It's not easy being a green traveller with a soft spot for luxury. Gone are the days when you could con yourself (and your friends) into thinking that going on a five-star safari was eco friendly. Sure, paying to observe wild animals in their natural habitat helps to preserve the last great carbon sinks on the planet, but having your own private plunge pool and a climate-controlled wine cellar? That would tarnish your green reputation faster than Al Gore could say: "an inconvenient truth".
But there doesn't have to be a trade-off between luxury and limiting your environmental impact when you're on holiday. Wilderness Safaris, which operates luxury camps throughout Southern Africa, is one of the few companies that aims to reduce the environmental impact of tourism, while offering guests the ultimate luxury safari.
"Most guests want an authentic holiday in the wild," says conservation manager at Wilderness Safaris Chris Roche. "But they also want to know that they have some positive impact on the area, or at the very least aren't harming it."
At its desert Skeleton Coast lodge in Namibia, guests' shower water is collected in tin basins and used for permaculture gardens, while their water usage is limited to 1 500 litres/day. Yet the opulent furnishings in the camps do nothing to suggest that you have to cramp your style out in the bush.
At the enchanting Mombo Camp in the Okavango Delta, guests are able to walk back to their elevated tents on boardwalks - doing away with the need to fence in camps and keep animals out. Or if a more active green holiday is what you're after, a canoe trip down the thundering Zambezi River, a game walk at the Pafuri Camp in the Kruger Park or a diving safari at Rocktail Bay off the Maputaland coast offers a chance to experience wildlife from a completely different angle to the back of a game vehicle.
At all its lodges, Wilderness Safaris uses a combination of canvas, thatch and timber, and rooms are integrated into the natural surroundings, bringing the sights, sounds and smells of the wild literally into guests' bedrooms. It's not unusual to hear an elephant rooting around outside your tent or a hyena whooping close by. "About the only thing you won't find in your tent is a hairdryer or a minibar, because they suck so much power," says Roche.
Wilderness Safaris is taking the greening of its operations one step further. It has installed solar geysers and lighting in all its new camps, experimented with sophisticated sewage systems that don't contaminate groundwater, reduced diesel use through employing battery banks instead of generators and even experimented with wind and hydro electric power at some of its lodges.
"But getting focused on the carbon footprint of the lodge you're staying at is definitely missing the bigger picture," says Roche. "One of the major threats to conservation is that we're losing huge tracts of wilderness to logging and mining, and if we are to preserve them we have to make tourism a viable economic alternative - something that makes nature more valuable conserved than destroyed."
Which is why the company has pioneered lease and operate agreements with communities and governments in Southern African countries.
In the Okavango Delta, for example, the company rents 90 000 ha of some of Botswana's most pristine wilderness. The rate the company pays the government exceeds what it could earn from leasing the area as a hunting concession. Wilderness Safaris has also set up the Okavango Community Trust, which benefits 5 000 people living in villages on the northern edge of the delta.
Another model of community involvement in conservation efforts is the Damaraland camp, a 325 000 ha conservancy in Namibia. The Namibian government holds the title to the land, but the community has the right to use it to generate income - from hunting and ecotourism to game capture. Wilderness Safaris negotiated an agreement that enables it to lease the land and, for the first 10 years, give 10% of the revenue generated to the community. After that, the community can take a 20% stake in the operation each year for five years, so that after 15 years, the community could own and operate the camp on its own if it chose to.
Now in the eleventh year, the community has decided to sell its first 20% stake back to Wildnerness to fund the building of schools and clinics.
"One of the reasons the community decided to [do this] is that though stand alone lodges can survive, it's much easier if they are within the portfolio of a bigger safari group," says Roche.
Though he admits that few first-time visitors are aware of the impact of their holidays on ecosystems, repeat visitors become more and more sophisticated. "Once they start learning about ecosystems and the sensitivity of nature to the activities of humans, they start questioning a lot more," says Roche. "It's part of the journey we want to take people on."
How green are your travels?
- Find out whether the animals you see occur naturally in the area. If not, there's a good chance certain species have been brought in for "viewing fodder". These can often cause much damage to indigenous flora and fauna.
- Is power use excessive? If the lodge has air-conditioning and a climate-controlled wine cellar or runs generators for hours to heat your water each day, the answer is probably yes.
- Watch whether rangers stick to roads or go off-piste to let you get a better view of animals. Game vehicles can destroy sensitive ecosystems.
