39. Welcome to the tour!

Picture this - you're in front of a group of people. You need to be entertaining, easy to understand for different levels of English and accents, loud enough for people to hear but not too loud to disrupt the ambiance and above all have everyone leave with a big smile. Being a tour guide is a tough speaking gig, and in this episode we hear from an absolute pro.

Check out Kyle’s tour at www.caveworld.co.nz

Transcript

Sally: Hi everyone. I'm Sally Prosser and I'll be your tour guide today. Over the next 20 minutes, I'll take you through the sights, scents and sounds. Oh, you know what, actually, it's just sounds, we're talking voice on this podcast and helping me on this tour is someone who's been in the Tour Guide business for many, many years. Are you ready to go?

I'm Sally Prosser. You're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters. So unless you've sworn a lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.

Welcome to episode 39 of That Voice Podcast. I'm chatting to Kyle Barnes. Ss=O I met Kyle after Christmas. I was traveling around New Zealand's North Island, so beautiful with my boyfriend Patrick, and we wanted to check out the glow worm caves. They're really cool. I'd highly recommend checking them out if you haven't already, and we found ourselves on this lovely tour with a company called Caveworld. We toured the Footwhistle cave and our guide Kyle was so entertaining and personable and he made the whole experience just great. You know how when you're on tours you can often just feel like a number in a group. By the end of the tour with Kyle, we felt like we were his friends and it was just beautiful. And when I was doing the tour I thought to myself, I'm going to get Kyle on my podcast and here it is, Kyle Barnes. Welcome to That Voice Podcast.

Kyle: Thank you Sally. Cheers. Good to be here.

Sally: My first question is always the same. It's could you do your job if you lost your voice?

Kyle: Well, I wouldn't be a very good guide if I had no voice. So it's a pretty important part of the trip. We have to give descriptions and tell people all about the formations the glow worms and a few safety briefings along the way and just articulating the story of the cave and the trip's really important so that now I couldn't do much without my voice.

Sally: Yeah. I was thinking about this and I thought you could have a tape recorder playing, but it just wouldn't be the same would it? How do you see the role of your voice in what you do?

Kyle: So I think using your voice is important because it sets the pace of the tour. I started years ago, we would do things like blackwater rafting. That was where I started out guiding and people would turn up and so, you had to be full of full of go and jazz. And it was like, okay folks, let's go, we'll come over here, we'll give you your wetsuits suits. Okay. And you found if you spoke quickly and full of enthusiasm, everyone sort of got into it. And then because we now do private tours and small group tours, it's about slowing it down and just taking your time, helping people in, and, and giving people time to, to just experience the cave and the trip. So I think it's everything. It's the speed of your voice. It's how you use your voice is lots of different things.

Sally: There is lots to think about. And how do you adjust for different groups depending on people's level of English or ability to understand Kiwi?

Kyle: Ah, yeah. Well, there's this terrible accent, but when we start the tour, what I do is I'll always ask people where they're from, when they first turn up. And generally you can gauge by their reaction and how they speak back to you whether they've understood the question, how well they understand English. And you know that sort of gives you a base level to start the tour on. Which is fairly helpful if people look blankly at you. You say, you know, are you from Australia? I'm just joking. No, but if people are looking blankly or they don't understand you, then you have to slow it right down. And we get a lot of people - non-English-speaking customers are a large portion of the market. And so yeah, that's something we deal with every day.

Sally: And I understand now you're running a small tour with groups of about 10 or 11, but you have done tours at a larger cave where there was a lot more people going through. How were the challenges there different for your voice?

Kyle: Yeah. So when we're doing trips through the main glow and cave, I worked there for about five years and would have groups of up to 50 people on a tour and you could have up to 300 people in the cave at once. And so it was always a little bit of a job because you had to speak loud enough so that your group could hear you, but not that you are drowning out the group behind you or the group in front of you. And depending on whether people understood English or if they were elderly or you know, how close they like to get in because some groups that didn't like to be close to each other would spread out in the cave. And so you say, "come forward folks, we'll just try and get everyone nice and close" and they'd sort of hanging back. So I'd always try and speak to the last person in the group so that as long as I was talking and projecting my voice out to that last person and I've got a fairly large booming voice, it would sort of go over everyone. My biggest problem was making sure I wasn't drowning out the guide behind me.

Sally: Yeah. And I guess people would usually tell you if they couldn't hear you.

Kyle: Yeah. And you did get that. And people would that stand back at the, at the end of the tour and they'd say "guide, we can't hear you." And that'd be holding their ears like this. And, and it is really difficult, particularly for elderly people that come on a trip. If they're in a group of 50, it's a pretty large number. And if they're stuck at the back of that group, we'd just say, "come forward folks. If you can't hear me I'll just get you to make your way down to the front." And so you try and solve it like that.

Sally: Yeah. It's one of those things you'd learn by doing and you've been doing this for many, many years. Your father did it for many years. It's a family business. What do you say to younger tour guides who are just starting out and might be a bit apprehensive or a bit nervous?

Kyle: I think what I've found is the most common thing that people do when they're in front of people is they talk really quickly and it's something you do when you're nervous and quite often you understand what you're saying, but the customers, they are hearing it for the first time. And what's really difficult about being a guide is you're saying a similar thing day in and day out. And so you can get comfortable with just running through it quite quickly and so to break that down and to make sure you just do it nice and slowly and clearly is actually the quickest way of doing things. My brother-in-law was a guide. His name was Robin and I guided with him for years and he was just brilliant at it. I used to turn up and we were black water rafting, guiding together and I'll be going, "this way folks. We'll go over here, the toilets are here, the coat hanger's here," and he'd turned up and he go, "right, this is your jacket. You unzip it like this. You zip it up like this." And I just used to think, wow. But by the time I did it quickly, three times and had to repeat myself, excuse me, and explain myself a couple of times and he would always just say it once and say it really clearly and people got it. And I've used that technique and I'll tell you what, people that know me would see me on a tour and think I'm talking incredibly slowly, but tourists enjoy it because they're hearing it for the first time. It's all new information. It takes a while. You know that you've got that language barrier and that accent barrier and so to speak slowly and clearly and take your time is important for a number of reasons.

Sally: For sure. When you're saying the same thing every day or multiple times a day, how do you get into that mindset of making it fresh and exciting for every new group?

Kyle: So I just find people really different and really interesting. And so for me it's not about necessarily doing all the talking. I ask a lot of questions and find out where people are from and I'm genuinely interested in that. And that's what I've said to guides in the past is people think a good guide is one that, can hold court and, and sort of say a lot of things. But actually the, the best guides I've found are those that are interested in others and that ask questions, that listen well and let other people finish before they speak. And for me, I started off firmly in that other camp where I just used hold court and tell jokes and I didn't actually like the quiet times because I thought my job was to fill every bit of silence and now as I've gotten a bit older and matured, I've worked out - one of the guides that I was training years ago. I said, what was the best part of that trip? And she said, "Oh, it was just when we were quiet and I could hear the dripping water and just look at the glow worms." And I thought, wow. Because you know, you spend a lot of time as a guide trying to be better and trying to crack the odd joke or having a bit of humor or working with your crowd. And so if the most value that you could actually do is to say nothing, then that's a challenge. And to try and create those times of quietness where you just stop, people can just listen to the cave. Yeah. I mean it's sort of the opposite of what you think it is sometimes.

Sally: Yeah. I love that. What fantastic advice and that can be applied to a lot of different speaking scenarios - what you don't say is often more important than what you do say. It's those pauses. Sure. So my boyfriend Patrick, and I did the tour earlier this year between Christmas and New Year and we really felt seen. That was one of the great things about the tour. Often when you're traveling around, you're constantly feeling like you're in these big groups and you're being farmed around. So you definitely have that skill of making everybody feel like they matter. And there was part of the tour. We enjoyed the whole thing. It was one of the highlights of the trip, but one of the things we really enjoyed was in the tour when you got a couple of things out and everyone's thinking, "what's going to be happening here?" And you're telling us the story and the suspense is building and the next thing you light up the magnesium. Is that something that you've practiced? I haven't many times.

Kyle: Yeah. And I mean I try and be fairly perceptive. I'm always trying to make the tour better and so that is a nice little story. And I mean I've even taken friends down and I kind of apologize. I'll say, "Hey, have a seat. I'll tell you a little story." And so I suppose it is a little bit of theater. We don't and make the tour theatrical at all because it's really authentic and it's sort of old school and back to basics and come and see the cave in its natural state. But we like to be able to tell, I like to tell that story and all the guides try different things and they have different ways of interpreting things. They have different pauses and different things they do. And because we've got very small groups, you're getting feedback on every group and sometimes things work really well and sometimes they just fall flat. Like I've, I've told jokes or done things and it just doesn't work.

Sally: Yeah, I hear you there.

Kyle: Sometimes people just go, wow. And you know, you've got them, you know, if everyone's quiet and they're looking at you and, and it just works, you know, this is great. So I just try and fine tune that and replicate that and make it a bit better. And you know, just work with the base of that. And so yeah, I think a couple of those stories are pretty good, hey?

Sally: What is the story that you tell right before the magnesium lights up?

Kyle: What is the story? I'm just trying to think because I'm not in the cave. If I was in the cave, but I will, I'll get there. You might just have to edit this little blank bit out Sally, Okay. I'm just thinking. The caves were discovered in 1887 and the first guided tours here in Waitomo started in 1889. And those very early tours, the guides would take one of these candles and they'd light the candle and they'd walk through the cave. And this was all the light they'd have, when it came to a large cavern like this, the candle wouldn't really light it up. So the guide would use one of these. And then I pull out the magnesium flare and I show everyone and they'd do this. And then you just wait and then you just light the whole cave up And everyone goes, wow. And I think it's the contrast because it goes from very dark to a booming light. It's kind of the pauses. It's the quietness. It's, yeah, it's everything.

Sally: Yeah, it was fantastic. And with the pandemic, tourism has been hit harder than a lot of industries. How are you coping?

Kyle: Yeah, so of course we've gone from doing people everyday to, to zero revenue. We're doing no one, we're shut down for the last seven or eight weeks. We're hoping to open up again next week. New Zealand has decided that we've still got our borders closed for - I don't know how long. We're hoping to open a trans-Tasman bubble and be able to have a few of you Aussies come over and share what is a wonderful, wonderful place. So we're just going to start with just opening weekends. You know, I think everyone's balance sheets have been hit in this thing. So even New Zealander's we're thinking may only start holidaying on the weekends. People are a little bit nervous to travel. We were doing a maximum of 10 people on a trip, we're going to limit that down to only six people on a trip. So we've got the social distancing, we're going to have to buy in hand sanitizer, rewash the vans, make sure we're following all the rules and keeping people safe just for this next little while. But what we're hoping things will return to normal again one day and we'll be able to look after people again from all over the world.

Sally: Oh, Kyle. Yeah. I've really been feeling for you and coronavirus hit pretty close to home for you, didn't it?

Kyle: Yeah, so my partner she went down to the wedding and she was at the part of the Bluff cluster, which was the largest largest cluster in New Zealand. So I think there was about 13 or 1400 people in New Zealand, I think there was 93 from that one wedding that ended up with coronavirus. And so just here in Waitomo there was two or three people, three or four people actually with coronavirus. And so, yeah, thankfully she had almost no symptoms. And was fairly fine as were a lot of the people that were middle-aged and, and fairly healthy. But for those that are not older, of course it hits them fairly hard. So yeah.

Sally: Yeah, it's a tough time, isn't it? So when things do eventually open up, where should people go to find your fantastic tour?

Kyle: So they can jump online. Have a look www.caveworld.co.nz and you'll see it's the Footwhistle Cave Tour - small groups, private tours. Jump on there, have a look. There's a little bit of a video and it'll show me talking on there and it'll show a few of those highlights, even lighting that magnesium flare, I think that's in there somewhere. And yeah, that gives you a good idea of what we provide here/ Just amazing glow worm displays like displays you'll never see anywhere else in the world. The caves quite pretty. We allow photography. And as Sally said, you'll get a great short tour. There's only four of us here that guide myself, my father, my brother-in-law and a lady that's been guiding with us for years. And yeah, we've all got a good story to tell

Sally: And hopefully your daughter soon as well. I think I met her when we had the tea. You get tea on this tour!

Kyle: Yeah the kawakawa tea. No, that's something special we do at the end in the tea hut and yet my daughter was working there over summer. That's right. She only works for a couple of weeks a year just in that real busy time, just helping with the tea.

Sally: And I remember saying to her, you will be in there tour tour guiding in no time. She said, no, no, I'm too nervous. And I said, you and I need to chat.

Kyle: Yeah, you could probably give her a few tips, Sally.

Sally: Absolutely. Kyle, was there anything else you'd like to add?

Kyle: No, I can't think of anything. I just want to say thanks for having us on. It's really great. And yeah, we wish you all the best with, with with the podcast. Thanks for your kind words and for coming and doing the tour. I really appreciate it.

Sally: Oh, my pleasure. And I'll put all those details in the show notes.

Kyle: Awesome. Thank you Sally. Take care.

Sally: Little secret. The first time I chatted to Kyle, it didn't record properly. Oh my goodness. I felt so terrible to have to ask Kyle if we could do it all over again. But he was so awesome and agreed to do it. No worries at all. So Kyle, I really, really appreciate it.

Kyle mentioned accents is one of the challenges with tour guiding and accents get mentioned a lot in my line of work, it's often to do with mindset. You know, they say, "Sal, people can't understand my accent, you know, I worry, I can't say the word properly with my accent." And usually I say, it's not your accent. So next week I'll explain what I mean.

Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. If you leave me a review on Apple Podcasts, screenshot and message me on Instagram @sallyprosservoice. I will share it on my stories.