Professionalising Bhutanese Tour Guides
24 May 2004 – The quality and standard of the present set of tourist guides in the country is “below satisfaction though there are some experienced guides” according to the department of tourism.
This is because of the “poor academic qualification and lack of ‘good’ professional training,” said the DOT director general Lhatu Wangchuk. “We need to enhance the guides through advanced professional courses to bring them to an acceptable standard.”Over the years people in the travel business have become more demanding over the overall professional abilities of guides.
Tashi Tobden, a freelance tour guide feels that trekking for the guides is not only escorting clients to the mountains. “It is very important to have efficient and informed guides, because guides are the first one to represent the country to an outsider” he said.
Even guides feel that they have a lot to achieve. “Today the tour operators hire only the best and in order to sustain we have to prove ourselves,” said a free-lancer. “The senior guides cannot take their job for granted and sit idle with so many new, educated and exposed youths flooding the job market,” said Tashi Tobden.
Attending a 15-day training programme on trekking from May 6 to 21, under two instructors from Switzerland, most of the 12 guides felt that they were “exposed to many new aspects of trekking,” said Sither Tshering, a guide with the bhutan travel bureau.
“We learned about emergency evacuation techniques at high altitudes, first aid information, about many alpine flowers used in making traditional medicine, and many georaphical and geological aspects that we were not aware of,” said Choki Dorji, a guide from wind horse tour and treks.
The Swiss instructors told Kuensel that the main difference between the trekking guides in Switzerland and Bhutan is that the Bhutanese guides don’t have to organise the trek, which is done by the tour operator. “Bhutanese tour operators organise horses, cooks and all other trekking accessories and the guides only have to escort the clients but in Switzerland, everything has to be done by the guide,” the instructors said. We don’t use horses as we have other means of transport and cooks are not common as people prefer to carry their own picnics,” said Mr Matthew Richards of the mountain leader school of St-Jean in Switzerland.
The obvious difference was technology as Mr Richards pointed out. “Trekkings in Switzerland are characterised by mobile phones, helicopters and weather forecasts and you are never cut out from the world,” he said. “In Bhutan you are cut out from the world and this has an advantage because that is what many tourist want – to be away from the world.”
Mrs Mali Wiget and Mr Richards are in Bhutan through the ‘Bhutan- Valais trekking guides exchange project. As part of the project, two bhutanese guides went to St-Jean school in Switzerland for two months in 2003. Three more Bhutanese will go to the same school in 2005.
To get a more professional touch in the tourism industry, the department of tourism has plans to recruit only university graduates as guides and to establish a hotel and tourism management institute in Thimphu in collaboration with the Austrian government. “The institute should become functional by 2006,” Lhatu Wangchuk told Kuensel.
With instructors from all over the world, the quality of the courses offered will be of international standard and will not be limited only for the Bhutanese market, Lhatu Wangchuk said.
Source: Kuensel