W
hat would you do if a man threatened to put
your children on the roof of a jeep and then
perform dangerous vehicular acrobatics,
trying to flip the car over? I’ll tell you what
I did. I said, “YES, PLEASE,” paid him a large amount of
money, AND my wife gave him a tip afterwards.
No, it’s not bad parenting. It’s a concept called
“adventure holidays”, also known as “assisted suicide”.
The horror began a day earlier when my wife handed
me a brochure of a “ jeep-trekking” day tour while we were
in Thailand.
Now, MY idea of a wild vacation is trying out an
incremental adjustment to my favoured reclining position
on the sofa, but I responded as a married man should to
all spousal utterances: nodding like a pecking bird desk
ornament. (All the married men reading this just nodded.)
The next day, a jeep-like pick-up truck picked us up.
Tour guides sat in air-conditioned comfort in the driver’s
cabin, while we paying guests balanced on benches in the
back of the truck or clung to the cabin roof like arrested
protestors.
The driver drove like he was half-mad, until we
met up with rival drivers – and then he drove as if he
was completely mad. The jeeps bounced over off-road
mountain trails, while we passengers screamed and held on
for dear life.
At the end of the day, the adults had that glazed look of
people who have survived World War I or a
Transformers
“movie”, while the kids were jumping up and down, saying,
“Again! Again!”
A fellow survivor of this expensive torment was from
Chile, home of the world’s scariest “entertainment”,
a bungee jump into the mouth of a live volcano. The
brochure, and I am not making this up, says:
FAQ
Q: Will I die?
A: Yes. You could. You’ll be signing a waiver though, so we’re cool.
Well, that’s all right then.
After I got home, I read in the paper that Action Park
(nicknamed “Class Action Park”) will soon reopen. This is
a famous theme park in the US state of New Jersey that was
Thrill-seekers wanted
Hiring people to endanger my children’s
lives was easy, but rather expensive, writes
father-of-three
Nury Vittachi
.
closed down in 1996 because so many people were killed or
injured.
WHAT IS GOING ON? In my day, being maimed or
killed was considered a bad thing. Now we buy tickets and
queue up. Note to self: Never use the words “rational” and
“humanity” in the same sentence again.
Maybe I should switch sides. A reader sent me a recent
news report about an attempted suicide in Qingdao, China.
A man climbed out of a window and balanced on a
ledge, five storeys up. When he tried to throw himself
off, firefighters at ground level blasted him with a water
cannon, which carried him upwards and back through the
window out of which he had climbed.
I hid the report from my children, knowing they would
copy it. “I’ll jump out of the apartment window and you
blast me back in with the gardener’s hose, it’ll probably
work.”
Mind you, if they did try it, and it did work, I could
market it as a new adventure holiday concept.
“Jump out of my apartment window! Only a few
hundred dollars! Must sign waiver!”
I might earn enough to go on another adventure holiday.
Oh, joy and bliss.
Nury welcomes your comments and ideas at his Facebook
page:
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