Why I decided to become a Google Local Guide in my spare time
A brief story about nature, people, and technology.
I live in Romania, one of the most beautiful and picturesque countries in Europe. Our mountains are fabulous, wild, and we still have pristine places untouched by mass tourism expansion. Until recently Romania also used to be one of the greenest places in Europe, a situation that unfortunately started to change in the last decades due to irresponsible governance and my compatriots’ lack of interest for the preservation of nature.
There’s one particularly major problem that foreign tourists are facing when trying to visit Romania: the lack of proper transportation infrastructure and useful, structured and comprehensive information. It strikes you as soon as you set foot in the Henri Coandă International Airport — the gateway to Romania. As a foreign tourist unable to read/understand Romanian, you’ll have very little to no information on how to get around by public transportation. There’s no train or subway to the Bucharest City Centre yet, and if/when you’ll find the bus station, you won’t find any schedule displayed there (because there is none, not even in Romanian) and you won’t have any idea on how to procure the bus tickets. I won’t even speak about the disastrous situation of CFR — our National Railroad Company. Visiting the National Preserve of Retezat or Făgăraș Mountains has become quite difficult even for native Romanians.
I don’t go out much nowadays. But when I do, I like to be truly outdoor, I like to walk for days in pristine, evergreen forests and unknown grooves, climb wild mountain peaks or enjoy the peaceful sound of waves washing ashore on quiet beaches. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m a web/software developer, so I earn part of my living by spending way too much time in front of the computer, taking tens of decisions per minute. Or maybe it’s because I live in one of the noisiest and most polluted cities in Europe. But on the other hand I’ve always liked nature, even before Bucharest became a city full of cars.
That’s why I’ve recently started to spend less and less of my summer holidays in Romania and really fallen in love with Crete instead. You know, the biggest, wildest and most beautiful Greek island in the Mediterranean. Over the last four years, my wife and I have already spent months walking the wild paths of the White Mountains, the fabulous gorges and the south-western coast line. We already have friends in Chania and Agia Roumeli. Speaking of which, I was pleasantly surprised by how friendly the Cretans are towards foreigners. You don’t have to be filthy rich and leave behind an obscene amount of money in luxurious hotels to really feel welcomed. Even if you are a moderately-spending backpacker, they’ll do their best to make you feel like home and help you with lots of useful information on how to get around and which are the best places to see. And the transportation services are among the best I’ve used so far — the busses and ferries are clean, efficient and always on time. They’re more expensive than the ones in Romania, of course; but there’s simply no comparison regarding the quality of services.
But I’ve discovered one disturbing common denominator between Romania and Greece — a relative lack of solid, officially-centralised information for tourists. There’s no public portal explaining foreign tourists how they can climb Gigilos Peak in a one-day trip from Chania on their own, or how to plan ahead their trip on the southern coast. Of course, there are lots of agencies selling packages and deals, but those merely cater the needs of “mass” tourists, and I’ve never been a fan of that kind of tourism. As part of a herd you won’t truly get to know the places and people you’re visiting, and I also believe that mass tourism is not sustainable on the long term.
Despite being blessed to live in such beautiful natural environments, government officials do very little to promote environmentally-responsible tourism and attract foreign visitors truly passionate about wild-life and nature in general. Despite having — for the first time in history — the technological means to truly map, understand and protect our natural heritages, we do very little about it, and our public administration does almost nothing. Although we pay half of our income as taxes, there are no governmentally-initiated IT projects even half as useful as Google Earth, Google Maps, Moovit or Waze.
For the first time in history, the technological means are truly empowering the regular people to contribute to and freely access the information. I know there are people concerned with how much knowledge (and inherently power over our lives) we are willingly giving to a giant company like Google, but on the other hand, most European citizens are unwillingly working half of their lives for the government (taxes, dealing with bureaucracy, etc.), and I’m not sure they’re getting more benefits in return. We are certainly not rewarded with transparency, correctitude and meaningful information and we have no more control over their actions than we have over Google’s.
To cut short a potentially endless debate, having Google Maps on my fingertips proved to be an invaluable commodity over the last decade. And although I used holidays as an example, it’s definitely not just about that. It’s quite easy nowadays to find the closest grocery store, 24/7 pharmacy, best auto dealer, or the fastest way to get from home to the other side of the city during the rush hours. But the quality of the service and inherently of our lives depends on more than just the maps — it’s also a consequence of information being constantly shared, tagged and reviewed voluntarily by people like you and me. Google laid the foundation and provides the infrastructure, which is more than most governments do, but it’s up to us to make it better.
There’s no immediate material benefit in doing it. I do it for fun, I do it because I can and it doesn’t cost me much time, and I do it because I want to leave more than just a carbon footprint behind. And since the age of building pyramids and cathedrals is over, one thing that each of us could do for the benefit of future generations is to help building the information model of the world we live in, so we can better understand and preserve it.
So, in a nutshell, why have I decided to become a Google Local Guide in my spare time? Because I believe the world is not ok and there are lots of things we can do about that. But first, we need to map it and review the facts in order to understand its current state.
