This way for the tour guides
photos by Paul Oswell

One of my favourite ever tour guide moments was a young woman, leading me around an architecture tour in Budapest, Hungary. She was trying to explain a statue to me and hesitated..."I'm sorry...this statue exemplifies..as you can see...ah, my English is not so good...how to say it....anthropomorphism."

I also liked the man in Kathmandu who was so jaded that we just walked around for an hour while he named things: "Temple....market stall....big bell..."

It's an often thankless life of tirelessly instilling interest in things that many of the group probably couldn't care less about, the tours signed up to by enthusiastic partners or taken while jet lag fogs the attention span.

I salute you, tour guides, who do your presumably repetitive job through testing conditions, in all manner of environs across the world. And I drop a theoretical small denomination note into your optimistically-proffered tip jar.

Please don't forget to tip your guide today.

(more PHOTO FEATURES)

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