Posts Tagged ‘life’

My first attempt at being tour guide was not an unqualified success. Aged 21, I was in put in charge of 50 French kids who had just arrived in London at the start of a three-week stay to learn English.

One of my duties, aside from stopping Xavier the 14-year sex pest reading the contents of every top shelf in every newsagents we walked past, was to give them the guided tour of my capital’s sights. I was told that this would simply consist of sitting at the front of the Barry’s of Weymouth bus with a microphone, reading from an information pack the language school had provided for me.

So, the merry travellers and I boarded our bus ready to take in the sights of London Town. Except there was one small problem. As I turned to the section of the folder where the tour information was supposed to be, it wasn’t. It went straight from Section 2 “Week 1 Itinerary” to Section 4 “Making Pronouns Interesting”. I flicked furiously through the entire folder, Section 3 was nowhere to be found.

By this point we were had already gone past the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace and the kids could tell that these places were of Places of Interest and some information about them would be well, interesting. I began to panic, I’d only been to London twice up until that point and had no idea where we were or what was coming next.

As we drove across a large park, I quietly asked the bus driver if he could tell me where we were. He told me and I stood up and faced my audience. 100 French eyes turned towards me expectantly. I cleared my throat, “Um, well this is um, Green Park” I stammered into the microphone. “And, um, as you can see it’s um, well, green.”

The bus driver stared at me, the kids stared at me uncomprehendingly. I sat down and said nothing else the entire journey.

So why, 18 years later am I dedicating myself to showing people the sights of Buenos Aires with Buenos Aires Local Tours? For a start I know Buenos Aires a lot better than I do London. Since my first attempt at tourism, I have got to know London a lot better, having lived there for a couple of years and visited many many times. However, the time I’ve spent visiting and living in Buenos Aires has been as a tourist, which means I look at things in a different way here than I do in London.

I got to know Buenos Aires through the pages of Lonely Planet and Time Out and have kept exploring. I’m blessed with a pretty good sense of direction and love figuring out where I am and how I got there. Now, 2 years after first arriving I’ve shown friends round the major (and minor) sights, figured out the best way to get around on buses and corrected taxi drivers when they try to take the long way round.

Link this internal GPS to an annoying tendency to remember every small fact I ever hear or read and tour guide starts to make much more sense as a profession and I love what I do. I meet some very interesting people and am able to share my knowledge and love for this city with them.

The route of the tour takes us to some of my favourite, and most interesting parts of Buenos Aires, and by catching buses to get around we get to see the city truly as the residents do. I look forward to showing you round!

Monday 14th June was a big day, it marks my return to gainful employment for the first time since that rainy October evening back in 2008 when I walked out of the BNP Paribas offices in Geneva for the last time.

It was a strange feeling then, and it is a strange feeling now and it’s got me thinking about what I’ve done in my 84 week “holiday”. There are plenty of websites out there devoted to all sorts of different types of travel; backpacking, a gap-year, the career break. These sites are filled (for the main part, there’s a lot of self-obsessed twaddle out there too) with information on where to go, how to get there, what to do when you get and, most importantly for my current state of mind, how to cope when it’s all over.

The thought has not been with me much over the last few months. Deep down I’ve always known that one day I would return to the world of work and it has held no terror for me. I think this is due to the fact that, unlike the gap-year student or the “career-breaker” I knew that this was much more than just a trip abroad. Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back to Europe a year later. Even if I did I woudn’t be returning to the life I knew before. Having made the decision to leave (I described it to someone the other day as the easiest decision I ever took – it was) I knew that whatever I would do in the future would be on my terms.

The fact that I’ve gone back to work doesn’t scare me, nor does it bother me. Over the course of the past months I’ve come to realise that it hasn’t been the not working that was important. As strange as it might sound, I don’t think that it was the travelling either, although obviously it’s been an incredible experience.

What has been important since leaving Geneva is that, for the first time in my life, I was able to do exactly what felt right, at that particular point in time. People have often said to me that I’ve been very lucky to be able to go travelling (instead of working), and I would often reply that it wasn’t luck, anybody could do it. I still believe that to be true to an extent, but the thing is, lots of the people who tell me I’m lucky, would like to do the same but won’t. They tell themselves, and others, they can’t, but the truth is they won’t.

Doing what I did is not for everybody, and in some ways it was painful, I’m a long way from home. However, coming to South America was one of the best things I ever did in my life, for the simple reason that it was the first time I stopped listening to voices telling me I couldn’t do anything different and just went ahead and did it.

Now I’m here and I know that nothing will be the same again. Never again will I find myself in the same state of mind that lead to me leaving in the first place. Life is great, and it’s 100% on my terms.