Women only tour to Ethiopia
Our company specializes in holidays exclusively for women over 25. If you have no-one to to travel with, well, now you do! You get to travel with a group of like-minded women in a safe, supportive and fun atmosphere – no male-female dynamics, no being the third wheel, and no single supplements! It’s a chance to relax, enjoy your holiday and be yourself.
Our trips are small-group, mid-range and all-inclusive. We travel in small groups to have more interaction with the locals, we partake in great little adventures, and being just women, you get to do things that women enjoy – like indulging in a local spa, learning to cook local food, and of course, retail therapy! Short and sweet: women-only trips are great fun!
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
All of our present staff come from a variety of backgrounds which lend themselves to sustainability of our planet: we have worked in National Parks, for Greepeace and for volunteer organisations. Needless to say, conservation and preservation comes naturally to us, from our office to across the globe!
Community
We are passionate about the people and places we visit: when in other countries we want our visit to be a mutual exchange with the locals, we want to have contact with them, learn from them and them from us in a positive way. Travelling in small groups allows us to visit locals in their homes and thus have a more authentic experience – like visiting schoolboy Sisay in Lalibela and his grandmother in their tiny mud hut for a coffee! Interaction is a big part of our trips – we like to make you feel like you are part of a place, and not protect you from it.
In Ethiopia, our local guide and “main man”, Firew Ayele, has an immense knowledge and passion for his country and gives us a deep insight into Ethiopia through his years guiding and documentary-making experience. Along the way we also use other local guides and drivers who contribute to our experience and also become a part of our group. We patronise locally run restaurants and hotels at all times. As we use local service providers, the majority of the cost of this trip goes to Ethiopians.
To educate our clients, we send out a Responsible Travel Code of Conduct with the pre-departure information: these are guidelines for respecting local environments, peoples and places.
We give back to specially selected charities, usually those that support women: in Gondar we visit and support the Ploughshare project for solo mothers. Poor and destitute, these women are trained to make handicrafts to sell – we buy their crafts and make financial donations also. In the capital Addis Abbaba we visit the Fistula hospital for women with childbirth injuries run by Dr Hamlin, an Australian who started this project with her Kiwi husband in the 70s. We take supplies of wool for recovering patients to learn to knit – once their recovery is over they have a wonderful handmade blanket to take home.
We also encourage our clients to bring their unwanted clothes with them so that they can wear them and then give them away on the trip - making more room for local crafts in their bags, thus supporting the local economy!
With the help of Ethiopian friends we have selected two Ethiopian children to educate, Liya and Ermais, whose solo mothers struggle to raise them. Our company and clients make donations, and we use the profits from water bottle packs which we have locally made and sell to our clients. Ethiopian sewing and weaving communities also benefit from this project. We visit Liya and Ermais when we are in Ethiopia to see how they are progressing.
