Photography tour in South East Asia
How Photography tour in South East Asia makes a difference
Environment
On this tour we visit the famous Angkor temples. Our entrance fee goes to the maintenance of and further research into the historical park. Around many of the temples are children who sell souvenirs to the many tourists who visit. We encourage our clients to not buy from the children. While the children state that they do go to school many of them only attend English classes so that they are better able to sell. Parents are not encouraged to give their children a full education because of the relatively large incomes that can be earned while the children are young, cute and more able to sell souvenirs.
Our group size is keep to a maximum of 8 clients. This is a reflection our desire to not be too over powering in our impact on a destination and our understanding that a group of photographers can be somewhat invasive in large numbers. We only run this tour a few times a year and have no desire to be bringing weekly groups through these regions. 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
This tour is an opportunity to learn not only better photography techniques but also how to be a responsible photographer when travelling. Great emphasis is given at the start of the tour to always asking permission before taking photos, respecting those that do not wish to be photographed, and not paying people to have their pictures taken.
The local people that give their time and permission to be photographed rarely receive anything much in return. We encourage all our clients to send us pictures that they have taken so that we can give these back to the locals when we next pass through. On all our tours we return many photos throughout the countries we travel in. The accommodation selected for the tour is all locally owned with the aim of staying at smaller boutique operations rather than big hotels that have a large footprint on the local environment. All the hotels employ local staff, providing employment opportunities to the local communities. In Siem Reap (subject to availability) we stay at Shinta Mani Hotel, a training hotel that provides free industry training for young Cambodians who might otherwise never have the ability for such skill development.
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. With this fund we donate half directly to the project and with the remainder we buy as many books as we can which are then distributed to a nearby village or taken on our next cycling tour to a local school in a village that we pass through on our route. In this way we act as a distribution outlet for Big Brother Mouse to villages all along the route that our tours follow and many children that would otherwise never get to read a fun children's book are given a great opportunity.
Photography tour in South East Asia
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