How a tour guide can ruin your holiday

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This was published 6 years ago

How a tour guide can ruin your holiday

By Ben Groundwater
A bad guide means a bad holiday.

A bad guide means a bad holiday.Credit: Getty Images

You know, immediately, if you've got a good one. There's a sense you get from a tour guide straight away, a sense of their competency, of their enthusiasm, of their experience. You pick it up from that first hello.

If your guide has all of those things, you know you're probably in for a good trip. This person, after all, can make or break your holiday, can drag it out of the mundane and turn it into something amazing – or take something that should have been incredible and mire it in boredom. So much of the success or failure of your holiday hangs on the skill of your tour guide.

A bad guide means a bad holiday. And lately, I've had a few.

Let's start in Sri Lanka. You only realise the vast difference between a good guide and a bad guide when you have both versions on the same trip. A few months ago in Sri Lanka I had a generic driver-guide for most of my two-week journey, and a specialist guide for my day in the city of Galle.

The driver-guide was not good. To be successful at this job, to provide people with a great experience, you need to be knowledgeable, you need to be enthusiastic and passionate, you need to be proficient in the language of your clients, and you need to be able to read those clients to figure out what they're interested in and what they're not. My driver-guide was probably only one of those things.

He knew the facts. He'd clearly passed a test. He knew what the longest river in Sri Lanka was, and he knew its length to the nearest kilometre. He could lecture for a solid 15 minutes on the history of the Sigiriya historical site. He could point out crops by the side of the road and tell you what the farmers around here were growing.

But that's not all it takes to be a good tour guide. What it takes to be a good tour guide is to present that knowledge in a way that's engaging and interesting, to edit out the bits that your client probably doesn't care about and expand upon the rest.

Cut to the city of Galle, towards the end of my trip. My guide there was a guy called Shanjei, and Shanjei also knew his stuff. There was a difference there, however. Shanjei's first words weren't a lecture, but a question: "What are you into?"

Food, I told Shanjei. Sri Lankan food. Street food, restaurant food, spicy food, local food, weird food, good food. All of the things. No problem, Shanjei replied. And so we spent the next four hours talking not about ancient history, or monuments, or crops – we talked about food. We found the good stuff. We ate and we chatted. It was the highlight of my entire two weeks in Sri Lanka.

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That's the difference. Shanjei wasn't reading from a script. He wasn't going through the motions. He was engaging, he was listening, and he was reacting. That's what makes a great tour guide.

And it completely changes not just your holiday, but your whole idea of a destination. Much of Sri Lanka seems boring in my mind now, thanks to my driver-guide. Galle, however, seems endlessly interesting and charming, thanks to Shanjei.

Every traveller experiences this. Whether it's a walking tour in Europe or a hiking trip in South America; a day trip in South East Asia or a week-long African safari. The guide makes all the difference. They change your whole idea of a place and its people. This is often your main point of contact with local culture, your strongest idea of what the people of this region are like. If they're boring – the place is boring.

I had a driver-guide in Cuba, once, who just didn't want to be there. I knew that, because he told me: "I don't want to be here." I had a safari guide in Botswana whose contempt for his rich clients was very thinly concealed. You remember that stuff. It affects you. It affects your idea of the destination.

But there have been good ones too, engaging guides who have sold their destination to me far better than any brochure or website ever could. A guy called Westley Lombard at Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa was amazing. Sean Blocksidge, who runs Margaret River Discovery Tours in WA. Michele Thompson, who does walking tours of York, UK. Javier, a mountaineer and hiking guide in Peru.

Those guides left me with lasting good memories of their homes, all by being enthusiastic, engaging, interesting. A good tour isn't about knowing the facts. It's about turning those facts into something bigger.

Has a tour guide ever ruined a holiday for you? Where have you found the best guides? If you're connected of Facebook, tag your favourite guides below.

Email: b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Instagram: instagram.com/bengroundwater

​See also: China Eastern and the world's worst airline experiences

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