hotel room with no one else they know and set sail on a river of elephant poop-and all is really fine. Yes, yes, of course.

The joys of family travel

 We take a lot for granted. Here's a lovely piece about what travel abroad teaches us about our lives at home.

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/11-05/eight-things-to-rediscover-about-home-by-traveling.html

And here at Quivertree, we recently posted our favorite family travel tips. Here's the link

http://quivertreeworld.com/pdf/Quivertree-Top10-TravelTips.pdf

We're always looking for different experiences here at Quivertree. So here's National Geographic Traveler's Top 10 Cable car rides worldwide

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/top-10/cable-cars/

And finally, we couldn't resist this, from the duty free shop at Medellin airport

Seen at Medellin airport...