greenliving
Five Affordable Vacations that Give Back
by heather boerner
while doing something good for the local community and the whole planet. Here are some ways to travel, get involved and avoid tourist traps while walking lightly on the Earth.
T
his year, you can cut the cost of taking a much-needed vacation
ence traveling with homestay,” observes Horowitz from his farmhouse in Hadley, Massachusetts. He advises prospective homestayers to verify the number of nights agreed upon and then pay a host for their hospitality beyond that, and also expect to spend time with your hosts in the evenings. Finally, be prepared for any kind of accommodations. “You have to be somewhat adventurous,” he says.
home swap As a renter, San Francisco resident Mela-
nie Jones figured home swapping wasn’t in the cards for her. But when she gave it a try, she found herself in a cozy studio in Paris’ ninth arrondissement near a train station with easy access to the city’s major attrac- tions. “It’s a unique way to connect with people who are different from us and to put ourselves in situations to see the world through someone else’s eyes,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re liter-
ally eating off someone else’s dishes and sleeping in someone else’s bed.” Although scores of home-swap-
homestay
Shel Horowitz has been sleeping on strangers’ floors, couches and private guest suites for decades now. In the pro- cess, he’s met peace activists, ecologists and friends with whom his family still interacts. But he’s not just couch surfing; he’s homestaying, a travel option that runs the gamut from traditional foreign- exchange visits for students to the non- profit peace outreach program Horowitz has been involved in since 1983, called Servas (
Joomla.Servas.org). The way he
54 NA Triangle
www.natriangle.com
sees it, he’s doing his part to spread cross- cultural understanding and making travel more affordable. There’s the time he visited Colorado
on a homestay and met a couple who gave him a private tour of their collec- tion of Native American art. Last year he stayed with the director of Guatemala’s National Park Service and another man active in sustainable development work in the country’s highlands. “You get such a richer experi-
ping websites offer to help streamline and vet potential swaps, she chose to post her ad on Craigslist. A 20-something French- man responded; he wanted to visit his girlfriend who was staying in San Fran- cisco. Jones notes that it’s important to both trust the person with whom you’re swapping and to set ground rules.
wwoofing
The World Wide Opportunities on Organ- ic Farms (
wwoof.org) movement matches eco-conscious urbanites with organic farms around the world. You stay for free and receive some meals from the farmer host, repaying him by weeding, prepar-
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