On why I walk, and don't book tours

I get asked, often, whether I lead tours. I do not. I have never wanted to. I have been asked enough times that I have, over the years, accumulated reasons; this essay is an attempt to put them in order.

The first reason is the easiest. A tour, by definition, has a point of view. The point of view of a tour is whatever the guide has decided in advance is interesting about the city. This is not a criticism — a guide who had no point of view would be useless — but it is a constraint. If I walk a city alone, I get to discover, slowly, what is interesting about it for me. If I walk it with a guide, I discover what is interesting to the guide. Both walks are valuable; only the first walk produces something that did not exist before I took it.

The second reason

The second reason is rhythm. A tour has a schedule. The schedule is enforced by the geography — a tour cannot stop for half an hour at a single café because the next twelve stops are waiting — and by the social contract, which makes it rude to lag behind the group. The cities I have most enjoyed walking through have all rewarded lingering: an hour at one café, a return to the same square in different light, the willingness to abandon a planned route because a small street looked more interesting. None of this is possible on a tour.

A city is a place. A tour is a story. Cities and stories are different objects.

The third reason

The third reason is that I do not, on the whole, like other tourists. I do not mean that I dislike tourism — I am one of the tourists — but the social configuration of a tour group encourages a kind of performative engagement that is the opposite of the disengaged, slow attention that good walking requires. I have stood at one corner of the place des Vosges and watched two tour groups, one French and one American, pass each other and continue, neither of them stopping to notice that they had, for ten seconds, briefly looked at each other.

What I do recommend

I am not recommending against tours for everyone. If you have one day in a city, take a tour. If you are mobility-limited or do not speak the language, take a tour. If you are simply nervous about being in a foreign city alone, take a tour. Tours solve real problems.

But if you can walk, and you have at least two days, and you are willing to be lost for an hour: walk alone. Bring a paper map if you must, but try not to consult it. Plan one stop in the morning and one stop in the afternoon and let the time between them go where it goes. You will see more, and you will remember more, and you will end the day with a city in your memory rather than a story about one.