Your worst excursion/guide experience?

[Aruba]

Were you tempted to pick up the carving knives and carve something into your guide?! I think I would have been...

[Y's Owl]

My worst excursion was also in Tunis, Tunisia. It was 1996, and I was on the Carthage ruins tour with my sister and parents. Anyone who has ever been there also knows that next door to the ruins is the Presidential Palace. Because of Presidential Security, you are warned not to take pictures in the direction of the palace. Indeed, to even use a camera in the park, you have to pay an extra fee. Well, wouldn't you know it; we had one person in the group who just didn't care about the local rules. She decided she was going to get pictures of the palace. While we were getting a pretty good historic tour of the park, our fellow passenger pointed her video camera in the direction of the palace and then suddenly we were all surrounded by Tunisian Army soldiers carrying automatic weapons. We missed out on the rest of the tour while she and our guide negotiated a solution to her violations of the camera rules. Eventually they took her camera and erased her tape of her visit to the park. A number of the passengers when we got back on the bus gave her a lot of grief for using her camera that way. On the way out of the parking lot on the bus, wouldn't you know it....she pointed her camera towards the palace and got her precious picture. Just about the whole bus this time yelled at her, including our guide. Fortunately this time she didn't get spotted by the soldiers.

[jhannah]

That's incredible, Y's Owl. There's always someone, isn't there? Sheesh!

 

My worst experience wasn't all that bad, really. Just annoying. A nice lady in a port I won't mention because it's quite small yammered on and on throughout the entire two hours. She was silent only to take a breath! I wanted some information ... but not details of local politicians and minutiae of every little bit of historic tidbit.

[Tricia724]

My worst ship's excursion was many years ago to Dunn's River Falls in Jamaica. My friend and I decided to climb the Falls, and joined a group of 8 or 10 others. Many of us had cameras, so our guide grabbed all the cameras out of our hands and put them in a large plastic bag while we climbed up.

 

At the top of the Falls, our guide launched into a speech about how he had "protected" our belongings and because he has such a dangerous job, he has no insurance, and he has a family and needs money, and on and on and on. All the time he is speaking, he is also holding our cameras up over his head, way out of our reach. Then he announced just how much money he wanted from each of us for his "tip".....and he wouldn't give our cameras back until we gave it to him! The only other people around at that time were Jamaicans, so we felt trapped and increasingly uncomfortable. In the end we gave him what he wanted, retrieved our cameras, and hurried back to the ship.

 

To this day I still hate port stops at Jamaica and rarely go far from the ship.

[Johanna7]

Love Australia but we had a ship's tour (Princess) and it had a driver and a guide. Most of the tours do except those you book yourself on the internet and you get great drivers who also servce as tour guides and they are great.

 

The problem with this tour (Melbourne) was that the driver and the guide didn't get along. She gave information and the driver always corrected her. He was right and she was wrong. Maybe it was her first time as a guide. In fact, some of it was quite comical while they were argueing.

[Aruba]

That's funny -- maybe the passengers could have taken a vote to settle the argument, like on that new tv show with Jerry Seinfeld where 3 panelists settle arguments between married couples (I forget its name).

[iceman93]

My story is funny to me in retrospect, but wasn't at the time. We were on a HAL tour in San Juan, PR to the Bacardi rum factory. Our guide was quite animated, maybe even a bit manic in his speech and mannerisms. Apparently HAL didn't know or plan for the fact that there was some kind of major holiday on the island that day, so traffic was a bear.

 

After visiting the fort and a couple of other sights around town, we were quite late getting to the Bacardi plant, and apparently already had tickets for a tour time that had passed. Our guide had to negotiate a new time for our rather large group, which itself took quite awhile. After the tour, a movie about Bacardi, and rum tasting it was finally time to get back on the bus, but the published ship's departure time was only about 15 minutes away!

 

Traffic heading back into San Juan was horrible. As the bus inched along, passengers became more and more concerned, and actually belligerent towards our guide. He kept assuring everyone that he had been in touch with the ship and that they were waiting for us, but given his quirky behavior I don't think people trusted him much. At this point I actually started feeling bad for the guy because he had done all he could but the passengers were becoming downright rude to him.

 

Of course the ship did wait for us (two hours!), and I think I was one of the only guests to tip the guide. As we rushed through security and towards the ship, passengers already on board looked down from their balconies and outside common areas and a few even yelled (seemingly seriously) things like, "It's about time!" Once we were aboard and the ship was prepared to leave, the captain made an announcement about how "the wayward bus" had been found and the last passengers were finally aboard. Even from inside our stateroom we could hear a cheer--apparently the saga of our delay had become something of a lightning rod for those already aboard.

 

I always try to balance rigid adherence to schedules with a recognition that while on vacation, particularly on a cruise, one has to remain flexible. On that voyage at least, my fellow HAL passengers apparently wanted things to run like the trains in Italy before WWII...

[CowPrincess]

This was NOT the worst tour we've ever been on, but certainly left us with the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

 

We booked the Go with Gus Humanitarian tour of the Rio Dulce, based on the fabulous reviews here on CC. Some of the comments were “life changing” and “the best excursion we have ever done”.

 

Nowhere on Gus’ website was there any explanation of how this was a “humanitarian” tour. We did not get to stop at the school, as it was supposedly closed for vacation (per our guide). Our guide did mention that “they” were sending someone to university but when pressed for information did not elaborate at all. We heard about how poor the people were, how the school has no blackboard, how the kids attend only part of the day so they can work or fish the rest of the day. That’s it. No real explanation of how our presence there was helping the people.

 

The whole tour that we experienced set off my “BS detector”, so when we got home I e-mailed the website and expressed that we still didn’t understand how this was a “humanitarian” tour.

 

Gus phoned me and spent about 30 minutes discussing:

• how wonderful Canadians are,
  
• how tourism is such a good thing for Guatemala,
  
• how the schools were closed because there was no money to pay the teachers (different than what we’d been told the day of the tour),
  
• how if we’d been on a different boat we’d have seen a school and the schoolchildren.
  

 

So instead of answering my specific questions, or alleviating my concerns, I was left with the impression that he didn’t want to commit to “paper” any specifics about the benefits that supposedly accrue to the area from the tourists that take the “Humanitarian” tour.

 

I still think there’s something not quite right in that whole set-up. I hope I’m wrong. If you’ve been on the tour and can set me straight, :) please feel free to!

[cruz chic]

This was NOT the worst tour we've ever been on, but certainly left us with the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

 

We booked the Go with Gus Humanitarian tour of the Rio Dulce, based on the fabulous reviews here on CC. Some of the comments were “life changing” and “the best excursion we have ever done”.

 

Nowhere on Gus’ website was there any explanation of how this was a “humanitarian” tour. We did not get to stop at the school, as it was supposedly closed for vacation (per our guide). Our guide did mention that “they” were sending someone to university but when pressed for information did not elaborate at all. We heard about how poor the people were, how the school has no blackboard, how the kids attend only part of the day so they can work or fish the rest of the day. That’s it. No real explanation of how our presence there was helping the people.

 

The whole tour that we experienced set off my “BS detector”, so when we got home I e-mailed the website and expressed that we still didn’t understand how this was a “humanitarian” tour.

 

 

Gus phoned me and spent about 30 minutes discussing:

• how wonderful Canadians are,
  
• how tourism is such a good thing for Guatemala,
  
• how the schools were closed because there was no money to pay the teachers (different than what we’d been told the day of the tour),
  
• how if we’d been on a different boat we’d have seen a school and the schoolchildren.
  

So instead of answering my specific questions, or alleviating my concerns, I was left with the impression that he didn’t want to commit to “paper” any specifics about the benefits that supposedly accrue to the area from the tourists that take the “Humanitarian” tour.

 

I still think there’s something not quite right in that whole set-up. I hope I’m wrong. If you’ve been on the tour and can set me straight, :) please feel free to!

Wow....something doesn't sound right on that tour. It's good to know. I'll avoid that one. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had a different experience with this tour.

[CowPrincess]

Wow....something doesn't sound right on that tour. It's good to know. I'll avoid that one. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had a different experience with this tour.

 

Yeah, I'd like to hear other people's experience, too. We schlepped school supplies from home, and the tour guide honestly behaved as though he was PO'd that he'd have to deal with them :mad: And the place we got taken to, to do some shopping, the guide kept saying "nothing from China here, you won't see any 'made in China' stickers here". Yeah, okay -- only because someone had peeled the "Made in China" stickers off the items :rolleyes: I know fibers and fabric, and I know they were selling Chinese products. The whole thing left both DH and I feeling that there was something "off".

 

So I too hope others can pop in and share their experience.

[Gamelan1971]

Most of the shore excursions I have been on have been good to excellent. However, I would say that both of the excursions we did in Vietnam when we took a leg of the Amsterdam Grand World Voyage this year were underwhealming.

 

In general, I am not a big fan of Vietnam; I am a frequent traveller to Southeast Asia and haven't been back to Vietnam for 12 years. So, I was curious to see how the country would be now that some time has passed and hoped I would appreciate it more this time.

 

These were both ship's excursions. The first one was the "Best of Ho Chi Minh City." We got held up by the ship's photographer on the way out to the bus because she wanted to get our photo and guess what, by the time we got on the bus, seats were full. So my mother and I had to separate. We both ended up sitting with people who were traveling together but wanted their own seats- not only that the man was unfriendly to my mother. My mother politely suggested that they might want to sit together but they indicated that they both wanted window seats since they hadn't been back since the war. In any case, I mentioned our issue to the HAL group leader and he got us moved to seats where we could sit together. So that was nice.

 

Otherwise the tour was unremarkable. Long trip from Phu My to and from HCMC (close to 2 hours each way). HCMC looked pretty much the same as I had remembered it when I visited 12 years ago except fewer bikes, more motorbikes, and a few more cars. We spent FAR too much time at the Presidential Palace. Lunch was just OK. And, our first stop in HCMC was a lacquerware factory- I did buy a few pieces but it was a lot of overpriced junk- in US dollars nonetheless. This was perhaps the biggest bummer for me- I remembered this sort of thing from when I visited Vietnam 12 years ago- government sanctioned shops to "soak" the tourists for as much foreign currency as possible.

 

And the biggest disappointment of all- we went to see a Water Puppet show- something I had regretted not doing on my first trip. What a waste of time- compared to the dance and shadow puppet performances we had just seen in Cambodia, as well as years of wonderful performances in Thailand and Indonesia, this was just a joke. The puppets looked like cheap chinese junk and there was no interpretation of the performance. I have since warned others that the Water Puppets are not that impressive if you are familiar with other forms of SE Asian art, dance, theatre, and music.

 

Finally, we visited Halong Bay. I remembered taking a 3 day trip there and swimming in the bay 12 years ago. No longer. The pollution and boat traffic is just incredible. Also, HAL advertised the trip as being on a Junk. These were not real junk boats. We also visited a cave complex that I also remembered visiting 12 years ago- I remembered that being very interesting at the time and found this visit to the caves to be missing something- this was because the Vietnamese government, in a move to sanitize it for tourism, made the locals take out all of their shrines that had made it interesting in the first place- no wonder I did not recognize it.

 

In any case, while many of these things were not HAL's fault, it is clear that part of the tour package (visiting the lacquer factory and shop) was government sanctioned- wish that HAL would disclose that- I would have appreciated knowing this.

 

HAL would probably be better off skipping Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and stopping in Hue or Danang instead.

[rugbypopsie]

One one cruise a few years ago our transfer into Bangkok had a guide...the obviously HE introduced himself as "Betty Boo" and then proceed to tell us ALL about the operations he has had to transform himself and the ones he has planned.

 

The looks on the faces of some of passengers trapped on the bus for more than an hour and a half was priceless! I will never forget him..I hope his operations went well and he is happy with his new self.