The Next Twenty Years » Eco Travel

How green is your cruise ship?

bobayres — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:16:07 +0000

With green credentials becoming increasingly important in the travel industry, Jane Archer considers whether cruise lines are doing their bit for the environment. The lead story in the Telegraph Travel section on Saturday did not make happy weekend reading for cruise lines.

Cruise lines sail to the ends of the earth, belching out emissions and taking hordes of passengers to ports that can’t cope with the numbers. In a story headlined ‘How green is your travel company?’, cruising achieved the dubious distinction of being named the poorest performing sector of the travel industry when it comes to caring for the environment. [ read more ]

The rise of responsible tourism

bobayres — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:14:29 +0000

telegraph.co.uk: Graham Boynton

We no longer have a choice. Climate change demands that we adjust our habit and get serious about greener holidays. Graham Boynton invites you to nominate the best of the eco-travel companies.

We have reached a point in our development where we can no longer travel without conscience. Even those of us who are the most self-interested of creatures, indifferent to the state of the planet, will have to shape up and start travelling responsibly. [ read more ]

Requiem for a River

Bob — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:35:25 +0000

onearth.org: by Tim Folger

More than 80 years ago, seven western states hammered out a pact dividing up the water in the Colorado River. Agriculture was king and Las Vegas just a railroad watering stop in the middle of nowhere. Today, after an eight-year drought, the river is in crisis. Tim Folger traveled from its snow-fed headwaters to the feeble trickle that enters the Gulf of California, asking everyone he met: What comes next?

Somewhere on the road between the lonely McMansion where the Mormon polygamist’s senior wife lives and the dried-up spring where the wild horses died of thirst, I put my foot in my mouth. “How big is your ranch?” I ask Dean Baker, the lean and weathered owner of much of the land around us. [ read more ]

Rein and shine in Chile

Bob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:34:56 +0000

independent.co.uk By the end of my riding holiday in Chile’s northern Patagonia, I’d grown rather fond of La Chica, my six-year-old chestnut-coloured mare. She and I had bonded after I had been separated – a tad humiliatingly – from my first steed, Volantino, whose penchant for ponderous diagonal descents had regressed into blunt refusals to advance.

In a five-day ride – during which I progressed from an apprehensive ingénue to a moderate rider with sore buttock muscles – I covered 50 miles of mountain horse trails, dirt tracks, roads, rivers and wooden bridges in and around the remote southern town of Futaleufú, in the province of Palena, 700 miles south of the capital, Santiago. I’d reached Futaleufu from the UK after 21 hours on five flights – the last, a 10-seater biplane from the port city of Puerto Montt to the coastal town of Chaitén – followed by a rainswept, bumpy, three-hour drive south-east, passing Lago Yelcho and mountain streams, in a misty, precipitous landscape. [ read more ]

Long way down: a journey through the Atlas mountains

Bob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:33:56 +0000

independent.co.uk: I spent my early years growing up in Casablanca in Morocco. Back then, in the late 1950s, Casablanca was very French, very European. My parents, like the city, were glamorous and dressed really beautifully. So it came as quite a shock when we moved to the East End of London when I was eight. London seemed so bleak – dark and cold, the people looked so grey, nothing like the pictures of elaborately dressed Victorian women I had seen on the tins of Quality Street that my father brought back from business trips.

These days I return to Morocco to take a break from my busy London life, which revolves around the demands of my design studio and boutique in Knightsbridge. And though it takes under three hours to fly there, once I arrive my London life seems light years away; Morocco submerges visitors into a completely different and exotic culture. [ read more ]

Mark Rowe picks the best new wildlife tours on offer this year

Bob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:27:00 +0000

independent.ie: There’s more to wildlife watching than safaris. Mark Rowe picks the best new tours on offer this year. An announcement that you were embarking on a wildlife holiday used to conjure up visions of watching the Big Five roam at large, with the adventure finishing at sundown with a gin and tonic.

The conventional safari is still hugely popular, but as travellers become more demanding so travel companies are required to be more imaginative. Wildlife can now be tracked to all corners of the Earth, and while some destinations are far flung, others are on your doorstep. [ read more ]

Wildlife Holidays: There’s more to wildlife watching than safaris.

Bob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:16:56 +0000

independent.co.uk: There’s more to wildlife watching than safaris. Mark Rowe picks the best new tours on offer this year

An announcement that you were embarking on a wildlife holiday used to conjure up visions of watching the Big Five roam at large, with the adventure finishing at sundown with a gin and tonic. The conventional safari is still hugely popular, but as travellers become more demanding so travel companies are required to be more imaginative. Wildlife can now be tracked to all corners of the Earth, and while some destinations are far flung, others are on your doorstep. [ read more ]

Tourism: Making the most of instability elsewhere

Bob — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:02:09 +0000

ft.com: Thanks to Bollywood, Mauritius is benefiting from free publicity worth thousands of dollars, as it seeks to tap new sources of tourists, such as India’s growing middle class.

Scores of Indian movies have used Mauritius as an exotic backdrop, making the island a trendy destination for rich Indian holidaymakers and honeymooners.

“Indian tourists are more upmarket, they are counter-seasonal as they often come to escape the monsoon and they visit everywhere in the island because they don’t need to tan!” says Xavier Luc Duval, the tourism minister. [ read more ]

Walking on eggshells

Bob — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:56:41 +0000

guardian.co.uk: In our house the bookshelf in the loo is the most reliable indicator of how the green revolution is faring. Ray Tabor’s Encyclopedia of Green Woodworking heralded demands for a log cabin. George Monbiot’s Heat arrived with a bout of cycle fever. More recently came We Want Real Food by Graham Harvey and that was serious: within days of its appearance the fridge was purged of supermarket food. When the Gang of Two (my partner Sophie and our four-year-old Maddy) started to plot the introduction of chickens to our miniscule back yard, I realised how much I was looking forward to my next assignment: an 82-mile walk along the Dales Way with my 16-year-old son Conor, not a person to worry overly about E-numbers and additives. Four or five days’ absence, I calculated, and the whole foul chicken thing would blow over. Brand-name biscuits and crisps could be re-introduced and normal service resumed. [ read more ]

The Future of Travel: Aquatic to Cosmic Destinations

Bob — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:14:03 +0000

space.com: Future travelers will be putting down their luggage in far-flung places, underwater, in the air and around the planet. They’ll get amazing views from bizarre living quarters that build on “outrageously successful” billion-dollar projects on Earth, and they’ll take adventures that have long been the province of science fiction.

That’s the vacationing landscape of the 21st Century envisioned by various travel analysts.

Thomson Holidays, a leading travel and destination group based in the United Kingdom, just issued a report on the future of leisure travel. The report is an outgrowth of the Future Holiday Forum, an event Thomson organized late last year to bring together architects, technologists, travel journalists, experts on social trends of the future, as well as authorities on sustainable tourism. [ read more ]