What we will not book, and why

Orphanage visits, anywhere, for any reason

This extends to the schools and “orphanage” performances offered around Siem Reap and at Chong Kneas on the Tonle Sap, and to the children selling books and bracelets at temple gates. Buying from a child working at 21:00 keeps that child working at 21:00. Our guides will explain this without lecturing you.

If you want to give money in Cambodia, we will name organisations we know: family-strengthening programmes, the demining agencies, and the arts school behind the Phare circus in Siem Reap. We take nothing from any of them.

Elephants, in any form

We do not book elephant riding, bathing, feeding or walking, at any camp, in any country, whatever it calls itself.

Riding requires a training process that is brutal and thoroughly documented. The “sanctuary” model that replaced it is genuinely better in a small number of cases and, in many, the same industry with better marketing: the animals came through the same training, are chained outside visitor hours, and are handled with the same tools. The word sanctuary is unregulated.

There are a small number of observation-only projects in northern Thailand and Cambodia where the animals are not handled by visitors at all. We will name them, tell you what we know and do not know, and let you book directly. We take no margin and we do not sell them as an activity.

Staged village visits

The organised hill-tribe village tour is extractive in a specific way: the village is arranged for visitors, dress is worn for the photograph rather than the day, and the fee mostly does not reach the residents. The long-neck Kayan villages in northern Thailand, where Burmese refugee women live in what amounts to a display, are the worst case and we do not go.

What we do instead is slower and less photogenic. In Ha Giang, on the Nong Khiaw trek, and in the Mekong Delta we walk through farming country and eat in houses where we have worked with the same families for years, on their schedule. Sometimes there is nothing to photograph. That is what a village on an ordinary Tuesday looks like.

Commission stops

The gem showroom, the silk factory, the lacquer workshop, the pearl farm, the coffee plantation that is really a shop. Two hours of your day, a margin to the operator, and a commission to the guide.

We pay our guides a day rate that is 30 to 40 per cent above what a commission-earning guide takes home in a normal month, precisely so that they do not need the stop. That cost is in our price and it is one of the reasons our price is what it is.

Where we do visit a working producer — a Kampot pepper farm, a Bolaven coffee smallholding, the Artisans Angkor workshops — we take no commission on anything you buy and we will say so at the door. If you would rather not go at all, we will change the afternoon without comment.

Wildlife, and the honest limits

• No tiger attractions. There is no defensible version of a photograph with a sedated tiger.
• No captive dolphin or primate shows.
• No feeding or touching of wild animals, including at the macaque sites around Angkor, where feeding has produced a habituated and occasionally aggressive population.
• Irrawaddy dolphins from a distance only. Engine off, distance kept, and no guarantee of a sighting. The Mekong population has recovered above a hundred animals and it remains fragile.
• Moon bears at Kuang Si. The rescue centre there is run by Free the Bears and is a genuine sanctuary. We visit it and we say why.

We are a tour operator, not a conservation organisation, and we would rather be accurate about that. What we can control is what we book.

The harder questions we do not have clean answers to

Everything above is straightforward. These are not, and we would rather write them down than pretend the list is complete.

• Flying. This is a long-haul holiday and the flight is the largest part of its carbon cost by a wide margin. We build overland routes where borders allow, we use trains and boats in preference to short flights, and none of that changes the arithmetic of getting here.
• Tourism concentration. Luang Prabang, Hoi An and Siem Reap all depend heavily on visitors and are all changed by them. We send people to Nong Khiaw, Battambang and Kampot partly for this reason and partly because they are better.
• Water. A hotel pool in Siem Reap in April is drawing on the same aquifer as the town.
• Land. Some hotel development in Cambodia and Laos sits on land with a disputed history. We ask, and we do not always get a complete answer.

We do not think any of these makes travelling here wrong. We think you should know them.

Questions travellers ask most

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