From navigating a 150-year-old fish market to skipping the crowds at the Taj Mahal and knowing the best restaurants, a local tour guide will know how your time is best spent.
My 30-something Mumbai-born guide has come to pick me up at my hotel next to the Gateway of India.
Still dark – after a quick change from our smelly fish market shoes – we head to nearby Victoria Terminus where newspapers are delivered and sorted for distribution on bicycles.There are dozens of daily newspapers in several languages. That’s why the print media is still thriving here with decent circulation numbers. The guide’s family takes five or six newspapers every day. Being a sports nut, he wants to read results and match reports.
Over the course of the trip, a raft of guides help me to get tickets for the major sites, avoiding long queues. They explain the best ways to get to and from; the best times to visit – and make worthwhile alterations to my itinerary. They also save this unsuspecting traveller from all sorts of run-of-the-mill tourist shops, steering them instead towards the real thing.
The guide here is a young villager. He takes tours but runs an electronics repair business as his main gig, and has his own blog. He’s training two young women to be guides; they tag along to see him in action, and prove to be the only women guides I encounter on the entire trip. We go into the homes of locals, who make simple clay pots, then head onto Sadhana, an impressive women’s handicraft enterprise.
Their all-handmade products are of a high quality, fair-trade certified, and cost a fraction of similar goods sold elsewhere. But the Sadhna’s real strength is in delivering economic and social power to these women. At other times, I get equally virulent anti-Modi rants. These diatribes can be informative, and at the same time supremely annoying, but they are usually not hard to shut down.guides on foot through the back alleys of the old city into artisan workshops where people carve temple statues; we wander past old havelis , truly historic architectural gems. Sharma is the only guide on the trip who refuses to take a tip when I ask if he will accept a thank-you.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Famous church nears completion nearly 150 years lateBarcelona’s famous La Sagrada Familia is one step closer to completion after the fourth tower was finished.
Read more »
Pressure rises on hosts India to hoist World Cup on home soilIndia are favoured to lift the World Cup on home soil, as in 2011. But that expectation may be their biggest obstacle.
Read more »
Pressure rises on hosts India to hoist World Cup on home soilIndia are favoured to lift the World Cup on home soil, as in 2011. But that expectation may be their biggest obstacle.
Read more »
Pro-China candidate Mohamed Muizzu wins Maldives presidency, upending relationship with IndiaRunoff vote was widely seen as a referendum on whether to pursue closer ties with China or India, both vying for influence in the island nation
Read more »
Bride and groom speak out after wedding blaze kills more than 100 peopleA young couple are in mourning after a deadly fire broke out at their Christian wedding in Iraq. More than 100 people were killed when fireworks set light to a hall in the country’s north on Tuesday. At least 150 people suffered burns, smoke inhalation, and crush wounds sustained in the fiery blaze. The wedding is believed to have had around 900 guests, with the fire starting at 10:45pm. The bride and groom have spoken for the first time, telling Sky News their dream of being happy has been destroyed forever as they’ve been forced into hiding.
Read more »