Tweaking Tours for More Experience in 2010 (Part Three of Four)

Still buzzing from the fun, sharing, and brainstorming our tour staff enjoyed with our tour guides at our annual summit last month, we are busy incorporating itinerary changes we agreed upon into our 2010 tour plans. Here is the thinking behind more of what I hope are improvements. (Sorry for the delay in getting this entry out. This has been a particularly busy week.)

For Spain, I suggested Gibraltar rather than the famous Andalusian hill town of Ronda (dramatically straddling its famous gorge). But our guides consider Gibraltar (the British military base-turned-tourist escape nippled onto the south tip of Spain) tacky, and strongly advised we stick with Ronda. Guides suggested we add Toledo’s Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz (a ruined mosque) to balance the sightseeing, since we already visit a church and a synagogue in Toledo. After cringing at that whiff of political correctness, I said I thought that particular mosque is underwhelming at best. Instead, we agreed to visit the new, fully functioning Great Mosque of Granada in that city’s Albayzín district, and see if our groups can actually check in with the imam there to see how Spain’s largest Muslim community (10 percent of the town) is living with its neighbors.

In Northern Ireland, we American visitors (even the sword-carrying Protestants) are predisposed to support the underdog Catholic minority. But to get the full story, we agreed to find an angry Ulster Protestant to talk with our groups about Orangemen activities in what we call a “reflections” setting. Orangemen have seemed to kind of terrorize the Catholic minority in Ulster — with its bombed-out Catholic churches, seemingly hateful Protestant marches through Catholic towns, and menacing bonfires that continue to this day. A reflections setting is when we sit down as a group with a local person in a quiet place, and our guide (without contributing otherwise) facilitates a reflective exchange between the local and our group. After participating in exchanges like this in El Salvador and Nicaragua, I’ve been encouraging them when the opportunity presents itself with our Europe tour program. (While Europe may be less contentious than political flashpoints, reflections meetings here can be just as instructive and inspirational.) We’ve done reflections meetings with Scandinavians who buy a kind of socialism by willingly paying higher taxes, Turkish Kurds supporting a separatist movement that threatens Ankara, Serbian Orthodox priests angry with American involvement in Kosovo, Hungarian grade school classes and their teachers, and American expats who’ve married into Italy (where mothers-in-law take mother-in-lawing to towering heights). We want our tours to connect with Europe in as many ways as possible. And reflections meetings are just another tool for this.

Dublin has a “Musical Pub Evening Tour” in which a trio of local musicians meet a group in a pub and, over the course of the evening (and several pints of beer), lead their group on a crawl. They visit three pubs while explaining and demonstrating their instruments, offering the group an educational foundation for Irish music appreciation (and generally a nice Guinness buzz). I absolutely love the experience. Our guides said they did music evenings in pubs in other towns, and doing that plus taking groups on this music tour would be redundant. Considering how an evening of live traditional music in a small-town pub is even more fun after having the pub tour education, I proposed that this kind of “redundancy” was a beautiful thing. In 2010, we’ll offer both experiences.

In Florence, we have always offered a historic “Renaissance Walk” through the core of the old town. While the Renaissance Walk is the main thing, we also recognize that it misses the town’s scant Roman history, its fascinating medieval history, and the heady years in the 1860s when Florence was the first capital of the new country of Italy. So, for our Heart of Italy and Venice/Florence/Rome tours, we’re covering more dimensions of Florence’s history by adding a local guide who’ll use generally overlooked sights tucked here and there in the old town as a rack upon which to sort out these layers of the Florentine story. Then the guide will walk our groups across the Arno River to lead an artisan-focused walk through the crusty-as-a-cobbler Oltrarno district.

In Slovenia, our guides were skipping the Skocjan Caves because they wanted to be sensitive to claustrophobic tour members. I love these caves and (at the risk of freaking out the paranoid ones) requested that we visit Skocjan instead of the visually impressive but empty Predjama Castle. We’ll include the 1.5-mile hike through Europe’s most awe-inspiring cave — a vast canyon evoking the hidden home of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, and illustrating memorably the honeycombed geology of Slovenia’s Karst region. Some will need to be shepherded across the scary bridge over the subterranean gorge in the middle, and some may simply refuse to enter and wait with the driver at a café near the entrance. But we will include Skocjan Caves in 2010.