Green Globetrotting

Richard Trillo, Rough Guides' head of communications, on trying to be an eco-friendly tourist

Maybe everyone has a moment when the light dawns about climate change. Mine came after our preliminary discussions at Rough Guides when we decided to find out about off setting our flight emissions.

It seemed a good idea and one uniquely associated with our business, guiding people on their holidays. I tried out the carbon offset calculator at climatecare.org with details of my next trip - a combined holiday and research trip to Kenya. It's simple: you just select your departure and destination airports on the dropdown menu. I was astonished at the result, and phoned the company immediately. Surely I was misunderstanding something, I said: the calculator seemed to be telling me that my return flight to Nairobi would result in 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide being emitted into the upper atmosphere for every passenger. That's right, they said. So the plane would be releasing several hundred tons of carbon dioxide on this flight? Correct.

I put the phone down, stunned. I don't know about you, but a ton of gas sounds like an extraordinarily large amount to me. Wouldn't just a pound be enough to fill, what, hundreds of balloons? I had a vision of the swarm of daily flights skimming around little planet Earth, completely fogging it with pollutants. I was convinced, but was I going to do anything about it?

The trip to Kenya was unavoidably by air and we paid the £14 carbon offset for each seat happily enough - it makes little difference in itself but it does force the issue up your personal agenda. At Nairobi we were met by a not particularly fuel-efficient VW van with a van driver aptly called Morrison. Having thus pressed our collective footprints quite deeply into Kenya's environment, what measures could we take to rebalance? And could any of our activities actually help Kenya to steer away from its dependence on tourism and thus on flights?

First stop was the Rift Valley, and the Malewa River Lodge in the privately owned Kigio Conservancy, a delightfully eccentric accretion of thatched rooms in bush-designer style, open to the elements. Delicious local food (nothing flown-in here) was served to us by candlelight. Electricity was strictly limited - if they had any, we didn't notice - and showers wonderfully lukewarm under the stars. The joy of the place is that you are not in any kind of tourist-processing machine: you can walk, mountain-bike or ride horseback around the reserve, as herds of zebra canter to the left and impala vault through the trees to the right. The few staff are charming and committed. It is a low-impact place, environmentally, but nor does it impact much on the economy of the local community.

The highlight of our trip was Il Ngwesi, a much-vaunted, award-winning lodge in northern Kenya, and this place is eco-tourism to the max. It is owned and run by the 6,000-strong Il Ngwesi Maasai community, whose future as herders and farmers has been transformed by the money they earn from the lodge (see box). The money has hugely improved health and veterinary services and enabled more children to go on to secondary school. One of the elders has done speaking tours of Europe and the US. The people of Il Ngwesi seem to have the balance right.

The contrast with the coast, where migrant Maasai dancers earn barely £1 a day plying their trade from hotel to hotel, is stark. On the Indian Ocean beaches, there is no room for herds; hotel workers rent basic huts inland; and it can take months to earn enough surplus to send a little cash to the family back home.

In this environment, tourists need to get out and spend: bargain for souvenirs on the beach, eat and drink outside the hotels, hire bicycles, and take tours. The dependence of people on tourists is critical: they have good years and bad years, like harvests.

Our ski trip in the spring, to Northstar, at Lake Tahoe in California, was environmentally pretty inexcusable. The air traffic into Kenya is a trickle compared with the thousands of planes that flood the skies over the US. And if no British tourists ever went there again, Californians would hardly notice the economic impact - unlike Kenya, where the economy would collapse if tourists stopped coming. Skiing at Tahoe is a gas, literally. The SUVs, king-size, open-air hot tubs, snow-making machines and giant grooming caterpillar tractors all seem to celebrate massive energy consumption in the great outdoors. Which might be why the resort is offsetting 100 tons of carbon emissions each season - equivalent to the airline emissions of just 40 British visitors - and is, paradoxically, rated one of the best examples of good practice in the country. Still, nul green points for this trip.

Autumn, and we wanted to test not flying. We hit on Naples by train - a city we thought might feel comfortably anarchic, accessed by a stately overnight rail journey, producing less than half the carbon emissions of flying. The first thing to say about long-haul rail travel is that it is often expensive: we could have flown the family to New York and back for the same price. But in the same breath you have to say it's fun: you switchback over the Alps and wake up in a rocking sleeper car in Campania. And you arrive bang in the middle of the most fabulously chaotic city in Europe, ready to take on Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius by city transport, relaxed and motivated, having spent 24 hours reading, eating, drinking, talking, sleeping and staring out of the window. That's the way to go, we thought. And even though that morning's easyJet flight was dropping into the airport as we pulled into the station, we would have had to get up at 2am (or not gone to bed) to get to Stansted in time for check-in.

And the verdict? In Kenya, the money we spent, and where we spent it, seem to outweigh the environmental costs of the trip, though it would be good to have some way of auditing that. Skiing in Tahoe feels instinctively like it should be a rare treat, one we would need to give up something big to justify again. And the train to Naples? We are not going to cut out all flying, but maybe never flying in Europe is a good start.

Richard Trillo is Rough Guides' director of communications, author of the 'Rough Guide to Kenya' and co-author of 'Rough Guide to The Gambia' and 'Rough Guide to West Africa' (theroughguidetokenya.blogspot.com)