Dubrovnik tours: busy as ever

I have the good fortune to return to the place where the idea for The Tour of All Tours first came to me: Dubrovnik. What's more, I'm here to assist making a performance that will involve some touring around the city, but more on that in a later post.

Today I caught the early shift of the tourists. As it is very hot during Summer it is best to start before it gets too oppressive or else wait till later in the day. I rather like the way she holds the number 1 so that people can identify her. When the tourist are dispatched to the guides they are given numbers depending on their language and route. Number 1 turned out to be an English speaking guide.

Here's a Chinese group and the thing that was most charming about them is how they have their translator and tour leader who wears a sailor's cap. The guide gives the explanation to him (I didn't catch whether this was in English or Croatian) and he then relays the information to the group. 

This is a Turkish group and I'd be very curious to see how their tour differed from those of say the Italians. Dubrovnik was under the Ottoman Empire's protection for a long and important period of time in its history so there must be some special information relating to this history that the Turkish group would hear. The Italians would hear a different history I imagine as they, or more specifically Venice, were another major power who exercised control over Dubrovnik for a period of time and who remained competitors for centuries to come. These colonial or historical ties are rich material for highly specific tours.

Finally, I saw a number of tours advertised that could take you out of the city and to some exotic locations. This was a typical offer: Montenegro, Mostar and Korcula. Albania is also popular and Sarajevo an option. With these tours some of them go to places known to most visitors from the wars of the 90s. The visits to Bosnia in particular can be a form of battlefield tourism. I also get a slight feeling that these tours play the angle of taking you from a reassuringly safe place to a slightly less safe place but in the company of a dependable guide. How true that is, is another question entirely: Albania may well be completely fine for all I know. 

I did hear today of a very extreme sort of tourism that took place during the war itself. Apparently there were people who paid to be able to participate in the war. Rather than mercenaries who are paid to fight, these were men who wanted a taste of the action and were willing to pay for the experience of being in a battle zone. Needless to say, I won't be taking those sort of tours myself for this blog!  

The Tour of All Tours Tour

Today's tour was both familiar and completely different from anything I've seen yet: I had the chance to give a first version of The Tour of All Tours and to then watch it as it was given to me. The route was familiar as it is a distillation of much of the work of the last two weeks and yet the effect was not something I was able to predict.  

My guide today was Andy who I will be working with a lot more now as we go into the final week since Andy will be giving the tour in German. This was his first real chance to see what The Tour of All Tours was and fortunately the reaction was positive. I'm sure he'd manage to give a engaging tour anyway but it helps when there is some belief in the material you're working with. This is Andy in front of the Kunst Museum explaining their tours. 

This was a lovely moment in the tour when, squeezed onto this car he talks about the car museum tours. Today we went through every location and defined the spot to speak from, where the listeners would be standing and how to move to the next location. It was technical work in a way but it has now more or less allowed us to fix the route and with that done it is possible to start accumulating details for the spoken descriptions that we will give. Watching someone else give a bare bones version of The Tour of All Tours has given me plenty of ideas of things to add to the text that I will now have to set about including. 

I'm conscious that I want to leave Andy enough time to be able to become familiar with the tour so this has set me a very definite timetable to work to, which is not such a bad thing. Not that we'll be making a very strict writerly work, this will have to remain a guided tour style of presentation but, it should be defined textually and have its own formal contours all the same, so my next 48 hours are quite definitely accounted for.