Tag: Green tourism

Green travels in Wales

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I wrote a series of articles this spring for greentraveller.

They were based around two trips, the first at Easter to Snowdonia (staying at Graig Wen, pictured above) and the second late April to the Dyfi Biosphere (staying at the Treehouse, pictured below).

All four are now online and you can read the stories in full below.

Meanwhile, here’s an extract:

“Rock-pooling is a lucky dip,” laughs Brain, explaining that the secret is to find a rock with space underneath and a good smothering of sea-salty reeds.

As we clamber over the rocks with green-mesh dipping nets, we find winkles, barnacles and limpets, the latter clinging steadfastly to the rocks.

Brian attempts to catch one off guard with a sharp jab of his Wellington boot. “You only get one chance with limpets,” he smiles. “Once they’re startled, they cling on for dear life.”

Liked this? Read more.

Walking trails around Dolgellau

A wildlife and local culture safari

A review of the Living Treehouse

A wildlife-watching trip to Dyfi

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Story of the week: Meeting a real-life count in Transylvania

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* This is the fourth post in a new weekly series, highlighting old stories from my travel-writing archive. I’m running them here in full. Subscribe to this website for more.

Friday night. Downtown Bucharest. The Count Dracula Club restaurant is doing a brisk trade with bemused tourists and black-clad Eurogoths, sipping blood-red Deeper Kiss cocktails. As we tuck into the Evil Salad (“Don’t smell the basil”), a man in a black cape with a fine line in facial pallor is running through a kitsch vampire floorshow, culminating in a spot of crowd-participation neck biting.

“No white wine,” shrugs a bored, white-faced Morticia Adams-lookalike waitress. “Only red. This is, after all, Dracula’s House.”

Some 15 years after Romania emerged from the dark ages of Ceausescu’s brutal regime, Dracula kitsch is proving a big draw for Romania’s fledgling tourism industry.

Indeed, the legend created by Bram Stoker’s bastardised take on the legend of the Romanian overlord Vlad Tepes, aka Dracul (meaning ‘evil’ in Romanian), today draws coach parties and tour groups – pretty ironic as the Dracula author never visited Transylvania in his life.

The novel was originally called The Undead and set in Austria; he changed details after initial claims of plagiarism.

There is, however, more to Romania’s early forays into tourism than men with plastic teeth. While Prague is now overrun with beer-soaked stag parties and Budapest firmly established in the brochures of the major tour operators, Romania still feels wonderfully untouched.

Better still, there are moves afoot to resist selling out to the filthy lucre of mass tourism and develop smaller, local tourism projects along more sustainable lines. The Romanian government may still be striving to shake off its Communist hangover and secure entry to the EU by 2007, but community projects are thinking long-term, lobbying hard for ecotourism over Euros.

One such project invites you to take a bite out of rural Transylvania as a guest of Count Tibor Kalnoky (pictured above), a genuine Transylvania count, whose 750-year family history spans the political history of Old Europe. And before you go getting any ideas, the man locals doff their caps to and address as “Mr Count” is urbane, charming and not prone to bedding down in coffins.

This time you can leave the crucifix at home.

From Bucharest, it’s a three-hour train journey through the Romanian countryside to the city of Brasov, where Kalnoky’s driver is waiting to whisk us to the tiny Transylvanian village of Miclosoara, 45km northeast of Brasov and nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.

A rustic bridge across the River Olt marks the national divide between the villages Saxon and Szekely Romania, where a local Hungarian dialect is the predominant tongue. Round these parts, agriculture remains the main industry, horse and cart the primary medium of transport and the patchy local electricity supply regularly plunges the dusty main drag into darkness after the cows come home at dusk.

If you do run into a vampire, there’s nobody around to hear you scream.

Tibor’s ancestor, Samuel Kalnoky, was an erstwhile regional chancellor of Transylvania. He built the family’s powerbase through shrewd political decisions and military connections, accepting the title of Count from the Imperial House of Hapsburg and set about building the family’s hunting lodge in Miclosoara in 1686.

The Kalnokys were exiled from Transylvania in the 1939 with the rise of fascism, leaving the ancestral pile to fall into disrepair. It was first looted then used to house offices for the collective farming syndicate.

Tibor returned to Transylvania shortly after the fall of Communism to set about the huge task of re-acquiring and restoring the family property to its former glory. He sued the Romanian state for eight years for the right to reclaim the family home.

Today, the revenues from the guesthouses – eight rooms in cottages throughout the village, decorated in traditional village style with antique furniture – are helping to pay for the restoration of the Kalnoky home. Once completed, he hopes to open it as a boutique hotel.

“The moment of epiphany came at church the night we returned to the village,” remembers Tibor. “I remember the old ladies at the mass crying as they recognised my father and I. Despite 50 years in exile, the outpouring of affection for the family was immense.”

We gather that night for dinner in the wine cellar. An eclectic bunch of British historians, a young couple keen on hiking and some prickly Americans on a riding holiday, we take our seats around the candlelit dinner table as if gathering for an Agatha Christie murder mystery, while the waitress serves up a turnip soup and chicken stew from large china ladles.

“Our guests range from diplomats to holidaymakers via the diplomatic ex-pat community, weekending from Bucharest. We aim to maintain a balance of atmosphere and personal service,” explains Tibor, over a post-prandial plum brandy in the drawing room.

But murmurings in the village suggest that Kalnoky is starting to become a victim of his own success. He used to greet and guide guests personally but, now, with increasing numbers arriving off the train to Brasov, his staff are primarily handling the day-to-day business, while the Count himself puts in the odd dinner-party appearance.

The next morning, a breakfast of coffee and bread with homemade jam and local cooked meats is served outside in the shade of the apple trees. There’s no fixed routine, as such, but local guides offer plenty of optional daily activities.

These range from horse and cart rides out to local beauty spots to a half-day jaunt into Sighisoara, the Unesco-listed medieval city, which recently escaped being the site of a much-derided Dracula Land theme park thanks to the personal intervention of our own Prince Charles.

The regulars at the Count Dracula Club restaurant are not Tibor’s target market. Indeed, the legions of Dracula fans that will flock to Transylvania for Halloween this year will find short shrift in Miclosoara. October 31 is a complete non-event around these parts but on November 1, the Day of the Dead, families will gather in churchyards across Transylvania to pay their respects to deceased relatives.

On our last day Tibor takes us for a guided tour of the hunting lodge. Climbing through the ruins, he points out a faded family crest, one of the first things to be uncovered during initial restoration work in 1995.

The motto reads: No est Mortale Qvod Opta (My life’s choice will live forever).

“Like Romania, we have a long haul ahead of us and feel, at times, we are swimming against the tide,” he says, as the autumnal afternoon draws across the cornfields of rural Romania.

Then he smiles. “I tell the locals I’ve come back to dig up the family treasure. That’s the only way they can believe why we’re still here.”

* This story, the first of several about Romania, appeared in the Guardian in 2004. Read the original, Gothic Quarters.

 

 

Story of the day: Green initiatives in Copenhagen

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I’ve been to Copenhagen several times and covered lots of different angles.

Last time it was hotdogs. This latest story, taken from the Express, was about green tourism projects – something Denmark does rather well.

It’s a few years old now and tales of The Killing and Nordic cuisine have since dominated the Danish agenda.

But maybe it’s time for a return trip. Anyone got a strong new angle on a green tourism story?

Meanwhile, here’s an extract:

I have a date with an ambassador. A cycling ambassador, that is.

On a nondescript sidestreet behind Nørreport railway station, the Cycling Embassy of Denmark is planning to take its specialist knowledge of cycling culture to the world.

Outside the work-in-progress office, a blue sign boldly proclaims: “Pedal power. Yes, please!”

Lise Bjørg Pedersen, head of political affairs, greets me with coffee and tells me her vision of the future, whereby 50 per cent of all commuters will travel to their place of work or study in Copenhagen on two wheels by 2015.

“In Denmark, cycling has no gender, race, age or social status. Even our Crown Prince Frederik travels by bicycle,” she explains.

Read the story, Going Green in Style.

And post your comments below.

 

Story of the day: Eco-escape in the Bolivian Amazon

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We’re going right back through the archives today. It feels like a different person, or a different lifetime. It some ways it is – but it’s still me.

This story, taken from the BBC News Latin America service, is a reminder of the time I spent travelling and working in South America.

Here’s an extract:

Madidi National Park was pinned firmly on the tourist map when a team of researchers from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, led by British-born conservationist Robert Wallace, discovered a new species of titi monkey in the park.

The team subsequently auctioned the right to name the monkey via the website Charity Folks. A Canadian casino bought the name and the monkey was subsequently christened callicebus avrei palatti (Golden Palace).

“We wanted to raise the profile of Madidi and Bolivia’s protected areas as a whole,” explains Robert Wallace from his La Paz office.

Read the full story, Ecotourism on the rise in Bolivia.

Have you been to the Chalalan ecolodge? Or visited the Bolivia Amazon since my trip?

Please post your thoughts and updates below.