After 20 years as a tour guide, and an almost irresponsible amount of travelling, I’ve discovered the secret to extraordinary travel. And it’s not necessarily the destination.
Visiting a destination without ever engaging a great local guide is a bit like settling for a level 2 orgasm.
Yep. Technically, something happened. You were there. There may even be photographs. But geeeez, there was so much unrealised potential.
For the purposes of this story, I’ve decided orgasms should be rated on a scale of 1 to 10. I have absolutely no medical qualifications, have conducted precisely zero peer-reviewed research, and suspect my methodology would struggle to get past an ethics committee. But stick with me, because I reckon this highly questionable scientific theory might just explain something I’ve finally worked out about travel.
You can fly halfway around the world, hire a car, visit the famous lookout, photograph the cathedral, sit beside the pool, eat somewhere Google tells you has 4.7 stars and return home perfectly satisfied.
Level 2.
Nothing wrong with it.
But with a bit of foreplay, some mad kissing, engaging touch, passionate words, time, experimentation and perhaps the occasional toy… that exact same destination might have gone to 11.
And that, increasingly, is how I think about great tour guiding.
It starts with the foreplay.
A great guide doesn’t necessarily meet you at 9am on Tuesday. They might start days before. An email arrives with tips about the little bakery tourists don’t know about. The bar where the locals actually drink. A walking trail for tomorrow morning. A Spotify playlist of local artists. A couple of Instagram accounts worth following.
Suddenly you’re not just going to Spain. You’re already imagining the food, the wine, the people and the places you’re about to discover. And you haven’t even packed your suitcase yet.
That is tourism foreplay. And I’m a massive fan. Then comes the mad kissing.
Except in tourism we call it interpretation. A spectacularly unsexy word for something that, done properly, can be incredibly stimulating.
This is where someone takes a castle you’ve been staring at for ten minutes, thinking ‘yep, that’s a pretty impressive pile of rocks’, and suddenly unpacks 800 years of extraordinary human history. The battles, the betrayals, the sex, the politics.
They explain why that vineyard is planted there. Why that forest survived. Why that neighbourhood looks different.
A good guide tells you facts. A great guide changes what you notice.
And once somebody changes what you notice, you connect at a much deeper level.
That’s when travel starts getting interesting. Then there’s touch. Getting amongst it. Travel should stimulate all the senses.
Paddle a river you’ve never heard of. Ride an e-bike through ancient backstreets. Hike a mountain that leaves you gasping for breath. Taste the weird cheese. Crush a eucalyptus leaf between your fingers and smell the Australian bush. Run your hand along an 800-year-old stone wall.
Try something that makes you a little nervous. Something you might never have attempted without a knowledgeable local giving you a gentle nudge
Some of my favourite travel memories have started with: “I’m really not sure about this…”
And ended with: “Holy shitballs, that was incredible!”
Great guides gently push us across that line. Then comes time. This might be the most important bit. Intimacy with a place can’t always be scheduled in 15-minute increments. Sometimes you need the long lunch. Another glass. The winemaker who unexpectedly wanders in. The backroad. The backdoor.
The human story that wasn’t part of the itinerary but somehow becomes the thing everybody remembers. Connection takes time. And great tourism leaves room for it.
And yes. Sometimes there’s a toy 😉.
Maybe it’s an e-bike vibrating across ancient cobblestones. Maybe it’s a canoe sliding quietly down a river. Maybe it’s a Land Rover on two wheels, rumbling along a bush track you didn’t know existed.
Whatever floats your boat. Sometimes literally. The point isn’t the equipment. It’s access.
A great guide gives you access to places, people, stories and experiences that are extraordinarily difficult to discover from a Google search.
That’s why, since starting my own tourism business nearly 20 years ago, I’ve become almost obsessive about booking tours whenever I travel.
Walking tours. Food tours. Bike tours. Whisky tours. History tours. Private tours. Occasionally tours my wife books that I initially declare sound absolutely terrible and later have to admit were magnificent.
I’ve just recently returned from six weeks travelling around Europe, and we booked tours everywhere we went. One of the highlights was a walking tour of Porto with Tiago, a local architect who helped us understand the cities structural history through his eyes. In Bologna, a food and wine tour with Eric the food delivery truck driver, gave us a completely different appreciation of a city already famous for its gastronomy. Then there was the maddest day of the entire holiday. Eight hours on the pedals, 62 kilometres and a ridiculous number of mountain bike trails through the Dolomites, guided by a born-and-bred local who knew every twist, turn and shortcut. Three weeks later and I’m still buzzing.
These weren’t just people showing us where to go. They were sharing their lives, their knowledge, their friendships and their passion for the places they call home.
And that’s the stuff you simply can’t download from Google Maps.
Of course, we occasionally get a dud. We’ve had guides who could turn the fall of the Roman Empire into a long afternoon. But reviews, social media and digital booking platforms have made finding brilliant little operators easier than at any point in history.
And increasingly, they’re the people I’m hunting for. Not necessarily the biggest. Not necessarily the one with 4,000 reviews.
The passionate local. The slightly obsessive historian. The architect who became a walking guide. The winemaker. The naturalist. The owner-operator who knows every bend in the river.
The person who doesn’t merely know the destination. They care passionately about it. Because perhaps that’s what we’re really buying when we book a great tour. Not transport. Not admission. Not even information.
We’re buying somebody else’s lifetime of curiosity.
Twenty years of noticing things compressed into six hours.
Relationships we don’t have. Doors we couldn’t open. Stories we couldn’t possibly know. And perhaps most importantly, permission to stop being spectators for a little while and actually participate in the place we’ve travelled halfway around the world to see.
That’s worth paying for.
After nearly 20 years guiding people around Margaret River, I’ve come to realise something else. Every time I experience an extraordinary guide somewhere in the world, I come home wanting to be a better one myself. It’s a rippa reminder that no matter how long you’ve been doing this, there’s always something new to learn from someone who does it brilliantly
And don’t get me wrong. I love a lazy afternoon beside a swimming pool as much as anyone. And sometimes getting hopelessly lost in a foreign city is half the fun.
But if you’ve spent thousands of dollars travelling halfway around the world, surely it’s worth investing a little more to discover what makes that place genuinely extraordinary?
You might just discover that the most memorable part of your entire holiday wasn’t the famous landmark, the spectacular scenery or even the incredible food.
It was the person who brought it all to life
Find a brilliant local guide. Get curious. Go somewhere you couldn’t have found yourself. Ask stupid questions. Eat something strange. Paddle the river. Ride the bike. Take the backroad. Stay for the long lunch.
And whatever ya do…
don’t settle for a Level 2 travelgasm.
You flew halfway around the world, you deserve an 11.
And if you’ve chosen your guide wisely… They’ll bring the toys 😂.
About Margaret River Discovery Tours
Sean Blocksidge is the owner operator of the Margaret River Discovery Company, an avid photographer, blogger and South West WA ambassador. In 2010 he won Western Australian Guide of the Year and his tours have been rated the #1 thing to do in Australia on the Tripadvisor website for the past two years.
