Corona Times - Being a travel guide

Around the millennium change I climbed glaciers and mountains, rafted and kayaked wild rivers, rode horses and mountain bikes and survived the jungle as a travel guide in Belgium, France, Norway, Costa Rica and Surinam. In later roles, as product manager and airline manager I guided educational trips to Abu Dhabi, Cura?ao, Mallorca and Thailand. Recently I organised and guided some yoga retreats with my wife to France and Spain and finally I enjoyed being a participant myself on a trip to the Ivory Coast.

Being a travel or tour guide can be real fun but also comes with a lot of responsibility. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if it’s wise to let very young people do this job. All the stuff that happens in everyday life will also happen while travelling, in fact even more frequent and more intense. People will feel homesick, get sunburned, get dehydrated, lose their luggage, get robbed, turn jealous or split up from partners. Sometime accidents happen and in the worst case people die. The latter never happened to me, but I witnessed the sad moment when another guide reported a tragic fatal accident from another continent.  

All the social mechanisms that occur in any given group also happen in travel groups. Some people are natural born leaders, a majority are followers and usually there is at least one person that doesn’t really fit in. It is also rather common that multiple sub-groups are formed, based on similar interests or age. I remember reading an interesting scientific article on travel guides and groups by social anthropologist Erik Cohen during my studies of travel and tourism and actually used some of that in my work as a guide. Groups tend to cause delays by definition as there is always a slowest person holding up the rest. Also, no matter how sophisticated group participants are, people like to stand around and talk, regardless of planned schedules and once there is an official travel guide, most people turn to sheep. Meeh, beeh or baah depending on where the group comes from. Knowing the mechanisms can make your travel guide’s life a lot easier. All you have to do is make sure the natural leader of the pack moves along to the next point and the rest will automatically follow.

But let’s start with first things first. I became a travel guide at the age of twenty-five. In 1998, just after meeting my wife as a sailor on the Dutch waterways, I had moved to Berlin and was looking for a job. After selling plants in a Dutch gardening centre for some months, working sixteen hours a day, six days a week, I applied to tour operators and was first hired as co-organiser and interpreter on a survival trip in the Surinam Amazon, one of my most extreme trips ever! After three days of theoretical and practical learning we made a real expedition in the jungle for nine days on a row with one kilogram of rice per person. We hunted for food, smoked wild boar, fished piranhas and slept in hammocks with mosquito nets against insects and tarantulas. It was a fantastic experience and I found out what really being hungry feels like. I will write a separate article about this expedition including fragments of a movie made by two German film academy students that was broadcasted on German television. 

In my next job I was hired as travel guide by a small Dutch tour operator called Mambo Outdoor Travel that had just been founded. We did an introductory weekend in the Belgian Ardennes. My first fourteen-day trip was to the South of France. I was a little shy speaking for groups and did not have extensive driving experience and had pushed myself to start exactly this job to get out of my comfort zone. I drove a nine-person minivan packed with tents, climbing and other outdoor material, cooking equipment and food and picked up my first participant in Amsterdam’s Olympia Square. My next stop was Utrecht. As my parents did not have a car since I was a little boy, I knew everything about the railroad system, but my knowledge of Dutch highways was rather limited, so I directly missed the first relevant highway exit. Hard to imagine now, but at this time we did not have smart phones and car navigation and used maps and printed road books to drive to France. When we finally arrived in front of Utrecht Central Station where seven more participants were waiting, my first participant directly started making jokes about the guide that had already lost the way between Amsterdam and Utrecht. I remember I was so keen on not making another mistake and carefully watching all road signs, that I almost missed a red traffic light. I had to make a full brake and my eight participants were flung into their safety belts. I think I made a little joke about the entire luggage now being stowed properly for the trip. Our next stop was Maastricht where we met the second guide who drove a smaller van for six persons and had picked up some people in Eindhoven before. All in all we were fourteen youngsters. In Luik, Belgium we had our first traffic jam and I got to do my first real inclining test after my driving exam and passed, sort of.  

The first night we camped somewhere near Paris where we lighted our BBQ with a cup of spirit causing a huge flame. Next day the real outdoor travel started. Some highlights of the trip were a mountain hike in Parc National La Vanoise and a spectacular rafting on the wild river Guil, the latter being guided by a local outdoor company. In this area we also made a mountain bike tour that we guided ourselves. I had a super condition and could beat anyone going uphill, but found out I was no fan of racing downhill and had to let some participants pass me even though the golden rule said they shouldn’t. Somehow I didn’t have the feeling of control going down on a bicycle. And that for a Dutchman? Yes, but don’t forget that the Netherlands is as flat as a pancake.

We continued to Guillestre and made an adventurous trekking in the Gorges du Verdon. Here me and the other guide first drove to the end of the tour, left one van there, drove back with the other van, made the tour with the participants, then drove with one van to the start to pick up the other van, drove back and picked up all participants. Quite some driving giving me more experience in the mountains. The Gorges du Verdon was also where we did some climbing and abseiling or rappel with our own climbing material. The other guide was a bit younger than I was, but much more experienced in the climbing. My role automatically focussed more on the social component and as such we were good team. 

Our next stop was the Cote d’Azur where we made a boat tour and went snorkelling and diving. We undertook guided five metre (sixteen feet) test dives. The dive master showed me an octopus, but I couldn’t really enjoy the experience and concluded diving is not my thing either. Later, when I had no problem to briefly unsecure myself on a sheer stone wall in 40 metres (130 feet) height, I concluded I am not fainthearted, I somehow trust my own muscles and simple gear more than external devices like a diving apparatus or a mountain bike. 

We continued our trip to Millau in the Gorges du Tarn. Here we did an action parcours including spectacular 40 and 120 metre (130 and 395 feet) abseilings followed by a zip line river crossing. In Millau participants could also book optional activities such as bungee jumping, para gliding and canoeing. Most of our group joined a canyoning tour, a mix of climbing, swimming and sometimes jumping. At some stage you had to jump from an 11 metre (36 feet) rock wall in a little pond that you could not really see very well from above which takes some courage. One girl, not from our own group, panicked last minute and pulled up her legs just before hitting the water. As kids we used to call that making “a bomb” to create the maximum splash, but when coming from this height that’s not recommendable as it turned out. She damaged her lower back. We were in the middle of the tour with no normal way out. I carried her on my back up forested slopes in turns with her boyfriend and she had to be flown home the next day. It made me realise accidents can easily happen, no matter how good you do your job as a guide.

Millau was also the last station for our group and we drove back to the Netherlands. A few years later years I came back to Millau with a good friend to do a one week paragliding course which was very nice. With paragliding (parapente in French) you start on the earth and use the wind and thermics to ascend which seemed more natural to me than jumping from an airplane with a parachute.

My second tour, again fourteen days and again with two minivans and another guide, took me to Norway. The first day involved a long drive of almost 1.000 kilometres (600 miles) from Utrecht in the Netherlands to Hirthals in the North of Denmark where we would take the ferry to Oslo the next day. I remember being quite tired at some stage and feeling the weight of the responsibility of being the driver for nine persons. I don’t have a detailed recollection of the full Norway trip but remember some highlights.

One was going up Norway’s second highest mountain Glittertind at the edge of Jotunheimen National Park. At some stage after reaching the 2.465 metre (8.087 feet) high summit, me and many of the group witnessed our first “white out”, the condition in which the contours and landmarks in a snow-covered zone become almost indistinguishable. I remember taking out my compass just to be sure not to lose my orientation! 

We also made a fantastic hike on the ‘Jostedalsbreen’ or Jostedal Glacier, the largest glacier in continental Europe. After extensive safety instructions on the previous day and putting on climbing gear and crampons and hooking up to a special glacier rope, we went onto the Jostedalsbreen in two rope teams. The idea of a rope team is that if one person falls into a crevasse, the rest of the team immediately drops on the ice, head first and use the ice axe or pickle to stay fixed and stop the victims fall. We also did some real ice climbing on a sheer ice wall. Similar to my French trip, my fellow travel guide was the more experienced one here and set up most of the climbing route using ice screws and other equipment.

We also made a nice three day hike in Rondane National park, a cool rafting on the Sjoa river, drove along Norway’s biggest Sognefjord and did our own climbing and abseiling in the Hemse valley. On the road we also saw some moose called Elg in Norway.

Another remarkable but different moment for me as a guide was going out with the group in Oslo on the last night. The group had their fun, drinking expensive alcohol. As guide and driver of the van, I was sitting at the bar and having a coffee. That’s where being a guide really felt like working to me, which was in fact also cool and I was somehow proud of myself.

The most spectacular trips as a guide were the ones to Costa Rica. I knew this destination very well because I had done a six-month traineeship during my studies of travel and tourism here and extensively travelled this Central American country improving my Spanish to a good level. The first trip as a guide was fantastic. It took 24 days and was the first ever long haul trip for Mambo Outdoor Travel. The group was small, only five participants. Some of them had quite some travel experience and had rather booked the trip because of features that cannot be done alone and spontaneously. Being a traveller myself, I can relate to such participants, but obviously they are not always the easiest to manage. It’s a bit like having other sailors on your own sailing ship. People book organised group trips for a variety of reasons. Some of them are simply too fearful to travel alone or too lazy to organise it. Some people just like the company of other travellers or look for a partner.

On the pilot trip to Costa Rica we did some stuff that was not done often before us and was not repeated afterwards because it was too expensive or too heavy. The local companies that cooperated were very eager to make a great experience out of it. Amongst the coolest things we did, were multiple day rafting, mountain biking, horse trekking, hiking and some mountaineering. 

With two rafts we went rafting for three days on the El General river, starting somewhere near San Isidro de El General. On the first day we learned basic techniques and commands, how to sit tight, how to paddle and, not unimportant, what to do if you fall out of the raft. You float with your legs forward in case you hit any rocks and keep the paddle crossways to stabilise yourself. The camp was set up in advance by a second team with a truck. It was a real expedition and it was clear that the guides had a lot of fun doing it! The rafting was awesome. We did some class III and IV rapids with names such as La Garganta del Diablo (‘the devils mouth’). After each rapid we would do the high five with the paddles!

The mountain biking in the north western province Guanacaste was done with a US American man. The tour was organised very well with a 4WD-support car with all spare equipment you could think of, but it was too heavy, the main reason being the amount of precipitation or simply being in the wrong season.

On some stretches we had to walk cattle paths that had turned into mud pools and cross rivers that were a bit too deep and wide. I was happy to have my survival rope with me that could be made to good use. It was a very adventurous tour though and we had a lot of fun.

We also did a fabulous horse trekking near Arenal Volcano, active at that time. I remember galloping through the mountains as if I had never done anything else. In fact it was my first time on a horse. One time, I mentioned to Janet, the Canadian organiser of the horse trekking, that my horse was a bit slow. Next morning, just after breakfast, Fernando, the horse guide, a real cowboy type, showed us that my horse was perfectly fine by galloping in front of the group and doing all kinds of tricks for us like making the horse walk sideways. I took this lesson with a big smile.

Another fantastic tour we did was a hike through Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula in the South-West Pacific, one of my absolute favourite places in Costa Rica and even in the world. I have travelled this park in many different ways. One time we arrived from Puerto Jimenez where you can take a 4WD-taxi to Carate, the last village before entering the park from the southeast. In fact Carate was just one house and one little store and from here it’s still a long walk to La Leona, one of the park ranger stations and official entrances. From La Leona you can hike along the beach and through the jungle to Sirena, the main ranger station in the middle of the park that has its own airstrip. Along the beach and in the jungle you may see monkeys, red and blue macaws and if you are lucky even a tapir. Jaguars also roam this area, but I was never lucky enough to see one.

Another year we started our trip to Corcovado from the North by boat. We boarded the little ship in Sierpe and first cruised the mangroves before coming to the Pacific Ocean. Where the river meets the ocean it got a bit rocky. Then we followed the coast line past Drake Bay before coming to Sirena. Landing here was spectacular. The captain carefully studied the waves and then suddenly hit the throttle. We approached the beach with high speed between two waves towering up higher and higher in front of us and behind us. After the front wave broke, we nicely entered the beach and unloaded our luggage. We stayed in Sirena for two days before making the hike to Carate. This time I actually saw a Tapir. Corcovado truly is a beautiful park, where we hardly encountered anyone else and you could see from one beach horizon to the other without seeing another human being.  

Most trips we also made a stop in Uvita on the Pacific coast where Dutch friends of the owner of Mambo Outdoor Travel had some cabinas and a restaurant and they sort of worked as local organisers. You could do a lot of optional activities here like a horse riding tour called ‘cowboy for a day’, an ultra-light flight, canopy tours or simply visiting a waterfall. Most tours required a minimum number of participants. I remember my group taking forever to choose because they were already pairing up and discussing what was feasible and complicating things. I made everyone write down their first and second choice on a little piece of paper so everyone would first think for him or herself before discussing the options with others afterwards which helped. It felt a bit like being a group therapist.  

I did many more things with groups in Costa Rica such as visiting Cahuita on the Caribbean coast, visiting Santa Rosa on the Pacific Coast, but also getting robbed in San Jose.

One last trip I want to describe is the ascent of the Chirripó, Costa Rica’s highest mountain. I did this trip at least five times and learned a lot about human and group behaviour here. With 3.820 metres (12.533 feet) and no real climbing to be done, everyone with a good general condition can reach the top, but Chirripó should not be underestimated.

On my first trip here with a group we arrived by public bus to the nearest bigger city San Isidro de El General. From there I wanted to take a taxi to go straight to our pension that was located near the park’s entrance. As it is everywhere in the world at stations and airports many taxi drivers offered their service to us and it’s sometimes hard to find the right taxi. I knew we had some very steep roads ahead and asked one of the drivers with a little truck if he really knew the road to the pension and was 100% sure his truck would make the steep roads. “Seguramente seňor!”, absolutely sure, so we had a deal. Off we went. After taking a wrong turn somewhere and driving back quite a distance, the truck stopped next to the road. We were out of gasoline. Me and the driver walked to the nearest house and bought some. When we arrived in San Gerardo de Rivas, the last village before the mountain, the driver was relieved but I had to disappoint him because our destination, the pension, was beyond the village. By now we were driving small and bumpy roads in the middle of the jungle, it was getting dark and the driver was nervous and sweating. At some point, just after crossing a little bridge, his truck stopped. The motor simply couldn’t cope with the inclination. By now it was pitch dark.

I was pretty sure we were on the right track. I had been here years before and had then hiked this road in early morning but it was hard to be sure. I talked to the group, told them I would run ahead with a flash light to see if the pension could be reached on foot. By now my group was quite anxious. To be honest I was having an excellent time. A real adventure! I ran ahead and only after some 1.000 metres (3.300 feet) I actually found the pension, run by an elderly couple and their adult son. The son had a shiny 4WD Toyota pickup and offered to drive down with me and pick up my group. Before leaving I ordered all the meals for the group. I stood at the back of the pick-up, holding on to the silver rail and came down feeling like a hero. It guess it reminded me of a scene from the movie ‘Romancing the stone’ in Colombia with Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny de Vito’.

My participants were happy they had made it, but this was definitely not their idea of adventure. Quite interesting! They had booked an adventurous trip, but it turned out they wanted an organised adventure where you exactly know what will happen well in advance. The real adventure was wasted on them. It reminded me of a story that my late uncle in Spain once told me about rich tourists being robbed in the dessert by Bedouins, just to give them the adventure of a lifetime!

Anyhow, we had arrived and the next day we started our ascent. The first day of this hike is absolutely tough. With heavy backpacks one has to ascend some 2.000 metres (6.600 feet) to the refugio or base camp. Except tents, sleeping bag, food, cooking materials, spare clothes, water and other stuff has to be carried. It’s a beautiful hike as you slowly move from jungle to cloud forest and then finally to the paramo or tundra landscape but all the time it’s going uphill. When people have different conditions, it will show even more in the mountains. Being the guide, one wants, but of course cannot keep the group together all the time. You mostly take care of the slower walkers and make clear appointments with the rest of the group on how often or where they should stop which in this case is not very difficult since there is one clear trail. You also need to take care that, when the slower ones finally catch up with the rest, the faster ones who by then mostly have had enough rest, don’t directly start off again, which is really demotivating for the slower ones. Not easy. I will never forget celebrating Queens Day in the Netherlands one day after I came back from guiding a group in Costa Rica and trying to keep my friends together, still being in my guide modus, between more than one million crazy Dutch partygoers dressed up in orange. That’s hard if not impossible. 

Back to Costa Rica. When finally reaching base camp everyone was super tired and despite my advice to drink enough and wear a hat against the sun, some participants were slightly dehydrated and even a bit melancholic or crying. Since Surinam I always brought my special salt solution with me and made some of them a ‘soldier’s tea’ a recipe I had learned from my survival teacher Jürgen. A mug of black tea, two table spoons of sugar and one table spoon of salt. It tastes awful but it sure helps. I also added some extra salt to the soup, which my group could certainly not value. 

The next day everyone that was fit enough came to the top with me. You start in the dark so you can see the sun rise when you reach the summit. With clear weather you can see both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean! When descending, one of the loners of the group didn’t wait for the rest. The group corrected him when we all reached the foot of the mountain. I felt a bit sorry for the guy and also had a brief talk with him, to explain him how he made himself unpopular like this, rather than to teach him a lesson.

My very first own ascent of Chirripó, in 1994 was a total catastrophe by the way. I did it with the girlfriend that I had back then who also did her traineeship in Costa Rica. Another Dutchman joined us. After 500 metres (1640 feet) the other guy asked us “are you sure we don’t want to go to the beach?”. Half way up, my girlfriend also wanted to stop, but I still saw the summit in front of my eyes and carried her backpack on my chest for the second half of the day. We hadn’t packed very smart, taking a glass bottle of whiskey and another glass bottle of ketchup as pasta sauce. I also had a square jerry can full of water that was peaking in my back. When it started raining we used garbage bags as rain clothes. When we finally reached “basecamp” in the twilight, no more than an unmanned windy hut at that time, we were all devastated and had a very short and cold night where I literally rattled my teeth of cold as all my clothes and my sleeping bag were soaked. We did have fun though and the bottle of whiskey was made to good use. The next morning, I was finally ready to skip the summit and go straight down. That certainly was an adventure I will not forget and taught me a thing or two.

When I studied travel and tourism in the nineties, I did my thesis for another tour operator called SNP Natuurreizen who offered hiking and nature trips around the world. Unlike most other students I interviewed people before they made their trips, in my case to Latin America and measured how satisfied they were afterwards. Obviously managing expectations is very important in tourism and travel. The product on sale is a mix of many variables, some of which cannot be influenced directly. If you make your advertisements too shiny, people may book, but will most probably be disappointed afterwards. A classical misconception orrurs to many people visiting the jungle for the first time. They should know they will not see all the animals that are displayed in television documentaries, certainly no jaguars.   

As said I also guided some educational trips to Abu Dhabi, Cura?ao, Mallorca and Thailand. Educational or familiarisation trips or just ‘famtrips’ are regularly used in the travel and tourism trade and are mostly organised by airlines, tour operators, hotels and tourism authorities in order to showcase their products to travel resellers or buyers. That is expensive and time consuming but very effective. In those mostly rather short trips, packed with hotel visits, tours, and dinners, the relation with the group is slightly different as you are selling something, but many other aspects are the same. One time, working for airberlin I organised a “megafamtrip” to Mallorca with more than hundred travel agents flying in from Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Cologne and Munster. It was fun doing it, and we made a great picture of all agents holding the board magazine in Puro Beach, a really cool marine club near the airport, but from a logistical and social perspective it’s terrible to move around with such a big group.

I made three trips to Abu Dhabi as part of airberlin’s cooperation with Etihad Airways. Besides learning more about the airline, me and the participants were impressed with the international vibe that surrounds this place. I learned some more about the very rich of our planet, liked my stay in the Jumeirah Etihad Towers, saw my first ever “gold to go” automat in the Emirates Palace Hotel, had one of my best meals ever in the Shangri-La Hotel, really liked the local fish market and found out it’s not wise to go jogging in Abu Dhabi.

I got to know the Dutch Caribbean island Cura?ao in four days and liked its combination of cultures, found its inhabitants very warm and welcoming and simply loved the Caribbean flair. The Dutch old style architecture but then very colourful is nice, just like the pontoon bridge and the floating market in Willemstad. I stayed in the Avila Beach Hotel where we drank some Blue Curacao in the Blues Bar on the first night. Mmmh. But we also visited many other hotels such as the Acoya, Lions Dive, Santa Barbara, Hilton, Pietermaai, Scuba Lodge, BijBlauw and many other fantastic places, beaches, coves and parks.

Thailand was a totally different experience. I loved Bangkok’s day and night vibe, I liked the floating markets, just as I really liked staying in the ‘Floatel’ on the River Kwai. I loved dining pure garlic and ginger on the night train to Chiang Mai. I loved the jungle tour with elephants, at that time still common and sleeping in a little village.     

In recent years I organised and guided two yoga retreats with my wife to Mallorca and a yoga and surf retreat on the French Atlantic coast, also a very nice experience. Two years ago I enjoyed being a participant myself on a Brussels Airlines famtrip to the Ivory Coast. The program only lasted 48 hours including the flights in Business Class, but it was lovely to be a participant and just “enjoy the ride”.

P.S. If you enjoyed reading my article, don’t forget to like, comment or even share it! Take a look at my other articles down here and follow me if you are interested upcoming travel stories. I try to publish one each Friday. The company Mambo Outdoor Travel still exists, but is now part of another company. All photos were made by myself.

? Bjorn Gianotten 2020