We’ve come to realize a great irony of modern travel. And it’s this: the people who recoil most at the notion of seeing a city with a tour guide are often the very people who would actually benefit (and enjoy having one) the most.
The reason for this inverse snobbery? Tour guides have an image problem.
Let’s do a quick exercise. When you think of a guided tour, what springs to mind? Flags? Megaphones? A group of bored tourists trailing behind a guide reeling off a rehearsed spiel? Maybe even the idea of scheduled toilet stops. Gah.
None of that is appealing to the educated, well-travelled, independent-minded traveler. And why would it be? The truth is that your writer (Bespoke’s founder) was also vehemently anti-tour guide when she started the company.
Those who know Bespoke well will remember that in the early days the company only produced one thing: custom guidebooks and local cellphones with access to the team for help – a service designed to help like minded travelers make the most of China by themselves. Who needs a tour guide? We thought. That’s so old school.
But then we changed our minds. Big time.
Despite offering what we thought would be the ultimate tool for seeing the city in our nifty edited pocket guide + phone combo, time and time again people would request tour guides. And not just any tour guides, good tour guides. So reluctantly, begrudgingly, we went out and started to look for them.
Fast forward several months – perhaps even a year – later, and through a great deal of hard work, we’d managed to find 10 guides who not only had perfect English and years of experience, but actual personalities. Personalities that made you want to hang out with them for a whole day – talking, sharing, hearing their life stories – stories that gave us more insight into China than we’d ever had to that point.
What we discovered was that with a good tour guide, not only were sights brought to life for the first time through richly-described scenes and the pointing out of details we’d never otherwise have noticed (the tiny arrowhead embedded in the eaves of the Forbidden City’s west palace after an uprising in 1813 for example) – but that the more questions we asked, the more we learned.
So that in between the fascinating historical anecdotes and mind-blowing facts, we would learn that Frank’s parents used to work in a tank factory, that his father wept when Chairman Mao died but not when his own father died; That Connie is the pride of her small village in southern China because she was brave enough to come to Beijing and buy a house, build a life. “When I go home and play mahjong with the other villagers and family friends I always let them win,” she says. “It’s a nice way for me to give back.”
How Amanda lived beside the Summer Palace as a child, and as a teenager would sneak through a hole in the fence to get in without paying, and skate on the frozen Kunming Lake with her friends. Or how Helen has lived apart from her husband for 6 years because he is in the army, but is given a 300RMB monthly ‘separation allowance’ by the government for their hardship.
The truth is that when you are able to connect with a local to show you their city – one whose English (or French or Spanish) is good enough to articulate not just the history of the place, but their own feelings and opinions – your understanding of that city is enriched in a way that you cannot imagine. Those flashes of comprehension, of sudden understanding, are worth more than a million guidebooks written by foreigners. In fact, how can they compare?
So it’s time to reassess your image of a tour guide. Because when you are able to connect with a good one, you won’t be ‘led around’ by them, but walk alongside them as you both decide where to go. You’ll not be talked at, but instead enter into a rewarding dialogue with them. Perhaps most important of all, you won’t be given a rehearsed script, but a personal memoir and authentic local perspective few other travelers bother to seek out. And at Bespoke, we think that’s something to be proud of.
Bespoke has spent 6 years sourcing the very best tour guides and experts we think China has to offer. We put every guide through a lengthy interview/testing process and our guides have taken everyone from Matt Damon to Marjorie Scardino and American Secretaries of State around their cities. To find out more, or to book click here.