This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. When I was a young adult, the thought of hiring a guide or going on a group tour was anathema to me. How uncool, I thought! How pedestrian. But once I got divorced and was traveling in my 50s and 60s, often solo and on complicated and exotic trips, I came to appreciate how wonderful it is to have a guide.
Case in point: On a recent trip to the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, our plane was delayed and my sister and I arrived at 1 a.m. instead of 10:30 p.m. Yet there was our driver Nelson waiting for us at the airport, immediately easing our anxiety about how to travel into Quito, a city that can be unsafe. And in the morning, there was Nelson again, and our guide Eddie, to take us to the Andes mountains and then to the airport the next morning, making sure we got on our plane to the islands. “There are many advantages to hiring a travel guide,” says Heather Stimmler, an experienced American-born Parisian tour guide and founder of the insider’s newsletter Secrets of Paris. “They have local and insider knowledge about the destination and where it’s safe to visit, and they can transla …
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