The low point was chicken sashimi. That was in Tokyo. I was in a very foreign city, my first time in Japan, but also in a place renowned for its food. And yet, where to start? With a food tour, I decided. Most of it was straightforward. Delicious, even. We started with chicken skewers in a bar under a railway bridge and went from there to inspect £150 melons, then around the corner to taste wagyu beef. Did you know that, in Japan, restaurateurs flogging wagyu beef often display photos of the cow and its identification number to prove its pedigree? It’s quite something to eat a hunk of beef next to a photo of poor Daisy gazing from the wall. After that came the restaurant where they produced a bowl of pale pink chicken sashimi, cut into thin slices, and served with ginger and soy. I nibbled one slimy piece of this raw poultry and tried to pretend it was salmon.
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Eating calf’s penis in Palermo
Palermo presented a similar challenge. It was historically a poor city. Poor island, really. That’s why the Sicilians became inventive with offal. Street vendors still sling lung and spleen sandwiches, but the main obstacle was penis. Calf’s penis, served on a dainty cocktail stick as if we were at a posh drinks party. It was a small, white, round disc, and immensely gristly. I felt like I was taking part in a bushtucker trial. Call me old-fashioned but I prefer an olive as an aperitif.
Still, I love a tour. Food tours, specifically, but tours in general. Stick me down in a new place and I will happily walk around by myself, exploring. But usually I’ll book at least one kind of tour too. Generally, on the food ones, you get three or four stops, led by an enthusiastic and kindly guide, so many snacks you can barely walk by the end, with some history thrown in for good measure. I would almost certainly never have ordered calf’s penis or a lung sandwich from a menu, but now I’ve given them a go. Plus, if you’re alone, this kind of tour means company, people to hang out with for several hours, if you fancy it, instead of eating alone in a strange place again.
Talking politics over tapas in Spain
I did another recently, in Seville. An evening tapas tour led by a perky Sevillian called Maria, with three other solo travellers, all women, all American, plus a handful of Brits and some Canadians. We bonded over sherry and jamon. “What brings all of you to Europe? Apart from trying to get away from Trump, of course,” one of the Brits joked across the table at the American women travelling by themselves. Luckily, enough manzanilla had gone down by this point for everyone to be good humoured about politics.
There was early heat in Spain this year. It reached 40C in May in the south. One of the Canadians revealed that they’d recently had snow in Nova Scotia, which he said was unusual, and I added that the UK had just undergone a heatwave too, at which point another Brit chipped in that, actually, he’d looked online and these sorts of cycles happen every 300 years, and it wasn’t necessarily climate change. Ah, this is travelling, I thought happily, reaching for my sherry. A gang of travellers, brought together by one place, who would probably never see one another again, debating global warming over plates of manchego. What a way to spend a Saturday night.
Sophia Money-Coutts on tour in Seville
If you’re a keen traveller, you don’t necessarily want to feel like all the other tourists, trudging around in a group, possibly — horrifyingly — behind a guide carrying a flag on a stick. That’s why you must pick judiciously. Don’t simply choose the first option that comes up on Tripadvisor. Most of the guides also now do a very hard sell on reviews at the end of their tour, so you need to do your homework. Read between the lines and work out what may suit you — a longer and more thorough examination of a city’s castle or cathedral, or a shorter, introductory stroll.
I’ve taken private, more tailor-made tours with my own guides in Amsterdam, Istanbul and Cairo, and I still recall the colourful stories of Dutch merchants one regaled me with in the former, and the dramatic accounts of the mummified pharaohs in the Egyptian Museum in the latter. Ramesses II, for instance, still has patches of hair. Pretty impressive after 3,200 years.
Private tours, of course, mean going at your own pace, stopping for a loo break whenever you like, or a snack, and you don’t have to faff around with those audio systems they seem to like so much these days, handed out to everyone at the start, so the guide doesn’t have to shout over a crowd. But they’re also going to set you back a good fistful of cash, and possibly lunch for the guide too, if you’re feeling generous.
Pay extra for exclusive access
For anything historic, I like an early, skip-the-line tour. Get up and out while most people are still dithering over the hotel buffet breakfast. They tend to be more expensive, but can you put a price on skipping a long queue? An early tour of the Vatican a few months ago cost almost £100, but it was a relatively small group and we gaily sailed past everyone else lining up outside the city walls that morning.
Nearly four hours of Catholic history, papal dramas and a dramatic telling of the rivalry between Michelangelo and Raphael. This proved too much for one American in our group, who glanced briefly at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when we reached it, and then spent the rest of our time in that sanctified space scrolling through photos of her golden retriever. Often these tours are quite instructive about the other nationalities on them too, not just whatever you’ve paid to look at.
An early tour of the Vatican might be expensive, but it’s worth it to skip the queueAlamy
One can hit the odd bum note. I fibbed on a tour of Little Havana in Miami a couple of years ago and claimed I had to leave early for a dinner reservation because the guide was clearly so bored herself. You need a certain level of perk for that job — the energy of a child’s television presenter combined with the understanding of Melvyn Bragg. A rare combination. But, in general, I’ve learnt far more about palaces, religious monuments and dubious cuts of offal than I might have done otherwise, and I’ve met fellow travellers. Broken bread with strangers and felt a shared sense of camaraderie and purpose on trips that could have had the odd lonely moment.
Just remember to take cash for a potential tip at the end, easily forgotten in these days of Apple Pay. It’s not always expected, but handy to have in a pocket. Although you’ll almost certainly be asked to leave a Tripadvisor review now too.
AloJapan.com