Green Travel: the new way to see the world
Bored of the ‘fly and flop’ holiday? Try something out of the ordinary, say Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith. You’ll be doing the planet a favour too.
Over the past decade we have travelled the world researching the “clean break”: we have taken the train from London to Vietnam, snowshoed over the Pyrenees, learnt natural horsemanship in Sweden, trekked with Amazonian tribes and made fire with the Bushmen of the Kalahari…
Wild swimming in Finland.
Photo: Richard Hammond.
The clean break is a departure from the “fly and flop” holiday: it’s an experience that you won’t forget; a journey into the heart of a destination and its culture, where you do something different, stay in family-run hotels, visit local festivals and hire local guides.
These breaks are also clean in another sense: far from the trappings of mass tourism, such holidays are about travelling in a way that has less of an impact on the environment and benefits the local community — without having to sacrifice comfort or thrills. Indeed, many of the most progressive places to stay are as stylish and innovative as they are green.
Here are ten favourites:
Great Huts, Jamaica
Stumbling through the thick vegetation that hides Great Huts’ thatched cabins and treehouses — some built of bamboo, some of mud — you might imagine that this was Africa rather than the Caribbean. The huts are painted with African geometric designs and decorated with sculptures and paintings by local artists.
The whole place is linked with its community, with 20 per cent of all profits funding local projects such as supporting the homeless and elderly of nearby Port Antonio.
The family-friendly huts occupy an idyllic clifftop overlooking one of Jamaica’s most unspoilt shores, Boston Beach. It’s also the birthplace of jerk chicken, which sizzles enticingly on the grill at beach stalls.
If you’ve had one drumstick too many, there’s plenty of ways to work it off such as surfing and scuba diving, or you can horse-ride or hike to nearby waterfalls in the surrounding hills. Or, if you’re really full, let a local guide paddle you slowly on a bamboo raft down the Rio Grande River. www.greathuts.com.
Swim in Finland’s lakes and rivers
The hosts, Maria and Petri, open their summer holiday home by Lake Sakara to the swimming holiday company Swimtrek, whose professional guides lead the way across several beautiful lakes and rivers of southern Finland. You swim approximately 5km a day (usually in two sessions) but you don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer; so long as you can swim at a steady pace for this distance you will be fine.
After each morning’s swim, you stop for lunch (sausages over an open fire), then you have an hour or so to explore the area on foot, or doze off, before beginning the afternoon’s swim. After that you can walk or be driven back to the cabins to relax in a wood-fired sauna. www.swimtrek.com; 01273 739713.
The end of the swim along River Penulia.
Photo: Richard Hammond.
Gaze at the galaxy, Kenya
Make the most of the African night sky from the comfort of a “starbed” — a hand-made wooden four-poster that you wheel out to the deck of a raised platform (fitted with a bathroom, a thatched dining area and a fire pit) at Loisaba Lodge on a private ranch and wildlife conservancy on the edge of the Laikipia plateau.
The game here is excellent – there are elephants, giraffes, antelopes, buffalo, Grévy’s zebra, kudu, dikdiks, wild dogs and some big cats. Guests who stay at the starbeds have access to all the facilities at the main camp — so after a day in the bush you can return for a dip in the clifftop pool, followed by dinner in the garden and then a doze under a thousand stars.
Profits from the lodge go towards conservation of the Loisaba Wilderness and to fund community health and education projects with the neighbouring Masai tribes. www.loisaba.com.
Le Camp, France
Well, what else would you call it? It is a campsite, after all, though expect more than just sleeping bags and roll mats. Hand-made beds, solar lighting and lazy chairs all come as part of the package at this luxury five-yurt camp in oak woodland overlooking the green Aveyron valley, about an hour northeast of Toulouse.
Pride of place, though, is the 20m natural swimming pool, with a gently sloping beach that is a perfect distraction for kids — and once they have grown tired of playing in the big sandpit they can go to feed the chickens and pat the resident pig. www.lecamp.co.uk; 00 33 5 63 6 5 48 34.
Ski the resort-free Craigieburn, New Zealand
Here’s a fresh take on the ups and downs of advanced off-piste skiing. At Craigieburn Valley, in the heart of the Southern Alps, there are no chairlifts, no groomed pistes and no two-lane road access up to the remote ski area. Once you have kitted up, join three fast-moving towropes that pull you 500m to the top, where you will find off-piste patrolled terrain with powder basins and steep narrow chutes, but, best of all, miles of empty slopes of white powder that can last for days.
The Craigieburn Club Field provides basic off-grid accommodation in two huts equipped with bunks and communal showers, and there’s a bar and a generator that is on for a few hours each day. From NZ$85 for dinner plus B&B, this economical and accessible offpiste skiing is becoming increasingly popular with skiers looking to escape more crowded and expensive resorts.
And they say that your skiing will improve immeasurably — on this kind of testing off-piste terrain it has to. www.craigieburn.co.nz; 00 64 3318 8711. For daily and multi-day ski packages and transfers from Methven and Christchurch: www.blackdiamondsafaris.co.nz; 00 64 274 508 283.
A long walk through the mountains of Lebanon
The Lebanon Mountain Trail, opened in 2007, is the country’s first long-distance hiking route. Running from Qbaiyat, in the north, to Marjaayoun, in the south, along the Mount Lebanon range, it makes use of ancient trade routes and rural tracks to connect national parks and nature reserves with 75 villages at altitudes of 1,000–1,800m.
The 440km circuit is divided into 26 sections, each walkable in a day. Accommodation is in B&Bs in renovated stonehouses, decorated with rustic wooden furniture and bold Beduin kilims (tapestry-woven rugs).
Hire local guides, trek independently or go with specialised tour operators that also offer mountain biking, rafting, caving, snowshoeing, birdwatching and stargazing. www.lebanon trail.org; 00 961 595 5302.
Bog walking in Estonia
Estonia is said by locals to have a fifth season — the flood season. Nowhere is this more true than in Soomaa National Park, in the southwest of the country between Viljandi and Pärnu. Soomaa, which means “land of bogs”, is a vast complex of swampy marshes and wet alluvial forests that provides a home to bears, wolves and elk and nests for spotted eagles and black storks.
The tour operator Karuskose, run by the local environmentalist Alvir Ruukel, offers two of the best ways to explore the bogs: by canoe or by wearing bog-shoes so that you can wade through the water without getting stuck. www.soomaa.com.
Vil Uyana, Sri Lanka
A 5km drive from Sigiriya, Vil Uyana blurs the boundary between hotel and nature reserve. The resort is built over reclaimed paddyfields and is made up of 25 vaulted wooden villas.
Guests can choose which ecosystem they would like their villa to look out over: there are six among the paddyfields, six over marshlands, three suspended above the water and connected by waterways, and ten — the largest and most private dwellings — in the forest. Each villa has a private plunge pool and sundeck, and the restaurant serves fantastic food.
So successful has this natural development been that, as well as the birds and lizards settled in the hotel’s grounds, wild elephants occasionally visit and two crocodiles have made their home in the resort’s marshes. www.jetwing.com; 00 94 664 923 5846.
Face to face with a mountain gorilla, Rwanda
No matter how many wildlife documentaries you’ve seen, nothing can prepare you for the moment you first see a mountain gorilla in the wild. Weighing about 200kg and about 2m in height (when standing upright), with deep-set eyes, a mass of coarse fur and bulging muscles, mountain gorillas are a fearsome sight.
Yet once you have reeled from the terror of being so close to this huge wild animal, you become mesmerised by it. Rwanda Ecotours runs trips to see seven groups of gorillas that are habituated to human beings in the Parc National des Volcans in the far northwest of Rwanda.
It is co-run by Edwin Sabuhoro, a Rwandan who was awarded a young conservationist prize for his work in convincing gorilla poachers to turn into tourism guides.
The pick of his trips is a ten-day “Best of Rwanda” tour: you’ll see mountain gorillas and also visit villages, Lake Kivu and Nyungwe National Park — the only place in the world where you can see more than five primate species in a single location, including chimpanzees, mountain monkeys and Angolan black-and-white colobus monkeys. www.rwandaecotours.com.
Learn to dance in Rio de Janeiro
Do you know the difference between Samba no pé and Samba de Gafieira? Or when to recognise the change in tempo from the Brazilian zouk to the Lambada zouk? If not, then Jingando Holidays offers excursions to learn the stepped patterns and subtle styles of Brazilian dance — as an individual or in a couple — from ballroom dancing to street-style funk, swinging Soltinho to salsa-style Forró.
You will be based in locally run guesthouses in the neighbourhood of Santa Teresa and spend the day learning how to perfect the moves — then put it all into practice in the local nightclubs, such as Lapa 40 Graus and Cachanga do Malandro, where many of the city’s best dancers go on Friday nights.
For a couple of afternoons you will help with a painting project, at a crèche, or on an out-of school activities programme teaching kids in Julio Otoni, one of the poorest shanty towns in Rio. www.jingandoholidays.com; 020-8877 1630.
This extract from Rough Guide’s new book ‘Clean Breaks – 500 new ways to see the world’ was first published in the The Times. To buy a copy of Clean Breaks with a 20% discount visit roughguides.com/cleanbreaks and enter ROUGH as the coupon code.
