Ghana, Togo and Benin cultural vacation

Planet

In collaboration with our tour partners in Togo and Benin, we support local conservation efforts by making little donations to conservation site managers. Many of our stays on this trip are at local Ecological home stays popularly known as “TATA” houses (miniature fortified castle built with clay). These houses are built with local materials produce in the communities. We patronize the accommodation facilities to boost and to encourage the local architecture. Participants on this trip are not allowed to litter the environment but are rather encouraged to sensitize the visited communities on environmental protection issues such as waste water management and efficient energy conservation . We continue to develop formal and casual partnership with the communities we visit to help address some of their environmental concerns through traveler fund raising initiatives.
We believe that excessive visits to the communities with so many people has possible environmental depletion effect, we therefore rotate our tours with limited number of travelers on a trip among the communities we visit just to avoid the depletion of the destination sites.

People

Most of the accommodations we use on this trip are locally owned by the people in those destinations.
This helps to give back to the communities something of monetary value and to ensure that our visit does not impact negatively on those communities.
Additionally, we work in collaboration with our Togolese and Benin counterparts who work with trained tour guides to ensure that our travelers experience local lifestyle at the local communities. Communities we visit are the core of what we do on our trips. We prefer visiting local people as friends rather than intruders. We therefore ensure that our visits do not in any way infringe on the local customs and beliefs of the people. Using the local tour guides in this respect does not only contribute economically to the lives of the people but also helps in maintaining the culture of the people since they will always find a person of their own being in charge of our visits. We give our clients pre-departure briefings where we orientate them to respect the local people and their customs. This is particularly relevant in some parts of Ghana, Togo and Benin where the local people are very reactive to photography. Although some may not want their photographs taken or ask for compensation for photography, many are happy with this but we just think that its only fair to offer compensation when requested a photo in order not to promote indiscriminate payments for photographs.
We believe that what we see at the various sites on our visits needs to be maintained for generations to come - so we encourage our clients to give the local customs the necessary recognition to serve as a motivation for the local people to maintain their culture.