Amsterdam North: A Guided Tour of Anywhere

The Amsterdam Tour of All Tours is now up and running and I have had people ask me which tours are really from Amsterdam and which are from elsewhere. I replied that this information is all on this blog. I was not lying but the writing is scattered over many reviews spanning two years so to make it a little easier to find, here are the tours that inspired the show. If you have not yet been on the tour but intend to go, I would suggest taking the tour first and reading the reviews second, as there is probably more to be gained that way round. 

The Free Alternative Tour of Berlin

The Stone Seeker Tour

The Dalston Conservation Tour 

The And While London Burns Tour 

The Kunstmuseum Tour 

The Political Tours Study Tour of China

The Bath Ghost Walk  

The Jack the Ripper Tour 

Harry Slingers Amsterdam North Tour 

The Political Tours Study Tour does not exist as a formal review, though I do quote their China tour in my Beijing Tour of All Tours. They do not currently offer a tour of The Netherlands. I also mention, in passing, a foraging tour around Amsterdam North. This is based upon one in Bath, which was similarly disorganised and did not actually take place. As for the rest of the tours, they are practically all not from Amsterdam North; the Amsterdam tours that I took were mostly ones from the centre. I particularly like to take tours that are the town's speciality and where else are Red Light District tours the popular mainstream thing to do? 

In this performance I have treated Amsterdam North as a canvas (not a blank one by any means) upon which to paint a portrait of tours more broadly. This picture has been painted with sensitivity to the local conditions so that it appears to be a lot more local than it actually is. Indeed, it has been a case of choosing tours from elsewhere which met the conditions I found here. The work involved in making this show has therefore been less about researching Amsterdam North tours and more about opening myself up to the area, finding a route that contained enough of the qualities that I sensed more broadly in the area and then adapting pre-existing tours to fit. The tour is still running daily another week till July 12th. 

Harry Slinger's North Amsterdam Tour

This video, shot from the window of a car travelling around Amsterdam North, features the song Mijn Amsterdam Noord by Harry Slinger. It is made from the car driver's point of view, which I find very interesting to take, as it totally changes my impression of the area. I have been getting around on a bike for the last week and consequently, have mostly been using different routes. I have also noticed, however, that several locations on this car's route intersect with the route of my bike tour, which has now been fixed. Unfortunately, this video does not trace a consequent route from A to B but is instead an edited video of the highlights of Amsterdam North. All the same, it is the closest I have got yet to a tour of this forgotten side of the city. 

Rick Steves' Red Light District audio-tour

The Rick Steves audio-tour is a free download which, like so many other Amsterdam walking tours, starts at the foot of the national monument on Dam Square. It begins with narrator Steves, advising against taking pictures, particularly photos of the women in the windows, advice I duly followed. The images here are therefore few in number. If you want to see what the place looks like, however, there are videos of walks online. The tour is basically a very simple 50-minute continuous narration given by Steves and co-guide Lisa.  Whilst Steves did say there was always the pause button, for those who want to get more personally acquainted with what the area has to offer, I just kept on walking and listening, lapping it up like a National Geographic documentary.

The two narrators play a bit of a good cop/bad cop routine with the woman staying on the straight and narrow, while the man is interested in the sex, drugs and sleaze. The way they do this is, Steves relates mostly positive information about the coffee shops, prostitutes and smart shops, explaining what you can find, how much it costs, and finishing off with a line he repeats again and again, "and it is all perfectly legal!" Lisa, however, sticks mostly to giving directions to keep the audio-tour moving. She interjects, from time to time, "that's enough, we have to keep moving." 

The tour is really very simple and that is one of its strengths: it tells the most obvious story clearly and it is easy to follow and not get lost. Steves has positioned himself as the American expert on European travel, and I can see how he can have some appeal. His audio tour has enough humour to make it feel relaxed, but he still does the bread and butter work of the tour guide of explaining the history and the life today. He sounds like a slightly risqué uncle who is basically very respectable, and knowledgeable too, but likes to joke around now and then. I am guessing that he probably represents the progressive side of middle America, as there are a number of times he talks very positively about Dutch pragmatism and the country's social security system. In this sense, he holds up Amsterdam as an example that America could learn from.

I took the tour around 8-9 PM, which seemed like a good moment; the streets were growing busy, there were women in most of the windows, and I saw several tour groups being led around. There was a Spanish group, a rather random mixed group of tourists getting a guided tour in English, and an older group of Chinese tourists with their own Cantonese guide. I can only guess they were all getting slightly different takes on the same basic story. Actually, as well as this audio-tour, I myself have also taken a walking tour which also passed through the Red Light District, and both that one and this related many of the same stories. Of these, the most particular is the peeing men falling into the canals story. On the walking tour I was told 10 dead bodies a year are pulled out of the canals, the corpses usually being men with their fly unzipped. Curiously, on this audio tour the number of men succumbing  to this ignoble death swelled to 12. What the two tours seemed to agree upon, however, is that those in greatest danger of coming to this pitiful end are British men. With that in mind, it was time for me to heed their warning and leave the Red Light District, lest I should join their number. 

Safely back home, I watched this Youtube video of the Ultimate Amsterdam Coffeeshop Tour. It is a record of another American visiting Amsterdam and taking a tour, but a somewhat less respectable one than Mr Steves. Call it age, if you will, but I think this is a tour I can best enjoy from the comfort of home watching it on my laptop. This guy smokes an astonishing amount of weed. It is painful to watch but, as Rick Steves says, "it's all perfectly legal!"

The Amsterdam 'Free' Walking Tour: there's money to be made in free tours

The Amsterdam Free Walking Tour is one that is heavily promoted online to the extent that it will probably be the first one you'll see displayed if you search for Amsterdam tours. That's because it's run by a big player in the guided tour business, that's to say, by a company that is running tours right across Europe. There was such a large crowd assembled on the morning I arrived, we were divided into no fewer than eight separate groups with some of the groups for English speakers and some Spanish. It was an impressive operation, but a tour is still only as good as the individual guide, so how is their walking tour?

The tour is a three-hour walk around the city-centre with a focus on history. Our guide was a Dutch man with a loud voice.

He took us to the Red Light District and here he explained its history before heading onto the Dutch East India Company, birthplace of modern capitalism, or so he said. He seemed to keep on saying 'fuck' a lot. This was not a family tour. 

As the tour went on there was a subtle shift in the way he gave it. At first he played the part of the loud, funny, Dutch young man. With time, however, he became slightly less funny and slightly quieter. The shift was not huge but it was noticeable. It felt as if he were playing a character at the beginning that was not precisely him but which was instead what the tourists wanted to see or, more to the point, the role that the company told him to play.

I also had the feeling he had been giving the tour just a bit too frequently. Every now and then he would forget what he was saying mid-sentence and go into auto-pilot. This is the nightmare moment for a guide: when you start waffling. He would usually catch himself quite quickly and we'd see just a second of him searching for his words. That second, when his guard was down, when he was not in character but really just himself, was something I started to quite enjoy watching out for. I had the feeling that this was when the tour was hitting against something solid.  

The tour was advertised as a free walking tour but it was not free in the sense of the free walking tours of Bath, which the guides refuse to take money for. This was free in the sense that you are meant to pay as much for it as you feel it is worth. What's more, I also spent 3 euros reserving my place online which I discovered, when I arrived at the start point, was unnecessary since most people just showed up without reserving. While it is still a popular and appreciated service, it might be better not to call it 'free'. Indeed during the interval in the tour, taken a city-centre cafe, there is some concentrated business with the selling of other tours and tickets onto the tourists. You can say this is all a part of the service of guiding people; they do need tips and advice on what to do and see after all. The thing is, this is not disinterested advice, the tips invariably gravitate towards companies and services with which the guides company has a business relation with. At one point in the tour the guide says the most important reason behind Amsterdam's tolerance was an almost exclusive focus on one question, "does it make money?" This tour company has a strategy in place that does indeed make money and it does so by drawing people in, particularly young people, with the label of 'free', and to then use the trust that is generated through the tour and turn that trust into euros. I also heard, from a different source, that the company works by charging the guides 2 or 3 euros for each of the tourists who start their tour. In this way the guide is under pressure to maximise the tips they get from the tourists and this shows in the way he is constantly pumping us and building up to the collection at the end. For a 'free' tour there was a conspicuously large amount of talk amount money.