Page 116 - Microsoft Word - Guiding light final version 0716 1206.doc

We have our own coach and driver, John Allan, for excursions mainly to houses etc. not normally open to the public and everything is included in the cost, even wines (an excellent selection). The crew is ever cheerful and I'm spoilt something rotten. I also do some guiding!
‘Preparation for the first trip involved hours of train riding, checking points of interest one side out, a quick tum round and the other side back. Time values vanished - I once tried to get lunch at Kyle of Lochalsh at 10.30am. No guidebooks equal private, peronal visits as we have to be prepared to guide anywhere if our hosts are absent, so that needed a day per castle.
‘The train leaves on a Tuesday, returning on the next Monday, so it does not need an Ein- stein to work out that makes a seven day week. By now THEY realised that the crew had no free time, there was more to guiding than - "Yes I think that's Loch Lomond" and besides, passengers paying almost £400 a day expected more than a guidebook. I became a fixture. Week after week it was a dash home, wash and iron 5 blouses etc., do hair, read mail, groan at garden, say hello to dog, pig and husband (usually in that order) and dash back.’
The ups and downs of being a tourist guide
By Christa Welsa
I sat on a bench in Crown Square and I knew that this would be the very last time I was visiting Edinburgh Castle. There was melancholy in the moment. Sad but not sad. It summed up my guiding career: I had had so many wonderful moments in this castle, so many laughs, so many wonderful encounters with colleagues usually moaning, got soaking wet, or was blown away in storms. It had been a wonderful time and a wonderful career but it was time to end it. And this was my choice - not through illness or some misfortune but because I had just started a new life.
I had no money as a student and could not afford a holiday, so to work as a guide for the Swiss Student Travel Service was an opportunity to travel. My first trip was three weeks in Iceland with a coach and staying mostly in huts/hostels. I was innocent, blissfully ignorant and certainly knew nothing about Iceland, nor guiding, nor group control, nor cooking.
Och I thought this went quite well and did another two weeks in Iceland the following year. Looking back of course I realise it was a disaster - I was a disaster for the group but Iceland made up for it.
I had been guiding occasionally during holidays yes I got the bug! and was by now guiding and doing hiking and walking tours in France, England and Scotland. I met my Scottish husband on one of the tours. When I moved to Scotland a year later and did not know what to do with myself - sitting at reception and selling theatre tickets for the Byre in St Andrews - I bumped into a coach driver who had been the coach driver when I worked for a Swiss hiking company. It is always coincidences that shape our lives.... living on the Isle of Raasay now is the result of one of those coincidences too. From that driver I heard for the first time about Blue Badge Guides.
‘I was in the class of ’95 which consisted solely of ‘students’ speaking a foreign language. Many of the Italian and Japanese colleagues have in the meantime returned to their homeland but some friendships survive from that time.
‘We certainly had no over-tourism. What was absolutely wonderful then - and I always loved itineraries with very little or nothing in it - was to adapt to the interests of the group. One could always turn up at a distillery, or a castle or visitor attraction unannounced and just visit. And if group was half an hour late for a lunch, not a problem. Today restaurants are unhappy if group is 5 minutes late - “why did you not phone?!”
‘What was really, really bad then were the hotels. Simply awful. The rooms, the service (ah remember drinks getting served just as dessert arrived!) the food, everything was awful.
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