Kyoto: Travel to Otsu & Travel to Kyoto / Hotel — Guide Nori

Title: What Is a Private Lake Biwa Day Tour from Kyoto Like? A Licensed Guide's Report

This Lake Biwa tour was for a group visiting Japan from Europe. For this assignment, I was never able to make direct contact with the guests, which made advance preparation extremely difficult.

The assignment was confirmed last August, but the booking came not from the guests themselves but from a local travel agency. Immediately after the assignment (last August), I sent my initial message, but the contact details only included the travel agency's address, so I believe it reached only the agency and not the guests. Even into April this year, I received no reply to my initial message, so without any information about the guests' desired destinations, interests, dietary needs, or walking ability, I had no way to prepare an itinerary. On April 8, I asked [Japan Guide Agency (JGA Inc.)](https://www.j-g-a.org/) to help prompt communication with the guests. Finally, the following day (April 9), a reply from the travel agency reached me. In summary, it stated that such inquiries were unnecessary and that I should simply carry out the sample itinerary shown on a booking platform, and that although the guests' personal phone number had been provided, I should avoid calling in advance and contact them only on the day of the tour. From these responses, I felt that the agency did not understand the aim of carefully building an itinerary based on the guests' own conditions and requests so that they could enjoy a comfortable tour.

However, by this point there was less than a week until the tour date, so I had no choice but to create an itinerary based on the information available at that time and past guiding experience. In the end, without any confirmation from the guests themselves, I finalized the plan as follows: Otsu City (Mii-dera Temple, Lake Biwa Canal, lunch) → Omihachiman (viewing the Omi merchant townscape) → Hikone (visiting Hikone Castle), and the day arrived.

On the day, the weather around the destinations in Shiga Prefecture was unfortunately poor, with light rain in the morning and heavy rain in the afternoon. In the morning I arrived at a hotel near Kyoto Station and met the guests. After brief greetings and confirming the itinerary, we set off right away by private car. The driver was very experienced and knowledgeable about sightseeing around Lake Biwa, offering various pieces of advice that were a great help. Fortunately, at the first destination of Otsu City it was not yet raining, so we were able to stroll through the spacious grounds of Mii-dera Temple without umbrellas and view the interiors of several halls, giving the guests a real sense of the world of Buddhism. However, it was here that I first learned that one of the guests had undergone joint replacement surgery on the ankle and hip a few years ago, could not walk for long periods, and had difficulty going up and down long staircases. This ended up having a major impact on the rest of the itinerary.

After visiting Mii-dera, we had lunch at a nearby Japanese restaurant, and around the time we moved on to the Lake Biwa Canal, the rain I had been worried about began falling in earnest. From then on, we did all our sightseeing under steady rain with umbrellas, adjusting the itinerary as we went. By the time we moved from Otsu to Omihachiman, the rain was growing heavier, so we cancelled the stroll through the Omi merchant residence district and instead visited the Nishikawa Family Residence, an Important Cultural Property that also serves as a museum. As for the final visit to Hikone Castle, the main attraction was climbing up to the castle keep, but due to one guest's difficulty walking, we gave up on climbing the keep. Instead, I spent time carefully explaining and guiding them through the museum near the entrance. On the way back, since some traffic congestion was expected, we left Hikone a little earlier than planned and arrived at the hotel in Kyoto exactly at the scheduled time of 6:00 p.m.

Even though I was never able to obtain detailed information about the guests in advance, and the tour ended in a downpour, we managed to complete it safely while making significant changes to the itinerary. The guests may have been left with some degree of dissatisfaction, but with the driver's help I tried to do my best in each situation. In any case, this was a case that made me keenly feel the danger and risk of communicating only through the travel agency. I would like to ask [Japan Guide Agency](https://www.j-g-a.org/) to take this tour as a lesson and consider any necessary improvements and measures.

Click here for more details: Lake Biwa Customized Private Tour by Car, Licensed Guide

Tour Report by Nori

Hi, everyone! I’m Norifumi Kamon, a government registered guide interpreter. Please call me “Nori”, or “Kamon-san”.
Let me introdece myself. I was born on April 17th in 1952 in Miyazaki prefecture in Kyushu island. I used to be an English teacher of Osaka Prefectural high school. When I retired from a teacher ten years ago, I decided to get a professional guide license. I wanted to play a role of the bridge between Japanese people and the people from all over the world as a second life of mine. After two years efforts, I finally got the guide license. Since then, I have guided several handreds of foreign people mainly in Kyoto and Nara for about five years except Corona Pandemic period. Almost all the tourists were deeply impressed by the beauty of nature, traditoin, culture, and art of Japan. I can surely help you enjoy and be satisfied with the sightseeing in Japan. And I’m looking forward to seeing you soon.