I’m talking about really nasty, rotten and bitter lemons…and, contrary to the usual “live, pray, love” saying, you should throw them away and try and find something else to eat. Sometimes, stinky lemonade is simply not acceptable!
Since this is not a cooking blog, let me explain: this is a story about a really nasty experience with a “specialist photography guide” and is intended to serve as a warning and a lesson. Learn from my failure and protect yourselves!
I have almost always used local guides in my trips - discovered through a variety of ways, from word of mouth and recommendations, from lists provided by some of the largest publications and organisations in the world and, sometimes, through my own personal research and vetting. It’s usually a long and very rigorous process based on a wide variety of layers, from the financial to the intuitive - from what a person says to how they respond to the details they readily provide. Some shine immediately as real stars - professional, responsive, detailed and with clear mastery of their area of coverage - others need a lot more filtering and communication.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy - in fact it can be a difficult and even daunting task at times - and it relies very heavily on intuition and small, subtle signs you need a lot of experience to know where to look for them and the language barriers sometimes makes it even more difficult to pick up on them. Ultimately it comes down, to a large extend, to individual chemistry between the photographer and the guide and how they can work well enough together to create good images.
To date, I have been - shall we say - extremely fortunate to always ended up working with excellent guides, some of them consummate professionals and this has resulted in long friendships, recommendations to other photographers and professionals and, I’d like to think, a really good photography enabling network.
However, as if to just prove a point, life decided to deal me the worst possible card during my latest trip - a guide of such monumental incompetence and bad work ethic to compensate for all my years of success and luck! Why was this particular guide bad? Oh, let me count the ways:
to start with, he lied about his experience. He said the right things but every single word was a lie. Not half of them, not a quarter of them - every single word. He knew nothing about Nagaland and its people - nothing about their customs, their traditions, their villages or what are the limitations around a particular time of the year. He had never been to Nagaland before and that became obvious during the very first day!
he lied about everything! Even for things there was absolutely no need to lie about! We missed a turn in the road and rather than simply saying this, he came up with this elaborate story about local feudal disputes driven by over-the-top Xmas celebrations causing road closures etc etc. He had arranged for us to change drivers in the middle of the trip and rather than just saying so, he said the original driver had a horrible family accident and needed to leave immediately. He did not know we needed to register with the local police authorities, causing us to lose more than 10hrs of driving time, but rather than simply apologise, he created this fiction of rogue police officers going against orders.
he had absolutely no idea what is involved in working with photographers. In one village he dropped us off in the middle of a crossroads, went off into one of the houses, found a poor guy who happened to own a traditional knife and a traditional-looking fake hat and presented him to us as the village chief who would show us the real tribe! The guy was wearing a Chelsea football shirt and Adidas shorts!
he had absolutely no local connections and was afraid to look around and find some. This meant that we were contactless and left to our own devices in a place where, unless you have an inside track, you will NEVER get anywhere. Never.
In an attempt to elicit more money from us, he made up this elaborate story about having to pawn his wife’s jewellery to organise the trip, even though we had paid him 50% of the trip cost in advance and, nothing we had seen in the first 2-3 days made us think his costs came even close to that amount!
But what made him the worst was not the above. It was the fact that even when confronted with the evidence and impact of his shortcomings, the obvious problems he was creating and my obvious dissatisfaction, he refused to acknowledge it and fix it. He refused to understand we needed local knowledge and try to find it. His feeble and fumbling attempts were obviously half-hearted and resulted in nothing!
The guide I’m talking about is Jitu and the company is Dulcimer Tours - please, if you value your money and your time, please, please stay away from him and please, spread the word around. This is not about getting back at him, much as he deserves it, it is about saving everyone else!!! (BTW, the person in the image is not Jitu - this is Michael, a wonderful Ao Naga who helped us enormously!)
By the way, if you’re wondering how I was able to produce the images I did, here’s how:
I spoke to a young guy I met in the first home we stopped at and asked him if he would like to make some money for helping us. I explained to him what I was looking for and, the following day, a friend of his, a wonderful person, joined us and it was with his help we were able to travel to two Konyak villages and meet the people. He even helped us meet another guide at a close-by Ao Naga village.
when we arrived in Tuophema, we got talking to one of the hotel people and it was through her, the wonderful Adile, we found out about the event next day, the people we needed to speak to and she was also instrumental in organising all the Angami people!
Not 100% pure luck - experience and willingness to be flexible turned happenstance into practical solutions - but still, it was me who made this happen…