Face blind, absent-minded and no sense of direction – as a tour leader, I was never boring
"I can’t think of a person less suited to the job of tour-leading than you,” my friend told me. This wasn’t malicious. She was absolutely right.
I had commented that I was definitely done with tour leading, after 30 years or so of leading innocent tourists into various disasters in the equally innocent developing world in the pre-internet era of the 1980s and early 1990s. So why unsuited? Let me count the ways.
Prosopagnosia (face blindness). Having greeted my group at the airport in Nairobi, Lima or Antananarivo, I would ask them to wait in a huddle while I located the bus to take us to the hotel.
On re-entering the airport, I would have no idea which of the various tourist huddles was mine. To prosopagnosics, all faces look the same. On one tour, I managed to herd the wrong group on to my bus, only to realise the error when one woman rather crisply asked where we were going. Even once I’d got the right group on to the right bus, there was the nightmare of breakfast the following day.
How on earth was I to know which of those diners, all freshly changed into different clothes, were mine?
Zero sense of direction. This is actually not as problematic for a tour leader as you might think, because we usually had local guides to take us around. On treks, I always made sure I was at the back – “supporting the slow walkers”, as I explained. But then I took on the job of leading a delightful group of American hikers along the Cotswold Way.
If I had been happy to stick to the plan and actually follow the National Trail, we would probably have been OK. But I couldn’t resist suggesting to the tour operator that, as an experienced walker, I could vary the route to show the group some of my favourite places, including a quite wonderful Roman mosaic floor hidden under old sacks deep in the woods. I could devise a different route along other, less popular footpaths – so much more interesting, I told the group.
It didn’t go to plan. A walker at the front recalled this conversation with an angry landowner:
“You’re on private land!”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Where are you trying to get to?”
“We don’t know.”
“Well, where did you start from?”
“We don’t know.”
“So where’s your leader?”
“She’s at the back.”
As indeed I was, staring at the OS map trying to work out where the hell we were. On the last day, I was told how the group had entertained themselves: “We took bets on whether you would get lost each day. And – oh Hilary – I was the only one who bet you wouldn’t get lost today. But thanks to that hundred-yard ‘diversion’, I lost my bet.”
Finally, I’m absent-minded. Vague, my mother called it. Easily distracted, I would say. My mind’s never absent, just gone off along a sidetrack. A good tour leader counts them all out and counts them all back. On our Peru treks, we always started in Cusco with a tour of Sacsayhuaman, the Inca ruins above the city. Later, as we drove to the hotel, I was busy explaining some subtlety of the Inca empire, when there was an urgent tap on my shoulder. “Just a minute,”
I said. “Let me finish this explanation, then I can answer your question.”
“But it’s Mary. You left her behind and she’s running after the bus!”
The thing is, no one really wants to return from holiday having had a boringly good time. What we most enjoy is a good, eye-popping disaster story with a happy ending, and perhaps because of the happy ending, my clients were usually extraordinarily forgiving, and would sign up for some repeat misery. These trips provided enough material for a talk I used to give some decades ago – “Tales of a Tour Leader” – and also for this new series of columns in The Telegraph.
At the end of one such talk, a member of the audience put up her hand: “How can I make sure I don’t come on one of your tours?”
Hilary Bradt is co-founder of Bradt Guides (bradtguides.com)
