Luang Prabang to Hanoi cycling holiday, Laos and Vietnam

Environment:
Asia Cycling tours - Our cycling tours in SE Asia have all been designed with sustainable travel principles firmly in mind.

Our Responsible Travel Guidebook - Our philosophy since 1975 has been to leave only footprints and take only photographs. To reiterate this, every customer who travels with us receives a copy of our award-winning Responsible Travel guidebook. This detailed book outlines our environmentally sustainable principles, and outlines how each customer can minimize their impact while travelling.

Global Warming and Carbon Balancing - 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 we are aligned with Climate Friendly, 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. Is this cheap? No. Is it responsible? Absolutely.

Community:
On tour, we travel in small groups of maximum 16 cyclists, led by a locally employed and trained leader, to minimise our impact on the communities we visit. We also aim to maximise the financial benefits to local and remote village. We do the latter by purchasing and preparing food locally and providing home stay opportunities, where appropriate, which provide the local villagers with an extra source of revenue. We assist the home stay visits by providing the required sleeping needs for our travellers to the communities.

Getting well away from the main roads by cycling rural back roads will bring you into contact with local people who do not see masses of tourists. This provides you with an opportunity for real and authentic cultural exchange and allows you to make purchases or even supply appropriate gifts to communities that do not benefit from the mass tourist trails.

On certain nights on tour we organise local cooking demonstrations, rather than visiting a restaurant, to again employ the services of locals, utilise their fresh and delicious produce and provide you with an authentic experience.

Cycling tours allow us the opportunity to employ more local staff as bike mechanics and local drivers who are required for additional support. We employ a different local team in each country we visit on the cross-border cycling tours.

With the assistance of our local guides we distribute donated clothing, books & stationery supplies to the children living in remote hill-tribe villages. We also support our local partners clean-up program in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Halong Bay.

No local payments policy - Local cash payments are becoming increasingly popular with many operators in the adventure travel industry. This policy seems to benefit the tour operators more than the local economies or the travellers, as it avoids local taxes and transfers the costs and risks of cash handling onto the travellers. In accordance with our Responsible Travel practices, we have chosen a policy of not asking for such payments.