India overland tour, Mumbai to Kolkata

In a country where so many ethnic communities live together, it’s important to respect individual religious beliefs. Our company wants to promote this understanding through insight into religious and cultural practices. Our leaders will take you into temples, mosques, shrines and gurudwaras where appropriate, and are able to teach the group about the etiquette and customs specific to the place visited, enabling a deeper understanding for the group of the communities and cultures encountered in India.

One of the major organisations we support in India is Deepalaya. Through Deepalaya, our company are currently sponsoring a number of children in the slums of South Delhi to complete their schooling, an opportunity they would otherwise not be able to afford. Since 1990, the support of this organisation has enabled thousands of children to receive quality education and become professionally qualified, for example, as teachers and technicians. We visit one of our own responsible travel projects, Taragram. This unique papermaking plant was set up to give tribal women from the area a chance to work outside the traditional areas normally afforded to them. All the paper is made from recycled clothing and wood pulp.

You will have many opportunities to interact with the friendly locals in your visit through India. We take camel rides in the Thar Desert and at night the riders get the camp fire burning, cook us dinner and entertain us with Rajasthani folk songs – a great opportunity to meet the local families and learn about how they live in the unique landscape.

Travellers are each given a "Responsible Travel" bag of information including trip specific guidelines for minimising impact, a language sheet, general information on responsible travel issues in India and information on worthwhile projects that we support in India. The bags are made by members of Karm Marg, a movement for street children and young adults in Delhi.

With the help of a local organisation, Help in Suffering, and the information gathered from our leaders and passengers, we have decided to not include the elephant ride up to the palace due to the inhumane manner in which these animals are maintained. On the Agra-Jaipur highway, there are numerous sloth bears being used to entertain tourists and they are badly abused and beaten. Through our foundation, we support the efforts of an organisation called Wildlife SOS in their setting up a sanctuary to care for these tortured bears. In voluntarily giving up the bears to the project, the owners are re-educated and re-skilled and are compensated with motorized rickshaws or welding tools.