Lasting Friends

Of all the trips we have taken and of all the tour guides we have come in contact with, there are a few who made lasting impressions on me.  Although it has been several years since we came into contact with them, I feel that their services are worth mentioning.

In 2005, people living in Birmingham were asked not go visit Aruba because a girl on her high school trip went missing there.  We had already booked our cruise to the Southern Caribbean and could not back out and we took a tour of the island while we were there just to know about the locations on the island that had been mentioned in the news.  As we sat on the bus at one of our stops waiting for the other passengers to get back, the tour guide, a young girl from Chile who was working during the cruise season, asked us where we were from.  When we reluctantly told her that we were from Birmingham, she knew that we had already heard what had happened several months earlier and told us this incident was an isolated case and there was very little crime on the island.  As we left the bus, she gave us a postcard inviting us to come back to "One Happy Island".  It was about ten years before we returned on another cruise, but never forgot that sympathetic young woman.

We were fortunate on our tour in Denali in Alaska to have a young man tour guide that really knew his information.  Although he was there only for the summer and living with his parents in Prescott, AZ, he and a group of friends previously had spent a year in a primitive cabin in Alaska that he pointed out to us as we traveled to Denali.  He was very knowledgeable and gave us information about living in Alaska that we might not have heard otherwise.  The bus driver had driven a bus in the summer season for many years and lived in New Mexico.  He said that his wife, who was a CPA, would ask him every March if he had heard from the tour company about driving a bus in Alaska.

On our tour in DaNang, Vietnam, the tour guide told us that he had received his college degree in business from Troy State University in Troy, AL.  Troy State University actually has a campus in Vietnam but students must be able to speak and write English in order to enroll.  As many people in Vietnam use motorbikes instead of cars for transportation he says his dream is to be able to own a car one day.  When his wife was in labor with their children, he would take her to the hospital on his motorbike and bring her home with the babies the same way.

The most memorable tour guide that we had led our tour in Dalian, China, and we have been corresponding since 2006.  He was just starting out when we first met him and ours was his 5th tour.  He had a great personality and got along with everyone on the tour.  I took a picture of him with the dancer on the ship and he gave me his email address to send him the picture when I got home.  We corresponded by email and in 2012, he led his first tour from China to New York City.  I was in New York City at the same time and we got to spend a few hours together.

In March, 2013, Bill and I went on a cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore.  Knowing that Hong Kong was across a narrow body of water from Shenzhen, where this young man was living now, we arranged to stay in Hong Kong three extra days before our cruise started.  He met us at our hotel in Hong Kong, made it much easier to go through Hong Kong immigration and then Chinese immigration, took us out to eat at an authentic Chinese restaurant, showed us the Shenzhen Civic Center with its beautiful architecture and stayed with us at the bus station until our bus left to go back to Hong Kong.  The following day after we boarded the ship, we met him and went to the Avenue of Stars, crossed over the water to a ferry, and went to Victoria Peak, where we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant.  He want back to Shenzhen and we took the metro back to Kowloon, where we took a bus to our ship.  The picture on the right shows Oliver and me next to his new car.  He had received his driver's license only a few months before and bought a new Hyundai Elantra.

Since then my friend has become an expert in tours from China to the United States and also has done tours to South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, and Cuba.  We have invited him to visit us in the southeastern part of the United States because the majority of his US tours go to the same large cities on the east and west coasts.  Since 2013, we are using a texting program which gives faster communication and instant responses instead of email.