i love solo travel, and all the flexibility and reflective time that it gives one, but on my first day in a new city i usually like to join a short guided walking tour: it helps me get orientated, i begin tentatively to read the city with my feet, i have a chance to ask the guide for some advice, and occasionally i meet some interesting new people and strike up the kind of casual, transient camaraderie between strangers abroad that forms as spontaneously as it dissolves. that sets me on my feet just enough to get going with the rest of the trip alone. so it surprises me how difficult it is to get a guided walking tour in kyoto — or at least not without considerable cost — almost all of them being run by private companies or freelance, fee-charging guides, and the charges are high indeed. (being just the one traveller makes it all the more difficult, since most of the prices are per tour.) it surprises me because in many cities, certainly in singapore, you can get walking tours that are free or at a very low cost: you show up at a meeting point, no reservations needed, and go on a walk or bike ride with a random group of people who also happened to show up. in this respect kyoto is very different from seoul where the metropolitan government runs many guided walking tours that are completely free, and they’re happy to do it for even just the one person. all the guides are volunteers (possibly they get a small honorarium from the city government?), many are retirees who are long-time seoul residents, and the last time i was in seoul i went on a walk along the cheonggyecheon with a lovely ex-army colonel who had been an interpreter in his service days. he told heaps of stories about his boyhood and old seoul before modernisation, and, since it was just the two of us we made a detour to an off-itinerary market where he bought me a delicious potato pancake. that was brilliant, and when i’m a retiree i should certainly do that in singapore. i’ve had so many visitors from france this year that i’ve been thinking hard about walking tours and the city, how to route them to get the maximum of punch out of a small neighbourhood, what time best to arrive in which neighbourhood to get the best vibe, right down to which mrt exit to take that would give them the prettiest vantage point when they emerge above ground, or which approach to choose towards certain landmarks so that they round a certain corner and a certain view comes into sight (a tip: if you take someone to duxton and approach it from craig, what they see first is a unexceptional little road and some stairs, and then when they arrive at the top an unexpected burst of pink bauhinia flowers in bloom, lining the gentle slope, pretty shophouse windows, a view that makes everyone happy, and as they descend the path opens on the duxton neighbourhood proper, like a small tributary stream running into a lake, and duxton is all around you at the bottom, charming with mottled light.)
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