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Microtours
Let an expert be your guide on walking tours of cities, guided tours of museums, city bus tours, or guided excursions in Europe
Even if you're a die-hard solo traveler and scoff at the folks being herded from one sight to another in big tourist clots, you can get a lot of mileage out of sightseeing guides. Bus tours of the city, escorted day trips, walking tours around town, guided tours through museums or cathedrals—these are all what I call microtours (as opposed to the macrotours of fully escorted bus trips). Your guidebook and the local tourist office can fill you in on the microtours available in each city.
Local guides who concentrate only on one city or sight are usually experts, not tour bus escorts who’ve merely memorized a canned spiel for each town, stop, and sight along the way. By combining do-it-yourself planning and travel with microtours, you can get the best of both worlds. The best microtours are packed with more information (history, background, anecdotes, details, and explanations) than any guidebook has room to print.
On any tour, be a head-of-the-class nerd and stick next to the guide. Walking from stop to stop on the tour, you’ll be able to chat on your own with her and ask questions, and you’ll also get to hear her answers and explanations to everyone else’s questions.
The city bus tour
This is great for city orientation and crossing the major architectural sights off your list. Almost every city has these city-run or private tours, which may last from 45 minutes to a full day, but usually average 60 to 90 minutes.
There are three main flavors: the roundabout bus that trundles you past everything in one big loop; the hop-on, hop-off bus that makes a long circuit of the major city sights (you jump off whenever you feel like visiting a museum or whatever, then board a later bus when it swings by); and the mini guided tour, where everyone gets off the bus at certain stops and you’re lead by a guide quickly through churches, museums, and other sights (these tend to last at least half a day).
Most buses have either a live guide or recorded commentary available in a dozen languages.
Your own budget tour
With a map showing bus routes and a bit of imagination, you can put together your own budget tour for the price of a regular bus ticket. Most major cities have a bus line that, either by design or default, happens to pass by some or all of the tourist highlights.
Guided specialty walking tours
There’s no better way to bring a city’s culture and history to life than through a guide’s anecdotes, character sketches, jokes, and tons of background details. It might be an Irish music pub crawl in Dublin, seeing London’s Shakespearean sights, visiting the Rome of the Caesars, touring the hidden gardens of Paris, or gawking at Gaudì’s buildings in Barcelona.
For some walks, you must reserve in advance; for most, you just show up at a specified place and time and pay the guide a nominal fee ($4 to $10).
I am pretty much incapable of visiting London anymore without latching myself on to at least one of these most excellent walking tours through London's streets and history offered by London Walks (london.walks.com).
Guided tours of museums or cathedrals
Whether led by learned volunteers, hired guides, a dusty professor, or a rotund old monk, a 30- to 120-minute tour of an individual sight can do the same thing for a cathedral or art gallery that walking tours do for a city. Guides can spin stories and give insightful commentaries on the meanings of every tiny detail of a sight or painting, conjuring up the past and enriching the experience of your visit tenfold.
Escorted daytrips
If you don’t want to hassle with figuring out the logistics of how to get out of the city to see some nearby sights and small towns—or you have limited time in which to do it—a local escorted bus tour can be just the ticket.
It whizzes you out to the sights with a live guide who’ll walk you through everything and returns you to town in time for lunch or dinner (most are either half- or full-day excursions). Using public transportation, for example, it’s pretty much impossible to see both Siena and San Gimignano in a single day trip from Florence, but an escorted bus trip can do it no problem.
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This material was last updated August 2007. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998-2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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