Pakistan mountain and city tour

Planet

We carry a portable water filter with us to reduce plastic waste. All the trip participants are advised to bring their water bottles that can be refilled from filtered water. This is not only important for their safety but also ensures that litter creation is prevented & that excessive consumption of plastic is avoided.
We carry our own lunch boxes and cloth bags to get things packed from restaurants and to use whilst shopping. The bags are also a means to carry back our litter in places where perhaps one isn't available.
Sometimes we also organize spontaneous cleanup drives and engage the participants of the trip to help collect trash from a certain area but this depends on the age of our clients.

We are promoting the ancient heritage and natural landscape of Pakistan by visiting Baltit & Altit Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sites are chosen by the UNESCO committee and must "bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to civilisation", "an important interchange of human values" or be outstanding examples of major stages of Earth's history or ecological and biological processes in evolution. The entry ticket to this site enables the tourist board to preserve it.

The group size of this tour is maintained at 8, to ensure we minimise the human impact on the fragile sites and ecosystems that we visit.

We keep our group sizes small because we want to keep the carbon emissions minimal by being able to use smaller transportation rather than coaches. This also ensures that we cause minimal harm or disruption to the environment and places we visit.

Where possible we also try and use public transport such as rickshaws or walking on foot as we think this is the best way to enjoy a country and to get an authentic experience, however due to the distances and security reasons we cannot always do this.

People

Community: We work with the local community to ensure that the tourism we bring in has a direct impact on the locals, with a particular focus on females and promoting entrepreneurship among them. 95% of the raw materials used in the preparation of meals has been sourced from local farmers and businesses in the Northern tours.

The resort we use is made up of people employed from the local community.

This tour also provides local businesses with a source of income as we take our clients to the local handicraft shops, which are stocked with embroidered items made by the women in Hunza. One of the excursions entails taking people to a cafe run by local business women, which is on route to the visit to Baltit Fort. The cafe is an initiative set up by the local government in which they have provided local grants to help female entrepreneurship.

All the meals prepared are organic and sourced locally from local farms, with seasonal fruits and vegetables on offer. The diet plans created on this trip by the nutritionist are personalised and cater for vegans, vegetarians and meat eaters.

In most of the cities we try and work with local boutique hotels.