The Tour Leaders

Louise

Louise grew up in a village in Leicestershire and had never met anyone who'd been travelling. Then she answered a classified ad in a magazine and ended up in Indonesia. She spent 14 months tour leading in Laos, completed 18 trips down the Mekong, and later bought an auto rickshaw in Lahore with an engine smaller than a lawn mower. The plan was to drive it 2,000 kilometres across Pakistan. It broke down every day. Eventually they picked up an armed police escort through Balochistan and sold the rickshaw at the Iranian border. There's also a jaguar that tried to climb into their boat in Brazil. Someone wrote a book about the rickshaw trip. Louise still hasn't read it. It's in Norwegian. Enjoy.

Zac

Zac and I never met. Same company, same routes, same people, just never in the same place at the same time. This episode covers travelling in armed tourist convoys through Egypt after the Luxor massacre, buses racing each other despite the military escort, swimming off feluccas on the Nile, and the strange responsibility of carrying dozens of passengers’ airline tickets around Cairo before e-tickets existed. There’s also the small matter of accidentally taking some contraband into a government building in Cairo, realising it halfway through a security search, and briefly contemplating life in an Egyptian prison. He didn't go to jail. The tour continued. Then there's getting the tour fund pickpocketed in Xi'an, and taking over a group in India after three days in the country, when the group had already been there longer than he had. Enjoy the ride. P.S. Check out Zac's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@intrepidsouls2024 [https://www.youtube.com/@intrepidsouls2024]

Annie

Annie traveled overland from India through Pakistan and Iran in 2000 with a dog she'd rescued from a Goan street at three weeks old, tied in a sarong around her waist. In Iran, dogs had only just been made legal again. Everyone got off the bus. This episode covers hitchhiking across Iran with a rescue dog, an Egyptian doctor who required a formal complaint, climbing the pyramids illegally with Purple Kate (Series 1, Episode 3) and lying flat on the stones while the guards swept their flashlights, a horse falling into a neighbour's cesspit in Bulgaria, and the moment Annie told the village mayor exactly where he could go. She drove a 7.5 tonne ark from Bulgaria to Portugal with a pony, a Shetland, three dogs, two cats, and six chickens she wasn't supposed to have... She now runs an animal sanctuary in Portugal with 82 animals, including 28 dogs. If you'd like to support Annie's work, you can find the sanctuary at: Star Mountain Animal Sanctuary [https://www.starmountainanimalsanctuary.org/] Enjoy. sEpmmsCBHhdjug1wvjnd

Arif

Arif hails from Eastern Turkey and started tour leading in Cappadocia in 1998. His first tour outside Turkey was Syria — no training, a local guide who had no idea what he was doing, and a group that never found out. This episode covers getting the minibus stuck in the Moroccan desert for six hours after someone at head office decided to swap the 4WDs for budget minibuses to save money — go figure. A broken down boat in a Thai national park after dark, a panicking passenger, and monkeys screaming from the forest. And what it meant to spend a decade leading tours across Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Southeast Asia before ending up in Helsinki. Arif still thinks the human touch matters more than the algorithm. Enjoy the ride.

Tracey

Tracy grew up in Wagga, studied maths and geophysics, and answered a classified ad to become a tour leader in Egypt. She thought it might last a while. It took years. She led tours across Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, India, Turkey and Eastern Europe — learning quickly that sometimes confidence mattered more than experience. We cover getting lost in Moroccan medinas, a spike through her toe in Todra Gorge (and walking on it anyway), a midnight hospital visit in Casablanca, a train that quietly crossed into Belarus without visas, and hearing about 9/11 in fragments at a station in Varanasi. Tracy is now an air traffic controller in Melbourne. Both careers started with ads in the paper. Enjoy the ride.