The gift or ability to travel and experience new places is something i have always considered a privilege. When i am given a privilege, i also believe it comes with a responsibility, an obligation that requires me to pay back to society for the knowledge and richness i have been given by the cities that have shaped me all my life and also pay forward to fellow human beings who are gifted with the same privilege of travel but need a guide in order to maximize the experience.
Understanding a new place, environment or city enriches the mind as a traveller, it makes you leave with memories and an appreciation of the people, the culture, the heartbeat of the place such that it becomes a part of you forever. In most cases a visitor or traveller never has enough time to stay long enough to discover and navigate the best experiences a city or place has to offer.
Local guides like myself through the beautiful world that google has created exist therefore to fill this void. A local guide is that friend you will never meet, but who has thought about you long before you planned that trip and has volunteered to tell and give you secrets that many wish they knew on their travels and journeys but never get for free, which are all now made possible through the generosity and technology enabled by the world of google.
A visitor need not settle any more for just any meal while in any town, but gets to eat the authentic cuisine cooked by local chefs that leaves a lasting taste in the mouth and memories that last forever, the visitor need not wander around a town wasting away precious “tourist time” yet not see the best tourist attractions the city has to offer, neither miss the most significant artefacts or landmarks that are the cultural essence of the place visited. All the puzzling questions and mysteries and in any new city can be solved by just leaning into the world of local guides waiting in the city and drink from the fountain of knowledge and information they offer with love.
Growing up as a young kid in elementary school i learnt of a great Portuguese explorer called Vasco Da Gama and always dreamed in awe of what it would be like to walk in his shoes, i never thought it could be possible, but years later on my visit to Lisbon, Portugal my dreams came through when i stumbled across a post by a local guide who wrote a piece about the Vasco da Gama bridge in Lisbon which made me decide to spend a day doing all things “Vasco da Gama”. I visited the bridge (the second longest bridge in all of Europe), the Vasco da Gama mall and the statue of the great man himself. If was very fulfilling, one of the highlights of my trip, only made possible by a local guide i will never meet, a local guide who changed my world and made me discover and experience in a little way the story man i never thought i could ever walk the streets he walked while experiencing the culture and led to his extraordinary life of exploits and discovery.
Local guides are a treasure to the world of adventurers, we make the world a better place and i am proud to be one.
