As you plan a summer getaway, you may be considering the perennial problem of how to travel without looking like a tourist. Wandering around with a map or guidebook in front of your face can really keep you from blending in.
But strolling with your iPod is another matter, and this summer, that may be all you need to help you wander like a local. With digital music players of various brands now a given in many people's carry-ons, there's been an accompanying explosion of downloadable tours to help you wander like a local, from Prague and Dublin to New York and San Francisco.
For the most part, listening in is as simple as playing an MP3 file. While some websites offer subscriptions to their regular podcasts, you can plan your trip with a one-time-only download. And it may not even cost you anything.
iWalks
Many tours, especially neighbourhood or city-wide walks, are available free -- including iWalks for the city of Dublin, which got into the game this spring through its tourism website (http://www.visitdublin.com). Like many other MP3 tours, iWalks come with downloadable maps, in this case beautifully produced. Local tour guide Pat Liddy narrates in a lively but blarney-free manner -- it's like a one-on-one walking tour, except that you can rewind him and turn him off.
Soundwalk.com
Most recorded tours split the difference between the broad strokes of guidebooks and the historic digressions of live walking tours. Sound effects, music, dramatic writing and celebrity narration can add some colour, as on the tours produced by New York-centric soundwalk.com, a pioneer that offers smart spins through NYC neighbourhoods and now other cities in the United States and Europe (at $13 each). They're worth it for their wealth of background knowledge and their know-it-all vibe. For instance, DJ Jazzy Jay's tour of the South Bronx will show you the block where he and the Zulu Nation hosted hip hop's first jams.
Rick Steves
Attitude, always an issue in a guidebook, is all the more important when your tour guide is actually talking in your ear. Take Rick Steves, host of a travel show on National Public Radio in the U.S. and author of numerous travel guides, who offers a few free tours of Paris on his website (ricksteves.com). He's a knowledgeable guy who, in his walking tour of the Left Bank, for example, makes honking-Frenchman noises and uses the phrase "medieval times" with irritating frequency. But it's a well-paced, slickly produced set of recordings, just what you would expect from a radio host.
iToors
The thing is, there are plenty of small-time operations that can match Steves' slickness, yet bring a different sensibility. Browsing through the hundreds of travel podcasts on iTunes (anything downloaded through iTunes can be played only on iPods) will get you Steves' ramblings alongside amateur dispatches and the slightly more youthful free offerings from iToors. These tours, also available at itoors.com, tend to focus on familiar aspects of popular destinations such as London, Paris and Prague.
Many are art-focused, which is typical for podcast tours (not a surprise when you think back to their predecessor, the museum audio tour). The iToors trips through Paris stick to the usual Lost Generation and Impressionist histories, but the stories of writerly debauchery are actually funny. Same goes for their "Subversive Scribes: An Alternative Literary London," which name checks such bookish troublemakers as William S. Burroughs (who lived in London in the 1960s), James Joyce and Karl Marx (who was apparently not much of a housekeeper).
BlueBrolly
For London visits, you'll want to check out the tours from local specialists BlueBrolly (http://www.bluebrolly.com). In each neighbourhood-focused afternoon tour, a slightly plummy accent will guide you cheerfully through the public houses and historic side streets, adding colour about social history and sensible street-crossing advice. At $14 each, they're not cheap, but then neither is London.
