Life as a Grey Hair for the day

December 5th, 2010: Yesterday I took a trip into the rugged mountains running along the Chilean border. This ended up not just being a trip to see a beautiful mountain pass that was used for the movie set Seven Years in Tibet but it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for me to experience life as a senior citizen for the day - which was not my original intention. It just seemed to happen as I stepped onto the bus that picked me up from my hostel, looking around and noticing that the bus was filled with grey hairs (at least they have hair). At that moment I realized that I might have paid too much for the tour since the mathematical formula for grey hair tourist is the following: Grey Hair tourist price = Fair tour price + 50% markup.

Worldwide, seniors seem to be targeted by tour companies due to the larger profit margin than the cheap, mangy backpackers. The backpacking community typically lives off the penny’s they have accumulated over the years and doesn’t seem to have a pension/allowance such as some of the older tourists. Unfortunately for them, the tour companies clearly know this and are sadly taking advantage of them.

On my tour today there was a few other stray backpackers asking the guide if we were going to do any hiking, gimping, walking, hopping, crawling, rolling or anything else besides stopping the bus and getting out for photos. Our guide made it clear that they are not able to do anything else because she was not sure if everyone was physically fit enough to do that…needing a waiver if they did. To support her case she informed them that on this tour she had 2 people died on her tours from exerting themselves too much.

A lot of people in tourism seem to think that all seniors are extra fragile, reminding me about the trip I took out to the mountains outside Cordoba, Argentina a week or two ago. This is when my friend and I went to this hiking area and wanted to make it to the top but arrived too late for the 4 hours accent – which I was internally grateful for. Standing at the information counter I noticed that the sign said if you were 60+ years old, you needed to hire a personal guide to go on the hike with you - that was quite expensive. I had to laugh but it was at the same time disturbing because I come across a quite a few 60 year olds that were in better shape than me. So how can you just come up with an age making it a requirement and not know the persons physical abilities, I don’t know? Where is AARP when you need them?

My day acting as a senior was extremely pleasant and relaxing, taking plenty of photos from the window of the bus to several photos only a few steps outside the bus doors. Perhaps it would have been nice to be able to walk a little bit more, by say…parking farther from the restroom doors. If I wasn’t a cheap mangy backpacker and decided to enter the restaurant for lunch when the rest of the bus did, I could have added to today’s excitement and used the typical senior citizen terminology to those individuals in the service industry such as “honey,” “sweetie,” and “darling” and get away with it. Never the less, I was still happy to see what I came to see and to have experienced a trip living life as a grey hair.