West Africa tour, Burkina Faso, Mali & Senegal

Environment
We minimize our impact on the harsh environments we travel through. Our philosophy has been to leave only footprints and take only photographs. To reiterate this, every customer who travels with us receives an overview of our Responsible Travel Policy, to understand our environmentally sustainable principles, and outline how each customer can minimize their impact while travelling.

As we know the danger that nature faces to day we minimize domestic flights on our trip, most of the travelling is done on the ground. During our trip we do lot of camping in villages because they have not got big hotels to waste water and some of them use solar energy for their light. We encourage our clients to minimize waste by advising clients to follow the African example and recycle everything. You will see how a system that provides no waste disposal produces very little waste.

The root cause of Global Warming is society's dependence on emission creating fossil fuel. Planting trees is not going to reverse this trend or cancel our carbon emissions very quickly or effectively. We believe the way to reduce these dependencies is to create clean energy production. Therefore, we support renewable energy projects like wind and solar power and the gold standard setter in effective, meaningful action addressing climate change. So, while we believe that tree planting can play a small role in greenhouse gas abatement, we have gone the extra mile in promoting a longer term solution because our countries are deserts and planting trees will be good for the population.

We also help a bee protection organization in Ségou named (GIPA). They try to advice local people not to use fire to obtain honey. We provide them with vehicles during their trip to inform local people how they could get honey without killing the bees, as in our society they use fire to kill bees to get their honey.

Community
You will have an opportunity to shop for local sculptures and the unique masks that are made in these areas surrounding the bustling market in Bodo Dioulasso, the local guide in Goree Isle and Dogon Country and enjoy an optional camel trip to a Tuareg encampment close to Timbuktu and a local boat in Mopti. The time we spend these regions will directly benefit the local community. The tourist taxes and the use of local people will bring a lot to the local communities.

Additionally we purchase everything we need en route, buying from local traders and markets in sufficient quantities to ensure we do not exploit, but equally so that we have enough for ourselves! In many cases, the routes we take are varied thus ensuring our visits do not impact negatively on the local communities and the income we bring is distributed fairly. All of the accommodation we use is locally owned, much of the time we will be camping, but in towns and cities we stay in guesthouses or hotels.