Tiger watching and photography holiday in India
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
When on safari we use non-diesel vehicles and always try to promote petrol driven vehicles in the park. We advise our participants not to feed, tease, touch any wildlife and maintain silence during safaris and respect local culture of behaviour and attire. Safari routes and timings set by the park authorities are strictly adhered by us.
We advise earth colour clothes e.g. beige, forest green, olive, grey, brown etc those that are not too bright when inside the park. Wildlife tends to avoid bright colours. We also advise no perfumes, deodorants, anything with strong scent needs to be avoided. Wildlife is very sensitive to smell. We advise participants to switch off lights, fans, air conditioners when leaving the room. We also advise them to reduce or avoid the use of air conditioners when possible. We have a strictly no smoking policy inside the forest; many forest fire accidents can be avoided by small measures. We encourage keeping the safety and welfare of wildlife first and foremost before any photography opportunity. We advise our photographer travellers not to encourage and tip mahouts who sometimes purposely push the elephants towards a tiger to get an aggressive or desired pose. We discourage photography from elephants during tiger shows when such a practice is noticed.
As part of our own learning process and to reduce our own footprint on the environment and keep track of our fellow providers e.g. accommodation providers, we ask every participant for feedback on the tour and accommodation practises that they observed and how those practises can be improved. We pass all relevant feedbacks to our accommodation providers so they may also improve their practises. We enforce a no paper policy where possible and encourage use of recycled paper. Wherever possible we try to use electronic medium for most of our documents instead of printed documents
Community
In keeping with our aim for responsible travel we use local agents, restaurants and hotels. Our policy is to have only local forest guides, trackers, safari vehicle drivers and using transport owned and operated by local people wherever possible and stay in responsibly run eco-friendly jungle lodges most of them members of the international organisation TOFT - "The Travel Operators for Tigers" who are committed to advocate and encourage more sustainable wildlife tourism in tiger reserves and national parks, and to adhere to ecotourism best practice guidelines.
Eco-friendly responsible tourism helps the local community including the wildlife and experts believe that tiger population in tiger tourism areas have increased over the years as compared to parks where tourism is less or not popular. Tourism helps the forest guards in keeping a free eye on the illegal and poaching activities. The park entry fee directly helps in the conservation of the wildlife. The most important thing is to keep visiting the parks so the local population generates income from tourism; they understand that without tigers, there would be no tourists and thus no money.
We encourage our photographer participants if they need to get a bean-bag or lens cover made by the local tailor, these are not fancy but very usable and useful, this helps the local tailor get some business and also helps the photographer get a good camera-lens support and cover at a very economical price.
These small steps we believe will contribute to the big cause and eventually help in protecting these areas.
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