Package tour. Living in Kenya for two years in my teens mostly cured me of any desire to be a tourist. I have to say mostly because I did finally succumb to tourism after I got married, the lowest of low points in my life. About a year into my time in Kenya I started noticing tourists: solo, couples, families and the inevitable gaggles of tourists on some canned tour with a tour guide who spoke their language, effectively insulating them from a country they were mere voyeurs in. I felt moved to ponder their experience: why were they there? What were they getting out of it? As I mulled it over it quickly became clear to me: tourism is bullshit. Those tourists weren't getting what the country had to offer because they couldn't. I didn't start getting any of what Kenya had to offer for months, and when I looked back on my first impressions, my first few weeks in country, I had to laugh. I had been utterly clueless about Kenya at first, bewildered. Every new arrival is. You have to dwell somewhere a while before you start to get it. What tourists get are a bunch of bewildered first impressions with no context, no way of understanding what they're seeing. And that's the best case scenario: earnest tourists trying their best to take it in without a tour guide. People on guided tours just see some carefully packaged entertainment touted as a real experience of Kenya. Tourists miss the most important thing about their destination: time spent living there, ordinary life. It's the only way to get to know a place, the only way to get what it has to offer. Ordinary life, ordinary days. No effin' holidays, please.