The River Avon Cruise

This cruise along the River Avon began at a pleasant spot in Bath city-centre where the boat is moored beside Pulteney Bridge. I walked onboard just as the navigator was loosening the ropes, his mate, the guide, doing likewise, and with that the boat eased out into the river. We had a brief health and safety announcement and then were pretty much left to our own devices for the outbound leg of the trip.  

When we approached Cleveland Bridge I remembered The Bridges of London Tour that I covered last year, also a boat cruise with live commentary. That cruise was very different, however, as it was given by a TV celebrity and was part of a large arts festival. For all of its build up, that cruise was far less comfortable with the format of the boat tour than this river cruise was. The Thames tour was essentially a TV series delivered, off the cuff, on a boat. This, however, is a long-established concern, and the boat felt as if it was the second home of the navigator and guide. Just letting the first half of the trip be a quiet, relaxed boat ride was fine as there was plenty to see. We knew we'd hear more about it on the way back so it gave us a chance to take a good look and awaken our curiosity. The Thames cruise did it the other way round giving the commentary on the way out followed by a silent return. That felt like an anti-climax that was only covered over by the copious wine and canape. But I digress. Back to the River Avon.

While the crew were in their element here, less at home on the river were some of the tourists who had rented row boats and got themselves stuck in between trees. I can imagine incompetent rowing being a staple of the hen/stag party weekends which flock to Bath, something I will no doubt see more of in the coming weeks. There can be a pleasure in doing something badly, after all, particularly with a little wine. We steered aside the mayhem and as we progressed further from the boathouse from whence they came, the rowers generally looked more competent and pleased with themselves. 

As we made our way out of the Bath urban area, Solsbury Hill came into view. Our guide mentioned it as the hill that inspired the Peter Gabriel song by the same name which is about having a spiritual experience that doesn't fit with the world of the flyovers and pylons. I don't know if Peter Gabriel has written other songs about the Bath area where he has lived for many years, if so they might lend themselves to being put together into a musical themed tour in the manner of The Beatles Walking Tour of Liverpool, The Smiths Walking Tour of Manchester, or the Crossroads of Sabbath a heavy metal walk around Birmingham. These sorts of tours have a big appeal to fans as they bring them closer to the musicians, their lives and inspirations, though going all the way up this hill just for one song is a bit too much effort for the pay back, unless you too are guaranteed a spiritual experience... or your money back.

The cruise came with a map but it was not in any way necessary to follow this to make sense of the cruise. Looking at it now, I realise I was quite unaware of the river's meander as I was just relaxing and looking at the river, the banks and the hills as they drifted by.

We were told the final bridge we approached at Bathampton was the most expensive toll bridge in Europe in terms of price per distance travelled. It must be one of the prettiest, too, not that that is much consolation to motorists. The small pier in front of the weir was the half-way point where we stopped to pick up some more passengers and where a gaggle of teenage girls were swimming and squealing in the river. This was quite definitely not the canals of Birmingham that I was walking along just a few days ago where you'd be more likely to find dumped traffic cones than teenagers in the water.

On the return leg we got a good deal more commentary as the guide talked us through the route. If there is one thing I thought could have been improved it would be to adjust the sound balance: it was very bass heavy. He had a warm voice with a gentle West country burr when speaking normally, but amplified, he seemed to suddenly drop an octave, like a Laurie Anderson routine. He told us he had been working on the river for 14 years and had no desire to do an office job as this was far better. He certainly did look very relaxed and, on a warm Summer's day like this I could see why; the river was without a doubt the nicest place to be. He said that he didn't get bored with cruising back and forth as the river is always changing, and he got to meet people from all over the world. I could see his point.

From the boat's point of view you see the landscape and hills around the city very well but the city streets very little. The city does not precisely embrace the river Avon, it seems more wary of it and focused instead upon the abbey. The commentary reflected this river perspective, however, and so we were told about the city as a whole, its relationship to the hills and why they are not built upon. Rather than a walk which is conceived from the desire to tell a story and then realised by finding the best route to illustrate that narrative, this was a tour that followed a pre-existing natural route and then described the city from that natural feature's point of view. As opposed to a location tour, such as Bath Abbey, which gets complicated because there are many ways to explore and describe the building, a river cruise makes things simpler by admitting only two possibilities: upstream or downstream. Because of this, and the less exclusive focus on history, the cruise did not run into the same frustrations around its narrative: the cruise just naturally flowed, the river bringing its own sense of narrative.

I found that the people on the boat chatted to one another more freely than on walking tours and one in particular, the man on the left with glasses, had a habit of saying, "Just what the doctor ordered, eh!" He'd repeat this every ten minutes, about the cruise, about the breakfast he had this morning and about the eleven-day trip to the UK the young man on the right was taking. This visitor to the UK was originally from Hong Kong but was now living in NYC and this was his first time here. He had been to London and he'd been to Edinburgh and now he was in Bath. Just what the doctor ordered, eh!

Back in the city and near the end of the cruise, we came again to the elegant Pulteney Bridge modelled on the Ponte Vecchio. It turned out to be less than elegant when viewed from this angle. Walking guides have made similar observations about a number of Bath buildings which present a unified facade while having individual and less dignified rears. Passing under it brought us back to our starting point and the end of the cruise. It was understated and very pleasant, a relaxing hour away from the bustle of the shops, buskers, cars and people. It was not an escape from the tourists, of course, but even they seemed to relax and quieten down when gently chugging through the water. They simply became normal people.

The Bizarre Bath Comedy Walk

In complete contrast to the Bath Abbey audio tour, which I took in the afternoon, was the Bizarre Bath Comedy Walk that began at 8PM outside a pub in the city centre.

Our host for the evening, Noel, sprung up seemingly from nowhere and after a few brief jokes, explained that this wasn't going to be a history walk and took the money for the tickets. There must have been a good forty odd of us, so it took a little time to hand out the coloured wrist bands but the process was transparent and efficient so we hung with it. 

He had a confident way to work the crowd and figure out where we were from. Wherever people said they came from he had a caricature about them to offer in reply; the Dutch were pot smokers with funny accents while the Kiwis just a little bit slow, the Americans knew nothing about geography and were on the big side, which indeed those present were. It was not the most politically correct of intros, but comedy rarely is, and I got the feeling it was all done for laughs rather than with any malice. Playing to an international crowd it had to be pretty broad and I got the sense he knew his public and pitched it well. He had one or two props with him, a crate that he stood on, which proved essential as he is no basketball player, a small backpack and two helium balloons. This was a comedy routine that was well practiced and everything he took with him had a purpose.

The walk is made up of different elements: magic show, comedy and challenges for a member of the audience to complete. What I thought was very smart about it was that these different elements could all form part of a stage show but had instead be adapted into a walk around the city centre. Whereas a comedian working in a club would probably be under pressure to constantly develop new material, by performing his act as a walk, principally, though not exclusively, for tourists, he was instead able to go deeper into the same material. I had the feeling this walk had been gradually added to, refined and the relationship it had to the locations deepened over time. What's more, because it is an interactive, outdoor show it remained a bit out of control and he still has to ad lib from time to time. In this way the act didn't feel stale in the way it might if it were the same stage show performed for several years.

Here we were treated to a very nice parody of a history guide who doesn't know the first thing about history. Having seen one or two guides bluffing their way through tours before, this was especially amusing for me.

We had a bit of fun following a blindfolded Noel in search of ley lines. This, like pretty much the whole show, was eccentric stuff that didn't really tell us anything very directly about the city of Bath, but it did show how the city could be used by someone in search of gags. To my mind that does finally tell us something about the city, about how it functions and how a professional street entertainer has enough flow of public to make it worthwhile doing this routine every night. You wouldn't find this in my city of Portsmouth: he'd make no money and get into problems with local yobs and jobsworth officials. 

There was a deliberate and pleasing ambiguity whether some of the things that we encountered were deliberate or accidental. Without giving away what these were, this grey zone is something that can only be achieved with acting, being well prepared and being able to ad lib so that everything can be brought back into the frame of the show. What's more, he parodied this quality of being surprised at a later point in the walk too, and because we had already bought into the game this parody of the rules also worked and kept the show moving forward.

The basic format of the walk was that the group walked a short distance, stopped and then at each spot he did something that got a laugh. Sometimes this involved complicated routines but other times it relied upon simple observations such as a joke about an empty events board. This all flowed very naturally but, I had to think about it and take things one step back and imagine the process of making a walk like this. It must have required looking at every banal thing in the city centre, re-imagining it and looking for its comic potential. That in itself would be a tour worth taking.

He made a number of gags by tempting them with a cash prize. It was funny to watch how people think they might be in with a chance of winning something when he clearly held the winning hand every time. Such is the power of money and he knew how to play the game well, pulling people in, playing with them then turning it all into a big joke.

Compared to the historic tours I have taken so far, the Bizarre Bath route was quite different. Although he stayed in the city centre, he used it in a different way and thus revealed an alternative side of it. He was not looking for historic buildings to talk about but was instead looking for places he could gather a crowd easily, places that didn't involve crossing too many roads and locations which serviced specific gags, such as this walkway down by the river. 

As it went on it became more and more a magic show which here features an escapology routine. Something that you can notice is just how colour co-ordinated Bizarre Bath is with it's insistence on purple. What's more, scattered around Bath city centre are a number of bikes bearing adverts for the walk, too. I've noticed how parked bikes have become a site for adverts in a number of cities, this being an effective way to circumvent the larger companies that control the poster sites. By choosing a relatively unusual colour and pushing it for all its worth in a fairly unsaturated environment, it has the local effect of becoming Bizarre Bath Purple, as nobody else is using this colour.  

One thing that surprised me was that there was an 'invisible' assistant who did some work behind the scenes, such as running out to clear up after the group had moved on. I'm a big believer in the old adage of "if you can't hide it spotlight it" and I felt that this was one of the very few awkward moments of the walk when I saw something I shouldn't have. Seeing as the rest of the show was so immediate and Noel, the guide, could clearly talk his way out of an ISIS hostage situation, I found this unnecessary, though it may be that there are some technical details that need ironing out and no solution is entirely elegant. This is, however, a very minor point, and one I was deliberately looking for. Most of the group missed it as they were already in tow on their way to the final destination and in any case, it didn't seriously detract from the fact that Bizarre Bath was a very enjoyable couple of hours of nonsense played out on the streets, which, while done for laughs, does up the game for all the more straight guides too.

The Bath Abbey Audio Tour

The Bath Abbey audio tour is free and can be downloaded from The Abbey's Website. It doesn't come with any instructions or map so I simply walked inside and pressed play.

What I was not expecting was that as well as beginning a half-hour audio tour I would also be walking into an organ concert! Screens positioned around the abbey showed the organist at work which meant looking at his legs dancing over the pedals. It's rare, I realised, to pay so much attention to a musician's legs unless he is a she, the skirt is cut short and the music doesn't distract you too much.

Breaking me out of the pedal dance was the audio tour which navigated me around the abbey and attempted to draw my attention up and not down. A man and woman speaking with clear, well-recorded and eminently civilised voices, talked about the chandeliers and their design, the roof and, of course, the history of the abbey. The directions for what to see and where to stand were good enough for what they were doing but I felt they lacked the precision that a live guide would have and with that, the ability to focus on very specific details which can be used to tell a larger story. I was usually brought to rather general areas and told about that part of the church, that statue or window but not, for example, to a single pane of a window or a specific doorknob. As such, I had the feeling of slightly floating through the space, carried on waves of Bach that were now reverberating throughout the abbey.

I then came across the church VJ who was editing the concert live, switching from leg shots to hand shots which inevitably reminded me of pictures of Rick Wakeman. This, of course, was not part of the audio tour but was quite fun to observe as I always like to understand how a show is put together.

From time to time the organ would get impressively loud and provoke a volume war with my tour. I have to admit that I am not normally one for organ concerts, nor heritage tours of churches, for that matter, so what I write here should come with this major caveat. The effect of experiencing these two stimuli together was curious and not entirely unwelcome. They did not cancel one another out and produce mere noise, nor did they exactly augment one another either. Rather, they allowed one other to exist and be heard without either of them becoming too demanding upon the attention.  

There came a moment when I was walking around with my headphones on that I realised I was the only person doing so and most other people there were glued to the concert. What's more, if they were to look at me it would probably not occur to them that I was listening to an audio tour but instead they'd probably take one look at me and think, what a stupid moment to be listening to music. I partly like audio tours because of the subversive potential they hold, namely that the person taking them can be listening to a commentary that could not possibly be given out loud in that site yet can appear as if they are simply listening to music. In this instance in the Abbey however, it was I who became noticeable.

The audio tour continued regardless and got thick into the history of the abbey. It really is a content heavy audio tour packed full of names and dates that I have pretty much all forgotten. The historical detail was great but I was unable to hold onto it as there was no clear narrative. That, I think, is a common problem when telling the history of an old building, as they often have an excess of stories that defy any single narrative. Still, the effect was to transform a place that is rather beautiful and does have some things worth seeing into a standardised heritage site with less and not more uniqueness as a result of the commentary's framing. It may be that in trying to tell everything it becomes increasingly difficult to say anything.

This brought me to the source of the music: the organ. I remember hearing some surprising stories about church organs and even more surprising ones about organists performing subtle acts of sabotage on their rivals by reassigning keys and tubes an hour before Sunday mass. Even if these nefarious deeds are exceptions and not the rule, they nonetheless offer ways into an understanding of the instrument, musicians and church that stay in the head a lot longer than the date of the restoration of the roof.  

In general I found the Abbey and audio tour to be very accommodating to tourists. Unlike some places which remain primarily a place of worship, the abbey seems to recognise its appeal to visitors, allows almost complete access to them and is happy with people using flash photography. The only area that it said we should not enter, but could look inside, was a small chapel on the side of the altar. My guess is they rightly view tourists as both a source of revenue (there is a suggested entrance donation) and that they can also offer a religious point of contact in an otherwise secular tourist experience. The audio guide does encourage visitors to return for a church service and so has an evangelical role but does this in an understated way that would not turn off the average visitor in a way that a more 'now get down on your knees and repent your sins' message would. 

As well as history being a running theme of the tour, architecture also played a significant role, and it was no surprise why. As is often the case with churches, there is a lot to be said about the roof. 

The concert ended and the organist emerged to take applause. He did so slightly self-consciously and did not milk it at all. This was entirely fitting with the spirit of the place as it came through on the audio tour: accomplished and dignified. This was one of the moments when the two worlds of the tour and concert came together in a pleasingly harmonious way. 

I was then brought to this tapestry and explained its significance. The flags were not discussed in the audio tour, however, and given the current Israel / Gaza conflict which led to the resignation of a government minister yesterday over Britain's position, they immediately grabbed my eye. On a guided tour I would have asked the guide what the intention behind placing them here was but here, instead, they simply hovered on the margins of the audio tour.

An interesting moment came when the tour came to this statue and talked about it being vandalised during the English Civil War. This was one of the parts of the commentary that situated the church's history within the wider history of the country. Being a building tour, however, we then moved onto the next point of interest and dropped this story like a stone. In this respect the tour was not a history of the building but rather a tour of various historical and architectural points of interest dotted around the building. It's a subtle distinction but a real one and in this respect it reminds me of the Undiscovered East End Tour which takes you to points of interest that can be found in that part of London. History, in both tours, is treated as a marker of significance but the tour as a whole lacks a coherent narrative that places its history, or rather histories, on a single timeline.

The tour showed how the walls of the abbey are lined with plaques commemorating the people who have been buried here and it drew my attention to this one in particular. It is, as the guide states, testament to the growth of empire and, if I can put it this way, shows that the abbey was clearly the place to be seen dead in Bath. The walls are crowded with the great and good and as the tour amusingly notes, poorer people were buried further away preserving a class distinction in death. 

And then when it came to an end there was the classic exit through the gift shop. Curiously, after I took this picture I was then asked not to take any more pictures in the gift shop. While welcoming pictures in the abbey they had decided there was nothing to see here. Maybe they were right, but I prefer to be the judge of that. In any case, I then stepped outside and in doing so realised that the tour did not take me around the exterior of the building, it was solely focussed on the interior. I was left reeling with a head full of numbers, a jumble of names and the memory of the bass organ shaking my stomach. It was definitely a full experience, yet it was one which now leaves me with very little I can hold onto except the very civil atmosphere that is Bath Abbey. 

Book Review: The Dark Tourist by Dom Joly

So far on this blog reviews been confined to reviews of tours I have actually taken. There's plenty of writing about tours too, however, and I thought it might be worthwhile to introduce some book reviews here and there to liven things up. So first up is The Dark Tourist by Dom Joly which I have just finished reading. It is a 2010 publication that would probably be best described as off-beat travel writing with author Joly relating trips of his to Iran, North Korea, USA, Lebanon, Cambodia and Ukraine. Some of these trips were to 'dark tourism' destinations such as the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Dealey Plaza in Dallas the site of JFK's assassination or Chernobyl the location of the world's worst nuclear reactor disaster. As well as these he also visits a number of untypical tourist destinations like the ski slopes of Iran and the propagandistic museums of North Korea. As such the book does not hold together through a clearly defined idea of dark tourism but rather through the quality of his observation and style of writing. There are some great episodes and unlikely encounters but there is also quite a lot of more conventional travel writing that is simply suggesting to the reader that there is much to be seen in untypical tourist destinations. 

I was vaguely aware of Joly through his TV appearances and I found his writing to be considerably more reflective than the comedy output I associate with him. It occupies a hip intelligent space as interested in foreign affairs as in the unwitting comedy of his North Korean guides and odd-ball tour group. Where the book took a very different turn was in the final chapter on Lebanon, the birthplace and childhood home of Joly. In this chapter his writing takes a more overtly personal turn and appears to be an attempt to understand his past and in doing so give a broader sense of why dark tourism might hold the appeal it does to him. I felt that this chapter belonged to a different book as it did not so much extend and deepen the rest of the book as take it in a new direction. It is as if he does not try so hard to be entertaining here and instead has a quite different relationship to the country and his experiences. As such it felt somewhat unfinished and I shouldn't be surprised if he develops some of the themes touched upon there further, at a later date. Overall the book is a mostly entertaining read that neither insults nor greatly stretches the intelligence and which has significant appeal to those who already have a bit of the dark tourist inside of them.