Laos cycling holidays
Typically you will be sharing your experiences with between 4-20 like minded travellers (depending on the trip, operator and how many others are booked on the trip) and you'll have a group leader with you. Whether you are travelling alone or with friends its good value, and a great way to meet new people! While itineraries are pre-planned there is some flexibility and you'll have plenty of privacy. This trip will appeal to travellers of all ages who enjoy meeting new people as well as seeing new places.
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
Plastic usage is a big problem in Asia so we use large refillable water bottles to fill your drink bottle. On the Mekong River boat cruise we ask the boat crew to provide us with a local lunch so that we don't need to buy a plastic and foam packaged take-away. This also provides extra income to the hard working boat crew.
On this tour we visit Kuang Sii Waterfall - a reserve where bears and (formally) a tiger which have been confiscated from poachers are kept safe from the animal trade. Our entrance fee (which we are sure to pay even though it is easy in groups to get a 'discount') goes to helping preserve the conservation efforts here.
Our small office is, apart from accounting requirements, paperless. We deal with customers electronically and do not print brochures to distribute. By remaining only as an online presence we reduce the wastage associated with producing annual brochures.
Community
On this cycling tour all the crew including drivers, guides and crew are locals from the region. We provide extensive training to ensure that our team deliver high quality tours and which also helps develop their professional skills for future use.
In Luang Prabang we support the Big Brother Mouse project which creates children's books in the Lao language, something very lacking in this country. They then encourage visitors to buy the books and distribute them to children. We ask our clients to donate to a group fund that we also donate to (about US $
100 (£
64) per tour). With this fund we buy as many books as we can and then while out cycling through villages we stop in a different village each tour to donate the books to the local school. In this way we act as a distribution outlet for Big Brother Mouse to villages all along the route that our tour follows and many children that would otherwise never get to read a fun children's book is given a great opportunity.
The accommodation we use in Laos is all locally owned and operated, employing local staff and services. In the small towns and villages the accommodation is simple and often the only place to stay in town. Our visits inject a lot of business into these small towns that create employment for locals.
Our group size is kept to a maximum of 14 clients. This is both a reflection of the limits in the accommodation of the smaller towns that we stop in and our desire to not be too over powering in our impact on a destination. We only run this tour a few times a year and have no desire to be bringing weekly groups through these regions.
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