Reserve a trip where somebody waiting at arrival already knows your name

You can reserve a trip where somebody waiting at arrival already knows your name, and that one sentence carries most of what rung one is. Six trips sit here at the moment. On each of them the company that operates the ground keeps a driver at the exit door, a guide for the days that need one, and a room, a seat and the tickets that have to be bought early held under your name before you ever leave New Orleans. The flight is your own arrangement, made with whoever you like. Everything after the arrivals hall is arranged for you.

The shape of one day

Breakfast is the meeting. The person across the table is the guide, not a receptionist and not anyone from this office, and the conversation runs about ten minutes: what the day holds, what time the car goes, which two or three things you get to decide. On the Tusheti trip that decision is usually whether to walk the upper track between two villages or ride the whole way around. In Upper Mustang it is whether the afternoon goes to the walled town or to the caves in the cliff above it. The rest of the day arrives already solved. The car appears when the guide said it would. Somebody is holding the tickets. Lunch is either ordered ahead or carried in the back. Between one place and the next you are a passenger, and the hours you would otherwise spend working out how to get somewhere go out of the window instead.

Four in the afternoon, when something breaks

Things go wrong on this rung at the ordinary rate. What changes is who handles them. A pass closes for weather. A road is dug up. A river boat the operating company runs sits out of the water for repair. At four in the afternoon the guide steps aside, telephones the operator's own coordinator, and comes back with two options and a recommendation. Beds get moved. The next morning's start time changes. Somebody who was going to meet you in one village is told to meet you in another.

Your part is to say yes or no to a plan somebody else built. You are not ringing around for rooms, standing at a counter in an alphabet you cannot read, or deciding at nine at night whether the driver you found is a driver you want. If the change alters what the trip costs, the operating company puts the new figure in writing and bills you directly, because this office holds no money and no card details at any point. The change and cancellation terms are set out at the cancellation terms in full.

The attention it asks for, and what it takes away

Count on twenty minutes of decisions a day and eight hours of company. That is the honest description of it. You are rarely alone between breakfast and dinner, you eat roughly when the group eats, and the long empty afternoon that some people travel for does not really exist here. In exchange, connections, luggage between rooms, opening times and the location of the ticket window never once reach you.

There are things you still do. You get yourself to the airport and onto the flight. You are downstairs at the hour the guide named. You say on the first morning, rather than the third, how far you actually want to walk in a day. You carry your own money for whatever sits outside the trip. And you accept that a day built by somebody else will now and then contain an hour you would not have chosen.

Who is on the wrong rung here

Two kinds of traveller regularly land on rung one and would have been better one step along. The first wants unaccounted afternoons and finds a guide standing by at two o'clock a weight rather than a help; that is rung two, where a guide comes out for the days that need reading and the rest of the week belongs to you. The second already knows the region, or one like it, and mainly wants the pieces booked and the schedule left alone; that is rung three.

Nothing sits above rung one. If it still feels thin, the answer is a longer trip on the same rung rather than a different rung. The people it fits are easy to name: a first visit to a place where the alphabet is unfamiliar and the roads are slow, a short trip where one closed road would cost a quarter of the whole thing, a group walking at four different speeds, or one person going alone who wants a named human being responsible on the ground every day.

Rung one is not the good end of the ladder and rung five is not the poor end. Each rung is a different amount of work for the traveller and a different figure, and the figure on this one answers for a driver's day, a guide's day, and a vehicle standing outside a village doing nothing while you walk. All five are laid out in order at the whole ladder, top to bottom, and the sequence from a first request to a held reservation is at how a request becomes a reservation.

Asking about one of the six

Give the month, the number of people and roughly how long you have. A request sent at midnight is answered within one business day, by the person who would place the reservation rather than by an automatic message. The questions that come up before that stage are collected at the questions this office is asked most, a written figure for a named month can be asked for at request a trip quote 24/7. If you would rather talk it through, the number is +1 (504) 832-6194.