What I Believe: About Tour Guides

By Mark Morgan Ford · June 28, 2022 · 2 min read

In Greece, we had several very good tour guides, including a young Frenchman that had graduated from the Sorbonne in psychology. He went on to work as an art historian for the Louvre, spoke five languages, was conversant in American literature, could name the genus and species of any plant we asked about… and much more.

He showed us the obvious places and made them something more than obvious by telling us stories about them that were not in the standard guidebooks. And he brought us to a dozen places that were not even listed. One of them: a tiny, hidden Byzantine chapel outside of Athens that still had the old frescoes on the walls and was still used by locals for services. It had taken many years for them to feel comfortable with him… so much so that he was allowed to bring his clients to visit so long as they didn’t take photographs or tell anyone where they had been or what they had seen. That’s what you want in a tour guide. That kind of knowledge. Broad and sometimes deep. With love for what he does and the respect of the community into which he brings tourists. In Naxos, we had a completely different experience. This time, we had two guides. (And I’m being generous in calling them guides.) They took us first to what they called a vineyard, which was a random plot of land in the suburbs that held about 100 plants of a grape variety that they could not name. And then to here and there, the usual places, about which neither of them seemed to know a thing. It was a four-hour “tour” that felt like 40 hours. In speaking about it afterwards, we got to calling them Dumb and Dumber.

What I Believe: About Tour Guides

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