Starter Kit. Idea 393 of 500. Cluster 19
Colombo walking tours through the Pettah, the Fort and Slave Island
The mechanism, from the book
Eight World Heritage Sites and 2,300 years of records, and the country's story is told to the world by other people.
The first step
Walk the route twice yourself with a notebook, and write down the stories you can check for each street in the Pettah, the Fort and Slave Island. Then run a free tour for 10 people from a guesthouse and ask each for an honest review and what they would have paid. Their answers give you the price and your first reviews.
- Who pays first
- A visitor with a spare afternoon in Colombo who wants to understand the city and books through a guesthouse or a review site.
- What leaves today
- Colombo's history reaches visitors through foreign guidebooks, if at all; a local guide who tells it straight earns the fee and keeps the story.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask whether walking tour guides must be registered or licensed.
- the local council (Municipal Council, Urban Council or Pradeshiya Sabha). Ask whether guided groups on the streets need any permission.
Check before you spend
That every story told can be checked, whether your guides need a licence, and insurance for groups walking busy streets.
Find out these three numbers
- What would visitors have paid for the free tour?
- How many people fill one tour?
- Which stories did visitors remember most?
A comparison from the book
Courses instead of meals. Chapter Five
"The other is a story they will tell for 30 years"
A walk full of checked stories becomes something visitors retell at home, which brings the next ones.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.