How travellers can enjoy more
Mohammad Shahidul Islam explores the changes that have come into tourism
30 November 2007, 18:00 PM
Code Green
Experiences of a Lifetime
Compiled by Kerry Lorimer
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a name of the biggest institution in the world travel industry. It has acquired much reputation worldwide for promoting and boosting the industry, basically through travel service publications. From its publication house, every year serious, dedicated travellers get a chance to enjoy many classical books on the travel industry and thus they find their travel easy and comfortable beforehand. Last year Lonely Planet published Code Green which has already been reputed as a guide to ecologically responsible world travel. It is a significant addition to its sizeable collections of travel service literature for which it remains unparalleled round the world.
Code Green, compiled by Kerry Lorimer, contains 100 write-ups from 100 global spots. They range across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Europe, and North, Central and South America. All these write-ups speak of environmentally sustainable travel experiences. The one-page accounts of each of these destinations, put together from independent travellers, incorporate "Responsible Travel Credentials" for the localethat is, details of how both hosts and visitors are admiring of the health of specific ecological and human communities and, in many ways, keenly working to bring back habitats, ecological veracity, and community verve.
Apart from these write-ups, beautified by dazzling photographs, Code Green offers common counsel that relates to many places and modes of travel. For instance, readers are offered tips on how to tread lightly in flimsy ecosystems, hunt for alternatives to fossil-fuel-reliant transportation, and differentiate authentic ecotourism from "greenwash" companies employing the "eco" tag to make a dollar.
The reader may be predominantly overwhelmed with Lorimer's stress on the complicated, holistic nature of "green" travel. Code Green makes it lucid that the environment includes not just flora and fauna but also living human communities facing real social and economic challenges. For instance, Lorimer confronts the ongoing quandary of how to reply to begging, rightly placing the question within the larger issue of sustainability and responsibility. Many of the contributors to Code Green encourage travellers to eat local food, stay in locally-owned accommodations, and buy responsibly produced local products. Frequently, travellers are urged to use their dollars in ways that nurture communities. The reader may recall, in particular, the feature encouraging travellers to take drumming lessons in Senegalin doing so they would not only be choosing low-impact travel but also spending time with locals and supporting them in the maintenance of their conventional skills and ways of life.
Code Green will definitely lend a hand to travellers in enriching their world whilst elevating their life. Sustainable travel and responsible tourism are practices that are achieving esteem around the globe as people distinguish the frailty, as well as the wonders, of our planet. Code Green can be for sure a knowledgeable guide that identifies the questions we all should be asking, regardless of whether we travel or not. What are the consequences of our choices and purchases? Who benefits and who loses? How might our actions change a place? In short, how should we live? Representing the values that Lonely Planet has all the time authorised and conveyed in its publications, Code Green offers a guide for people who are looking for exclusive and culturally authentic travel experiences that shield and preserve the ecological and cultural environment. Code Green is arranged with a bounty of humour in order to stir the reader to awareness of the challenges the world comes across.
Mohammad Shahidul Islam , a travel writer and UNESCO heritage guide trainer, works for Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation.
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