Guides. How many people use them I wonder. Do you? And I don’t mean travel guidebooks. Nor the guides who take package tour groups around. And not the specialist guides who lead treks through mountains, jungles, glaciers and other hard-to-get places we might not otherwise have access to.
I mean the personal guides who people hire to escort them around a city for a few days or walk them around a museum or archaeological site, and the specialist guides who take walking tours, culinary tours, and so on. I’d never given the subject much thought, until recently.
We’ve only ever used guides a handful of times and on all but two occasions they ruined the experience for me and I swore I’d never use them again.
I keep reading and hearing about people hiring guides: the owner of a travel website we were consulting on was creating itineraries that inevitably involved using a guide in each destination and sometimes several specialist guides in one place; in a travel magazine I read the other day a reader asked the expert to suggest guides she could hire in a popular European city; and a trip planner recently asked if there was a guide in Dubai I could recommend. Dubai is the last place on earth anyone needs a guide. The city is easy to get around, people are friendly, and everyone speaks English.
And surely they’re the main reasons you’d consider hiring a guide: accessibility challenges, hostile ‘natives’ and language barriers? I’ve occasionally felt while researching a guidebook in a place where we only speak the basics that we could have benefited from a translator. And when we trekked the hill tribe villages in Thailand, we certainly would have had a warmer welcome if we would have had a good guide from the area – as promised! A visit to an art gallery or archaeological museum can be enriched by a guide familiar with the work on display.
But it baffles me when I see a guide bringing a tourist into a café in Damascus and I overhear an explanation which seems to come straight out of our guidebook or I see a guide walking a couple around an easily-navigable city such as Paris, Milan or Madrid. Part of the fun of visiting a place for the first time is getting lost.
Do you use a guide? If so, when? And why?
Pictured? The last place I’d want a guide – no way would I want anyone to get between me and the wonderful assault on all senses that is Aleppo souq.