Vegan Nut Roast
People talk a lot these days about their rights. Their freedoms, their entitlements, but not so much about their responsibilities
Taking responsibility, putting others first and making sacrifices is at the core of Tour Leading. On tour, we always say everyone wants to be your friend until the restaurant has double booked and then you’re the Tour Leader. As a Tour Leader you prioritise the customers. It sounds obvious, but this is not the universal truth I thought it was. I have friends who toured with a company where the leader dropped them at a restaurant in a small French town and left them for two-and-a-half hours - he had a property nearby and had gone to mow the lawn and collect the post! Our Tour Leaders make little (and not so little) sacrifices every day without even noticing it. You eat last and take the last meal, whether it turns out to be what you ordered or not. The time this really impacted me was when the last meal was the vegetarian option as the supposed vegetarian had decided they liked the look of the beef stroganoff I had ordered.
Tour Leaders often end up with the last plate no matter what it is. On one occasion five people had ordered lamb and the last one to come out was just a bone and sauce. Taking this, the Tour Leader queried how the others looked so lovely but the fifth was so poor, only to be told: “This lamb only had four legs.”
You measure your riding to the riders you are with. Often, we get people applying to be Tour Leaders for whom this is apparently shocking news. We all enjoy a razz round the Alps or kicking up dirt on a trail through Morocco with our mates, but that is not what Tour Leading is about. If you have steadier riders who want to ride with you (riders on our tours have the choice to ride with the Tour Leader or independently) then you match your style and pace to them. If you have riders who don’t fancy the optional Dades Gorge dirt road then you defer to them, no matter how much you were looking forward to it. The essential thing is that the customers love it, not the Tour Leader. However, sometimes it all works out and you still end up razzing and kicking up dirt.
The first time I rode with Joanna was a decade ago in Morocco. At the pre-tour briefing in Malaga this mature, petite lady made it clear that she and her R1200GS would be with me throughout the tour, not wanting to navigate for herself. I admit my unconscious preconceptions had me thinking that these two weeks were not going to be so much about the riding, as the journey. How wrong I was! By the third day of steadily increasing the hustle and finding
Joanna more than happy to match it, I was riding my natural ‘progressive’ pace through the twisties of the Rif and Atlas, and we were both having a great time. And we rode the Dades Gorge route, as she was a veteran of BMW Off Road Skills. And I had the pleasure of riding with her again in Vietnam a few years later, and even more fun was had.
However, sometimes it doesn’t work out so well for the Tour Leader. The American who thought the A9 in Scotland was “tiny” with “the cars comin’ right at ya” had a terrible shock arriving at the first single-track road of the Highlands, but the valiant Tour Leader saw him through, commenting on his return: “My slow speed control has never been so good!”
Still, some people just don’t get the need for sacrifice. For example, the Trainee Tour Leader on his first tour, accompanied by a mentor, who was faced with a challenge that he just couldn’t grasp. The small loch-side hotel was full, and the client’s single room had an oily smell as it was located close to the boiler. Without hesitation the mentor gave the customer the Tour Leader’s twin room, leaving the trainee and mentor a small single bedroom with a boiler smell. With no more room at the inn, the mentor took the sofa in the lounge. Going to bed after and rising before the customers, no one knew of his sacrifice, except the trainee. The trainee could not fathom making such a choice and withdrew from the training program. However, if a night on the sofa in a Scottish hotel with a roaring fire was a step too far, then he was definitely not for us!
He went the same way as the interviewee who ‘insisted’ he’d take his own bike on tour with knobblies so he could ride some of the nearby trails, on an all-Tarmac tour; and the customer who came back off an Alpine tour complaining the Tour Leader wouldn’t go out razzing one-to-one with him and followed it up with an application to join the team.
Mind you, don’t get me wrong, not all the sacrifices are bad ones. If you sacrifice a few weeks of your time, you can get paid to ride a new BMW to some amazing places with some great people, staying at incredible hotels and eating at remarkable restaurants. Even if you do end up with the vegan nut roast in a Rochefort sauce.