Tiger and wildlife photography holiday in India
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
All our trips are designed by a wildlife photographer and are small groups of not more than 5 people. We believe that being small helps in leaving minimal negative impact on the fragile environment and in our experience the best wildlife experiences often happen in small groups. Our tour leaders ensure that the guests understand the fragile environment they are in and minimise the impact that they may have.
Bandhavgarh & Kanha National Park offers a good variety of Indian Wilderness. There are approximately only 1400 Bengal tigers left in the wild. Bandhavgarh holds some 30-40 tigers young and old. Kanha is a success story of conservation and its landmark achievement is the preservation of the rare hard ground Swamp Deer (barasingha), saving it from near extinction.
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 out of tourism; they understand that without tigers, there would be no tourists and thus no money.
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 to by us.
In Bandhavgarh we encourage our photographer participants 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 very economical price.
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 ask 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 document.
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 eco tourism best practice guidelines.
TOFT Objectives are as follows:
- To advocate and support better tourism practices in wilderness areas, with specific guidelines for operators, service and accommodation providers and visitors.
- To empower local communities to become involved in wildlife tourism projects and initiate low impact and sustainable development which helps conserves the parks and benefits the communities through employment and business opportunities.
- To catalyse initiatives through the lodge community that enhance wildlife conservation and community support, including waste and water management, trade cooperatives, local employment, fair wages and local enterprises and services. The accommodations providers that we have selected are TOFT members and follow a very responsible and sustainable approach in running these jungle lodges/resorts. As members of TOFT they are audited for their practices and their footprint on the environment and community. As members they contribute directly towards tiger conservation and protection through TOFT membership and contributions.
Some of the good practices followed by our accommodation provider:
- Employment & training of local staff for their livelihood approximately 80% of staff are from local villages.
- Environment friendly usage of compound waste for hot water boilers.
- Use of low power consumption CFL bulbs which consume 1/5 power of normal bulbs.
- Maximum dependently on local material and local skilled labour for construction.
- Huge plantation drives were conducted by them during the initial construction of each resort resulting in all their resorts having an average of 20 year old trees throughout their compound which attract birds, butterflies etc in large numbers.
- Use of eco friendly material wherever possible for construction.
- They change the guest room linen only every 3 days, unless insisted by the guest. They do not maintain any lawns which consume huge amount of water & electricity. However their focus has been hedges which are easy to maintain and consumes very little water to beautify the resort compound.
- Bird’s baths and others small water bodies particularly in summer are kept in the compound to attract birds and quench their thirst. We pay our local forest guides, safari vehicle drivers, trackers, transport owners with a fair price, these are locals whom we have build a relationship of friendship and trust over the years even before we started operating the tours. We treat them as our friends and assets. We also encourage our participants to tip the forest guides, trackers, safari vehicle drivers if they feel so after each safari.
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