Bengal and Bhutan guided tour

Planet

This being an overland trip involving purely road, rail, and boot, we’ve striven to put sustainable travel at the heart of what we do. By keeping our ecological footprint light, the idea is to intensify clients' overall experience in nature. This tour proposes to use electric trains, narrow gauge, miniature rail, single vehicle, boat, and boot to cover the vast distances it entails.

Bhutan, relative to neighbouring countries, is an environmentalist's dream. Its government policy stipulates low impact, low volume tourism, and does so by pricing the costs of visiting outside the reach of most. Our tours there only go toward supporting that long-standing policy on environmental tourism.
We visit Gorumara National Park to see the one-horned rhino. Our presence there invariably helps finance the repopulating of this beleaguered species and brings visitors to a much lesser-visited park.

Wherever possible, we go on foot. This advocacy for walking is borne out in our excursions to the Tiger's Nest monastery, the Punakha Valley temples, as well as cities designated on the tour, e.g. Kolkata and Thimphu.

So as to restrict single use plastic, we urge our clients to invest in water filtration bottles and canteens for refill.

We try, wherever possible, to extend stays in the same accommodation. This way we necessarily limit the amount of vehicle transport we need to run around from hotel to hotel.

People

Travel The Unknown always prefers employing local guides and expertise. Wherever possible, we strive to harness local human capital in the delivery of tours. This includes, guides, organisers, drivers, and hospitality staff.
Our tour schedule incorporates close cooperation with people at the community level. Although this tour involves long distances, we still manage to explore the concept of community action with temple visits in Bhutan, plantation visits in India, and a visit to a local Bhutanese family.

Bhutan embodies the first principle of community-oriented travel. Adventure tour organisers, like Travel The Unknown, are all too aware of this. And this is why we wrap our itineraries around the concept of making local connections in small tour groups. Hot on the heels of this drive for a more community-invested approach to sustainable travel is our strong adherence to preserving ancient ethno-cultural and religious traditions. This is why we factor in living monasteries, shrines, and even farmer's markets into our choice of sites.

Lastly, our choice of local partners must entail an element in fairness in working practices and conditions. Employees are treated with due respect, reasonable hours and a living wage.