Cape Town day tours, arts & crafts tours

Community
Our aim is to share South Africa’s cultural richness, diversity and natural beauty in such a way as to beneficiate all involved. We intentionally only associate with like-minded establishments and individuals. We uphold the principle of giving back which is why we make a voluntary donation calculated on your carbon footprint to Food & Trees for Africa to offset this impact. We seek out and support local initiatives, such as family run hotels, local transport companies, entrepreneurs, owner managed restaurants, seasonal food and regional wines. We support the ethos of Fair Trade & Tourism in South Africa and its affiliates and are a member of Open Africa, a collaborative network linking tourism routes. We endorse the South African Sustainability Seafood Initiative (SASSI) abiding by their guidelines. We also support the Biodiversity & Wine Initiative which applies diversity guidelines to the wine industry by choosing its members when selecting estates to showcase.

Operationally we subscribe to an ethical code of conduct with our staff. Our local guides and drivers are fully accredited by South African standards. We practice fair trade policies particularly in respect of salaries and personal insurance and advocate raising the tourism industry bar by dedicated training. When visiting practitioners in their work space, we voluntarily contribute the equivalent of an entrance fee towards reimbursing them for their time shared with our party.

Environment
We believe in leaving only our footprints and abide by the golden rule guidelines of the Friends of Conservation, with some local additions which in the natural environment include not picking flowers or removing items from the landscape, feeding animals, littering or deviating from paths, and in the built environment, not wasting water, being ostentatious with possessions or behaving disrespectfully among other cultures. Administratively we undertake to lighten our impact wherever possible by selecting low impact options, using biodegradable materials, applying recycling practices, implementing 'turn it off' policies and intentionally limiting the size of our groups. We endorse and uphold the principles of conserving our natural resources, preserving our cultural heritage and being accountable custodians.

We believe each step we take matters. This is why we calculate your carbon footprint accumulated by your journey to, from and within South Africa via a carbon emission calculator, and base the voluntary donation we make to Food & Trees for Africa (FTFA) on this calculation in order to offset the impact. FTFA is a non profit, national, greening organisation that arranges the procurement, transport, delivery, training, some short term employment and planting of trees with the beneficiary communities and issues a carbon offset certificate and lists the tree funder. Throughout our website we encourage visitors to maximise their long haul journey by adding on shorter tours to their existing itineraries in order to minimise the take off & landing fuel-guzzling impact when flying.