ETHICAL TRAVELLER: Catherine Mackon responsible tourism
GREEN holidaymakers are grinning more than non-greenies, a recent holiday survey suggested. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do with that information, except feel slightly smug that I might be contributing just a little to this holiday-happiness factor.
It’s all a load of nonsense, of course, because a person’s holiday experience is affected by so much more than a solar-heated shower or locally sourced meals. The simple fact is that most people I have met in green tourism are not only wholly committed to protecting the landscape they are trying to promote, and to sustaining their communities, but also have an infectious passion and know how to live life.
They also like to do things a little differently and want to share some of that with visitors. And this is, mostly, what lots of holidaymakers are after: something different from the norm. What philosophers call the other.
So if you are after that other, you are spoiled for choice. Grinning greenies are sleeping in treetops, tepees, boats, railway carriages and mud huts in fantastic locations around the world. There are converted containers at Cove Park in Scotland (www.covepark.org) run by a charity offering residencies to artists. When they don’t have residencies, they rent their self-catering turf-roofed Cubes, overlooking Gare Loch, to people passing through this stunning hideaway on Rosneath Peninsula.
Still in Scotland, you can join the Mountain Bothy Association (www.mountain bothies.org.uk), a charity that looks after 100 remote stone shelters for hikers who want to lay their heads down for the night. They are extremely basic, with no water, although they usually have a fireplace and a platform to lie on. You don’t book, you don’t pay, you don’t get a key and, just like the bears, you do it in the woods.
For somewhere warmer, check out the wonderful tree house I stayed in in Normandy, in northern France, last year (www.perchedans leperche.com). This has all
mod cons, and showering in a tree is something you must try sometime. The best bit is getting a picnic breakfast delivered to your door, so you can enjoy flaskfuls of hot coffee, home-made bread and other local delights while gazing over the surrounding hills.
Also in Normandy, you won’t get too chilly at Earthship Perrine (www.earthship- france.com), a solar-heated glasshouse. The pile of earth it sits on conceals hundreds of tyres, bottles and pieces of reclaimed wood, Sounds weird, but it is brilliant, and a place that makes me wonder why we can’t all live like this.
If trains are your thing, check out the converted carriages from the award-winning Welsh company Under the Thatch. It started by putting people up under the thatch, then developed the concept to an Edwardian railway carriage, a circus wagon, a Romany caravan and many more (www.underthe thatch.co.uk).
My two favourites for green quirkiness take me back to the silence of the woods. In Sweden you can stay in a forest shelter based on a traditional charcoal maker’s hut. It looks like something children would construct in the woods, except it has a fireplace and a sleeping space, although the hardness of the “bed” might not leave many greenies grinning in the morning (www.kolarbyn.se).
On Vancouver Island, in Canada, you will not be able to wipe the grin off yourself when you see the wooden Free Spirit Spheres suspended among the Douglas firs in a private forest (www.freespiritspheres.com). They are arboreal art at its finest – and you can sleep in them. If you aren’t going to free your spirit here, you aren’t going to do it anywhere.
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