Tourist Guides and Domestic Tourism
There has been a huge change for the better with tourist guides across India. I say this with confidence because decades of domestic travel which began with avoiding tourist guides in the early years to a total respect for the tourist guides I come across all over India is a personal anecdotal experience, backed by inputs from other travellers, and something which, in my humble opinion, has not been documented or written about. One example out of many - at a particular temple complex in Peninsular India, over 1000 years old, my taxi driver is an elderly man from another religion. I am usually interested in seeing parking lots, especially paid parking lots, to get an idea of the environs. Not much tells you more about a new place than the paid parking lots, if you can spot the gambling, the pushers and the fake "receipts", you have made a start. So after parking the taxi, our driver asked me how much I knew about this particular temple complex, and I told him that, yes, I ha...