Being a local guide has been the best accident I have ever had. It all started in my hometown, Maracaibo, a place with little sense of direction, with confusing streets and people only knew how to give you directions by naming landmarks that I didn’t know either.
My dad used to drive me everywhere, so every time I wanted to visit a new friend, he would tell me to ask for his location on the map so as not to get lost, but they didn’t know how to do it.
From that moment I became a teacher convincing my friends to use the map to guide me to where they were and then I realized that not even the building where I lived existed, after adding it I had my first points as a local guide, I couldn’t believe it!
Adding new places gave me a lot of emotion, I felt that I was helping my friends and little by little I was understanding that I was helping millions of people in the same situation as mine, that’s why I think the Local Guides program is perfect to meet new people, share new locations and have fun while doing it.
This is how my family chose me as their own official travel guide. We love spending time together, so we recently decided to visit the Colombian Coffee Axis and it was another opportunity to use Google maps to find the best tourist sites to visit that were suitable for our large and diverse family.
We visited the Coffee Park, the Santa Rosa de Cabal Hot Springs and the Cocora Valley. It gave me great pleasure to contribute and share with the whole community the best and most suitable places for people in wheelchairs like my grandmother, small children like my sisters (1 and 3 years old), my cousins (5 and 12 years old) and the rest of my family.
It is not easy at all to leave the house with 12 people to discover the world, but we did it thanks to Google Maps and the entire Local Guides community that has added places and shared reviews, that’s why I am passionate about the contribution of my experiences, because I want everyone to have the opportunity to explore without fear of getting lost or reaching a place that was not what they had expected.
I want to teach people with a traveling heart like my family´s that they don’t need to have a lot of money to enjoy because there are wonderful plans at very low cost that they can go to without so many worries. This is my way of sharing my happiness, that’s why I believe that being a local guide reinforces our sense of union, solidarity and a lot of passion for what we do.
