Tanzania and Kenya biking holiday
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
It is important to us that when we travel to different parts of our amazing planet that our exchange is always a mutual one and that we make a positive contribution to people and places that we visit along the way.
These days ‘responsible travel' and ‘sustainability' are hot topics. Responsible travel is not about donating large sums of money to charity (at least not without thoroughly researching the long-term intentions or effects of the charity). We believe responsible travel is about taking time to think about how our actions can benefit or how they impact the people, communities, economies, environments and eco-systems we visit, and then use this to make a difference (or sometimes more appropriately - how we can NOT make a difference). We are constantly considering our actions and how we and the people who travel with us can improve our impact on the places we visit.
Here are just some of the ways that we ‘make a difference’:
- Social integration with the local people is a central part of our trips. Simply travelling by bike is a great start – a great way for our bikers and local people to meet and start a conversation. We camp with a Maasai family, paying them to stay there. This gives our bikers and our hosts alike a unique opportunity to take the time to learn about each other’s cultures.
- We have a relationship with a Primary School in the Usambara Mountains. Our main goal of the visit is the fantastic social and cultural exchange experienced by both the school pupils and our bikers. Over the past years money donated by our bikers has been used to employ local carpenters to build more than 100 much needed school desks for the school.
- We always buy locally grown food and shop in small local markets; we support local businesses by staying in locally owned campsites and using local operators for our safaris.
- Educate our bikers – about the effects of buying products that come from endangered species, or products that are destructive to wildlife or the environment (ivory and endangered hardwoods for example).
- Waste/rubbish management – when we travel we should treat our surrounding as we would treat our home (or better!). We do our best to avoid ‘single use packaging’ only using reusable or recyclable packaging. We recycle what can be, and manage any rubbish in the best possible way e.g. in Africa – all of our organic waste is feed to local domestic pigs and goats, and we always leave our campsites as we find them (or better!).
- We avoid campfires to help prevent deforestation. (Three are some places where wood is purpose grown and replanted for fire wood - for the occasional campfire – but it is important to carefully check the source of firewood).
- We have an environmentally conscious office – to avoid paper waste we aim to use as much computer technology as possible in our office. And when we do print we use paper from recycled sources!
- We are currently working on a project where we calculate the environmental cost of each of our biker’s air travel to East Africa. We then transfer this cost into trees and plant the trees in a local reforestation project during our biking journey. In addition to this for every trip we lead we will plant sufficient trees to offset the CO2 emissions of our support vehicle. We plan to initiate this project in 2008.
- For every person who flies to join our trips we donate 10 trees to a reforestation project.
Community
Social integration with the local people is a central part of our trips. Simply travelling by bike is a great start – a great way for our bikers and local people to meet and start a conversation.
We buy locally grown and produced food as much as possible; we support local businesses by staying in locally owned guesthouses, eating in local restaurants and taking our bikers to local operations and parks.
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