DESTINATIONS PERU ESCORTED TOURS RIGHT:
Bruce Poon Tip meets cooks
who work with G Adventures
BELOW: Machu Picchu
English-language skills, and provides travellers with a good meal. On Caye Caulker in Belize, profits from Bike with Purpose are funnelled into educational programmes, benefiting the students who run the tours. And in New Delhi, all-female taxi service Women on Wheels is one of many projects aimed at empowering women. At the Ccaccaccollo cooperative,
SAMPLE PRODUCT
G Adventures’
Inca Discovery includes a four- day trek along the Inca Trail with porters directly employed by the company, and visits to projects including the Ccaccaccollo Women’s
Weaving Co-op and the Parwa Community Restaurant in the Sacred Valley. The eight-day trip starts at £949, excluding flights, for November 2018 departures.
gadventures.com
tourists are given a fascinating introduction to ancient Andean techniques. Each item is painstakingly spun with llama and alpaca wool, and even the brightest colours are extracted from plants. The 60 women who make up the
cooperative get to make a decent living while keeping ancient techniques alive. Many of them have husbands and male relatives working for G Adventures as cooks and porters on the Inca Trail.
w HIGH TIMES The next morning, we took a train ride past pistachio-coloured mountains, gorges and ravines crossed by skinny bridges. Portions of the hillsides were etched with terraces, a landscaping technique that allowed the Inca people to plant on steep slopes. The scenery was beautiful but only a hint of what we could expect when, after a bus journey from Aguas Calientes, we arrived at Machu Picchu. From the Andean peak it was built upon and the rows of sculpted terraces to the llamas grazing within a maze of dry-stone walls, it felt simultaneously familiar and weirdly, wonderfully alien. As Peru’s most famous and most
The sculpted terraces and grazing llamas made Machu Picchu feel simultaneously familiar and wonderfully alien
popular attraction, the ancient Incan citadel is also an example of why sustainable tourism is necessary. Visitor numbers are now restricted in an attempt to slow the erosion caused by heavy footfall. It’s a delicate balance. The site
needs to be protected, but tourism provides jobs. We stopped for
pizza at Hot Springs, a restaurant in
Aguas Calientes. G Adventures brings its tour groups there for lunch and, in exchange, the owners provide porters and guides with food and a place to shower and rest between trips. It’s neither a Planeterra project nor an investment, but a neat example of the mutually beneficial relationships tourism can bring.
w SELF STARTERS Another is the G Values Fund, which provides low-interest loans and support to employees wishing to start their own business. Poon Tip realised that most tour guides – known as chief experience officers, or CEOs – can manage only a few years on the road before risking burn-out. The fund, founded in 2015, gives them an opportunity to create a business closer to home, drawing on their experience and skill-set. Again, the litmus test is that each business can be incorporated into
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travelweekly.co.uk 14 June 2018
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