I stumbled upon this program a few days before my flight to Taiwan. It's a free volunteer guide services by the good people of Taipei. It was a program for the Taipei Flora Expo and the city tour services started from sometime in June and ended the same time with the Flora Expo. The program offered ten tours, in several languages including English, French, Korean, Japanese and Italian.
Getting free tours was easy. I just signed up in their website, chose my preferred tours (2 tours maximum per person) and tour guides. Immediately thereafter, I received an email from one of the program staff and he helped with my my itinerary and made some very good suggestions. When he learned that I was travelling alone, he took the liberty to change my tour guides from male to female. Well, when I chose my guides, the male guide for the Danshui tour was the only one available for my preferred time, so I just went ahead and chose him. The program staff was able to find me a female guide available and so, all's well. I mean, while the idea of having a male tour guide is acceptable, I was still alone and touring the city with a male stranger would kinda look like we're going on a date. Hahaha!
So for my Danshui tour and Yangminshan tours, I have two female guides, Ms. Annick and Ms.Alice. And I was the only one in the tour but I had two great guides! Lucky!
Unfortunately, though, we were not able to go up to Yangmingshan. My guides were supposed to take me to the Calla Lily Festival, a tour on special request, but since it was the last day of the festival and it was a weekend, too, the traffic up and down Yangmingshan was terrible, a disaster. That was what another guide told us when we were about to ride the bus to Yangminshan. So, we decided to go to National Taiwan University instead for the education tour.
And, my tour adventures will be featured in separate posts. So till then!
