Clean Breaks, 500 New Ways to See the World

Clean Breaks deals a welcome and deadly blow to persistent false assumptions about sacrificed comforts or loss of fun when ‘travelling green’. It is a special piece of travel publishing, one far more ambitious than anything I’ve seen from its competitors, including Lonely Planet’s already-forgotten precursor, Code Green, Experiences of a Lifetime, released back in 2006.

“The experiences we’ve selected are (hopefully) ones that you’d love to do anyway,” write co-authors Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith in the book’s introduction. “The difference is that your presence in some way benefits the locality. Many of the properties we review are as stylish and innovative as they are environmentally aware.”

Just as important, Hammond and Smith slice through the ubiquitous fear of unscrupulous ‘greenwashers’, or businesses worldwide using environmental spin to float credentials they don’t have or deserve.

“An increasing number of websites claim to point you in the right direction yet often these are merely portals to places that claim they are green; few websites have actually sent anyone to check,” writes Hammond. “Travellers’ feedback forums can be useful but you’ll rarely find authoritative reviews on how green a place is. After all, who wants to spend their holidays sticking their noses into recycling bins or asking hotel managers about ethical procurement policies? It was for this reason that I teamed up with Jeremy to write a guide to genuinely green holidays based on our experiences of what really works.”

Village transport in the Iza Valley of Romania. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

A Peek Under the Hood

Clean Breaks is intuitively divided into 14 geographical sections, each with a corresponding chapter that carries the selected clean breaks. Within each chapter, there are often interesting sub-chapters that highlight the unusual, surprising and worthy qualities of a particular destination: yurt and tipi camps in Great Britain and Ireland, treehouses in Western Europe, Fair Trade holidays in South Africa, the world of snow in North America, alternative Caribbean beaches, jungle lodges in the Amazon, tiger safaris in India, the ‘other side of the Himalaya’, homestays in Kerala, aboriginal experiences in Australia and much, much more.

Several enlightening sub-chapters even beat back skepticism about whether the right travel choices can be made in cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Luang Prabang, Mumbai, New York, Sydney and Tokyo.

For sports enthusiasts, there’s a little something of for everyone: abseiling in South Africa, bog walking in Estonia, canyoning in the Pyrenees, and cycling, diving and snorkeling, hiking, canoing and kayaking, surfing and winter sporting all across the planet.

Naturalists will find heaps of information about land and marine conservation efforts, national parks and ideal locations for wildlife-watching.

Culture vultures too lose no ground with insightful entries about aboriginal people, art, cooking courses, festivals, homegrown food, homestays and shopping.

Finally, interspersed with the meaty regional chapters are short sections that help readers consider slower and more meaningful modes of travel, grounding in practical detail the old adage that a journey itself should be as entrancing as the final destination. “We’ve focused on a range of alternative ways to travel, such as taking the train and ferry to the Med, taking the train to the slopes (Alps), and using social networking sites to stay with local people,” writes Hammond.

And, as if all that isn’t enough, yet more information about how to plan a clean break is available in the back of the book, “where we provide a list of online resources for trip planning, including transport options, details of ethical tour operators and how to link up with ‘couch surfers’, local guides and ‘greeters’.”

Tom Mahamba, a local guide in South Afirca's Tembe Elephant Park, is full of tales and information about the park's birds. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

Still Incomplete

Alas, despite the obvious time, care and scholarship behind the book, much is missing. That is more a deficiency of the medium – print publishing – in which each added page is added weight, and, of course, of an industry that is growing and changing (and, yes, maturing) as rapidly as responsible travel is.

That being said, we hope that next editions and further commentary will not omit crucial networks like whl.travel that are committed to locating and promoting the kinds of small, grassroots travel initiatives identified throughout Clean Breaks, and that over time, especially with the support of travellers and guidebook publishers, are making positive progress toward improving places, helping to shape the travel industry in a caring and sustainable way.

After all, as Hammond and Smith write in their introduction, “It’s about minimizing your environmental impact – on your journey and at your destination – by choosing carefully how you travel and the nature of the place you choose to stay at.”

Amen.

More Information

• Win one of 20 copies of Clean Breaks (this promotion has ended).
• Purchase a copy of Clean Breaks.
• Read about the authors’ motivations for writing Clean Breaks.
• Read examples of a few clean breaks.
• View samples from the book.

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Richard Hammond

Freelance Travel Journalist
Founder, GreenTraveller

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Key “ecotourism” or “responsible travel” into an internet search engine and you’re likely to find thousands of results, from remote ecolodges and luxury hotels to safari holidays and voluntourism. But how can you be sure that any are the genuine article? Similar search terms, such as “ethical” and “sustainable” are becoming just as overused (and abused) by tourism companies looking to cash in on the green wave. An increasing number of websites claim to point you in the right direction yet often these are merely portals to places that claim they are green; few websites have actually sent anyone to check. Travellers’ feedback forums can be useful but you’ll rarely find authoritative reviews on how green a place is. After all, who wants to spend their holidays sticking their noses into recycling bins or asking hotel managers about ethical procurement policies?

It was for this reason that I teamed up with Jeremy to write a guide to genuinely green holidays based on our experiences of what really works.

I first saw the benefits of genuine ecotourism while on a conservation volunteering holiday with Raleigh International to the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues in 1993. Since then I have visited and reported on hundreds of clean breaks for travel magazines and newspapers, principally as The Guardian‘s eco-travel correspondent and as the founder of GreenTraveller, an online guide to low-impact travel worldwide. So often the media coverage of ethical travel has concentrated on the negative impacts of tourism, but while it is important to highlight tourism’s ills, I wanted to show how travellers can continue to see the world in a way that has less of an impact on the environment and makes a genuine difference to destinations – in terms of conservation and by putting money into local economies.

Most importantly, I wanted to show how easy it can be to go green, and that it doesn’t necessarily mean travellers have to sacrifice on notions of comfort or adventure. We have also included numerous experiences that focus on the unique of the destination – staying in family-run hotels, visiting local markets and festivals, and hiring local guides so that your tourism dollars benefit the destination. We’ve taken the train from London to Vietnam, snow-shoed over the Pyrenees, learned natural horsemanship in Sweden, trekked with Amazonian tribes and monitored whales in the Bahamas.

We both feel that these kinds of trips make for better travel experiences. After all, the most inspiring person to take you on safari is likely to be a local guide whose ancestors have lived on the land for thousands of years; your dinner tends to be better when the cook has grown and harvested the ingredients; and the most suitable person to take you to meet remote tribes is someone who understands their cultures, speaks their languages and is committed to their welfare.

Finally, why call it Clean Breaks? Because we wanted to show that going green doesn’t have to be a hard slog. It is simply a more progressive, more thoughtful way to travel. And best of all, it’s fun!

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Jeremy Smith

Freelance Writer
Former Editor, The Ecologist

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After six years working behind a desk at The Ecologist, I was really keen to get out and see some of the world again. Richard was looking for someone to write a book with him that focused on genuinely green holidays, and I was keen to find out more about different forms of ecotourism, a topic we’d never really touched at The Ecologist, where we’d always focused rather on the negative impacts of tourism. Yet all my life I’ve loved travelling. So many of the most important moments in my life are connected with my experiences away from home. I was therefore desperately keen to see for myself if there really was such as thing as ‘good tourism’, if it was possible for me to have some amazing experiences and to do it in ways that were not just environmentally sustainable, but actually helped the local people and areas I went to in some way as well.

What I didn’t want to do was lecture people about the issues. I hoped that if I could find some really inspiring people and places that were making a positive difference, and share these stories with a wider audience, then that might enable more people to get excited about taking these sort of holidays, and when they did they might find that not only did thy have a better time, they’d possibly find themselves more receptive to the underlying issues too.

Put it this way: what is going to bring home the importance of preserving local distinctiveness and biodiversity more? Is it reading an article I might write about destructive modern monocultural agricultural practices or  going on holiday and spending a few days in a remote and unspoiled Romanian village, walking through wildflower-rich meadows that have never seen a pesticide and spending evenings sharing homemade cheeses, breads and meats and drinking wine and brandy below the vines from which they were pressed, all of it prepared by the very people sitting around the table with you?

More Information

• Win one of 20 copies of Clean Breaks.
• Purchase a copy of Clean Breaks.
• Read a review of Clean Breaks.
• Read examples of a few clean breaks.
• View samples from the book.

Hiking through paddy fields in Thailand, you will definitely feel like you've made a clean break from your regular routine. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

Needless to say, there’s an inspiring overlap between the authors’ motivations and the whl.travel vision, the latter being to locate and promote the kinds of small, grassroots travel initiatives that, over time and with the support of travellers, are positive steps toward improving a place, and help shape it in a caring and sustainable way.

To illustrate this, the following links take you to abridged Clean Breaks excerpts paired with mentions (in blue) of the further resources in select destinations available through whl.travel. After all, it is our shared belief that readers inspired by Clean Breaks are the kinds of people who see the value in traveling with whl.travel.

• Fair Trade Holidays in South Africa
• Treks through Villages in Nepal
• Jungle Lodges in the Amazon
• Green Luang Prabang, Laos
• In Search of the Real Fiji
• Explore Borjomi-Kharangauli National Park, Georgia
• Dive at Bunaken, Indonesia

FAIR TRADE HOLIDAYS

South Africa has the world’s first fair trade tourism scheme, with a growing range of places involved. The following ten experiences offer much of the best South Africa has to offer – from wildlife-watching to townships to wine tasting – plus you’ll know that the local communities benefited from your visit. For details of all the participants in the scheme see www.fairtourismsa.org.za.

Clean Break #227: Drink with locals in a township

On a tour of the townships of Nelson Mandela Bay with Calabash, it’s a great idea to visit some of your guide’s favourite watering holes (shebeens). Here you can drink with the locals and shake your stuff to the marimba bands who often play outside the bars. www.calabashtours.co.za

The whl.travel local connection in Cape Town also offers a variety of Cape Town township tours, including the Township Dinner and Jazz Experience, Local African Cooking in a Township and a Weekend Township Experience, as well as other responsible tours and community-conscious accommodation.

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CLEAN BREAK #440: TREK THROUGH VILLAGES IN NEPAL

A 15-day Annapurna Trails and Homestay trip with the Responsible Travellers (who invest all their profits in local charities, www.theresponsibletravellers.com) takes in traditional houses like those pictured here. The whl.travel connection in Nepal (www.pokharahotel-link.com) also organises responsible tours in the area. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

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JUNGLE LODGES

The Amazon rainforest is the stuff of dreams; there are iridescent butterflies the size of your hand, deafening waterfalls that cascade into emerald pools, indigenous tribes who hunt with blowpipes, and as many different kinds of exotic plants and birds as you’ll find anywhere on the earth. The remoteness of most jungle lodges means they have to be self-reliant for electricity, food and water, and many now organize guided treks that promote conservation of the jungle’s biodiversity. They also bring much-needed income to remote communities and provide visitors with an insight into their struggle with logging and oil companies.

Of 10 favourites named – including four in Ecuador, two in Peru, one in Guyana and one in Bolivia – one of the two in Brazil is:

Clean Break #353: Amazonat Jungle Lodge

One of the most accessible jungle lodges, Amazonat is two hours by road east from Manaus international airport, in a 50-square-kilometre private reserve. The owners run treks deep into the jungle and include courses on jungle survival. www.amazonat.org

The whl.travel local connection in Manaus, also known as the gateway to the Brazilian Amazon, is alert to the importance of sustainable practices in such a vital place. Their offers of responsible tours and accommodation tap into a growing global awareness of the need to support long-term conservation for future generations.

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In the forests of northern Laos, the Akha people still wear traditional clothing and use patterns that may inspire you at Ock Pop Tok’s textile gallery. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

GREEN LUANG PRABANG

Laos eased restrictions on foreign tourism in 1994, and the sleepy former royal capital of Luang Prabang, hidden away in the jungle at the confluence of the Kahn and Mekong rivers, was made a World Heritage Site a year later. Visitor numbers have accelerated since, and Luang Prabang now has several ventures that aim to cope with the growth sustainably. The following experiences [three of five listed in the book] offer the best of this magical place, and will help to preserve its soul for many years to come.

Clean Break #402: Enjoy a puppet show

Every Thursday and Saturday at 7.30pm the kids at Children’s Cultural Centre, a project developed with Unicef, put on a traditional Lao puppet show. Throughout the year, the CCC members (aged between 6 and 18) perform in rural villages, using puppetry and other traditional forms to deliver messages about children’s rights and health issues. The rest of the time they learn all manner of traditional arts at the centre, and guests are welcome to learn as well, or help out. It’s all part of a concerted effort to ensure interest in Lao traditional culture is carried on by the next generation.

Clean break #403: Get a massage with the Red Cross

There are plenty of places in town where you can get an invigorating massage for berry little money, but choosing the Red Cross means you’ll help to fund projects to provide latrines and water systems to local villagers, and train local youths and tuk-tuk drivers in first aid. It’s a proper massage too after sweating away toxins on a steam bath infused with 24 different herbs, you’re kneaded and pummeled back into shape by medically trained professionals.

Clean Break #404: Make your own scarf

Laos is famous for its silk, and at Ock Pop Tok’s textile gallery you can select your favourite patterns and colours from a range of hand-stitched fabrics, or have clothes made to measure. Or you can visit their weaving centre located in a traditional riverside garden just 2km from the centre of town. Here you can learn how to weave or dye your own scarf in classes lasting from a half-day to a week; you’ll be taught by women working with Ock Pop Tock in an effort to keep their traditional handicrafts alive. www.ockpoptok.com

The whl.travel local connection in Lunag Prabang (in Champasak, Vientiane and Vang Vieng as well) also recommends visits to the Children’s Cultural Centre and the Lao Red Cross, in addition to offering responsible tours and accommodations throughout the region.

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CLEAN BREAK #479: IN SEARCH OF THE REAL FIJI

Agencies such as FijiBure (www.fijibure.com) and Fiji Ecotours (www.fijiecotours.net) help travellers get beyond stage-managed 'village tours' and into the embrace of real Fijian families living in traditional bures of woven bamboo walls and thatched roofs. The whl.travel connection in Fiji (www.fiji-hotels.com.fj) also offers responsible accommodation and tours. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

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CLEAN BREAK #140: EXPLORE BORJOMI-KHARAGAULI NATIONAL PARK, GEORGIA

It may be the same size as Ireland, but Georgia has more animal and bird species than any other country in Europe – and the best way to see them is on guided walks through Borjomi-Kharangauli National Park, a vast wilderness of coniferous forest where bears, lynx and chamois dwell.

The family-run Marelisi guesthouse in the village of the same name at the park’s northern edge provides an ideal base to plan walking routes, book guides and fill up on local food. Hikes from here pass along rhododendron-lined rivers and meadows whose subalpine grasses seem to shift colour as they waft in the mountain breeze. Marelisi village itself is almost totally self-sufficient: a place where people still grind their corn in communal watermills known as tiskvili. Before you set out, be sure to stock up on sweet churchkela, a smack made by boiling nuts in grape juice and a useful energy source while hiking.
www.borjomi-kharagauli-np.ge

The whl.travel connection in Tbilisi & the Caucasus Mountains is also actively involved in supporting the local community, and specialises in organising eco and adventure tours throughout the country, including to Borjomi-Khargauli National Park. They also make possible online bookings at the Marelisi Guesthouse, as well as at other Borjomi-Kharagauli hotels and responsible lodging and tours in the area.

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CLEAN BREAK #400: DIVE AT BUNAKEN, INDONESIA

No one’s really sure how many fish dwell in the gin-clear water of Bunaken Marine Reserve in the north of the Sulawesi archipelago. It’s probably more than 2500 different species, but the number keeps changing as more are discovered. Whatever the exact amount, with up to 45m visibility on a clear day this is one of the best place to dive not just in Indonesia, but the whole world.

Sea turtles are just some of the many underwater creatures awaiting eager divers. Photo courtesy of Rough Guides

And each year it gets a bit more beautiful. That’s partly because the 890-square-kilometre reserve – which is spread over five hundred small islands – is using money raised from entrance fees to end damaging practices such as coral mining and blast-fishing. Also, because the reserve employs local villagers to clean up the reefs and beaches and guard them from trespassers, live coral cover is now increasing by around five hundred percent a year.

Most of the reserve’s accommodation – mainly basic homestays – is on Bunaken Island. If you’re after a little more luxury, head for the nearby island of Siladen and the Siladen Resort and Spa.
www.sulawesi-info.com/bunaken.php, www.siladen.com

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MORE INFORMATION

• Win one of 20 copies of Clean Breaks.
• Purchase a copy of Clean Breaks.
• Read a review of Clean Breaks.
• Read about the authors’ motivations for writing Clean Breaks.
• View samples from the book.
• Visit whl.travel for connections to tours and accommodations in more than 175 destinations in 80 countries on six continents, including many already involved in demonstrating long-term care for their destinations.