We’ve selected 2 unique cultural tours to offer you the best way to see the highlights of your destination. Cultural tours are about getting a real sense of a place through its history and traditions, whether that’s sailing slowly down the Ganges, cycling around the townships of Cape Town, following the footsteps of history along the Silk Road, or riding elephants and visiting remote hill tribes in Thailand. Immersive and historical, cultural tours help you get under the skin of destinations.
These full and frank independent cultural tours accommodation reviews are from travellers who have booked directly through responsibletravel.com. They are not edited by us or any of the companies we work with. Find the real story, from real travellers below.
You can trust responsibletravel.com reviews because, unlike many other schemes, reviews can ONLY be written by people who we have verified have been on the holidays. In addition, we don't run these holidays ourselves - our only interest is giving you the best independent advice.
Few of us enjoy the feeling of sticking out like a sore thumb when we are on holiday. We giggle about the strange habits of overseas tourists here in the UK, but maybe it’s them laughing at us when we are away on holiday? However sometimes cultural faux pas are no laughing matter. Although our intentions might be good some of our behaviour can inadvertently cause great offence in destinations. For example, that little pink mini skirt which looks great in Brighton or Miami can, when worn away from the beach in Muslim countries, cause offence. The same types of culture clashes happen in conservative Christian communities in Polynesia, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Beyond causing offence to individual people tourism can impact on the culture in entire destinations. The tourism industry packages up and sanitises religious rituals, dress, ethnic rites and festivals to conform to tourist expectations. Once a destination begins to see itself through the eyes of tourists it begins to lose its sense of itself and its identity (and pretty quickly the reason why tourists came in the first place). Read more about cultural holidays in this cultural holidays article.
