About Us > Why Choose Us

WHY CHOOSE US

Exclusive and Personal

We’re not your normal tour operator. Our specialisation – original journeys focused on nature and culture, or active learning, mostly set in natural surroundings or pockets of intact culture – means that we are always going to remain a niche company. We’re not interested in taking you to places or leading you to partake in experiences that you can do by yourself. With us, in most cases you travel to locations and do things that are hard to organise by yourself – this is why you need us. We’ll also take you to places that we feel passionate about, not just about anywhere we can find a tour, and this ensures there is no loss of passion through entropy. In keeping with this vision, we operate in the region we know well, our backyard really – the places where we live and where we constantly travel. There are many tour operators based in your country who cover the same region, but they simply take you to the touristy and noisy places; most tour operators only have a shallow knowledge of Asia. Others subcontract to local tour operators whose idea of travel is the vehicle-bound, hop-on-hop-of take-a-picture road trips that leave travellers feeling numbed to the beats of a place. With us, you’ll visit destinations that are similar in character to the famous attractions, but more rewarding in every sense. We do travel to renowned places sometimes, but then we go into the back regions of these famous attractions; we explore the areas others overlook, or do activities that few others do. This is our speciality and promise. 

Local Expertise

We work with a variety of local tour operators, guides, and local outdoor fiends that share our passions and sensibilities, and that are experts in their area. We don’t simply subcontract work to them - as others do - but work closely together as a network of partners. This gives you the best of both worlds: we bring in the overall expertise and guidance and sophistication in travel design, and then work with local experts in each destination as part of the team. This ensures you would be travelling with people who are spiritually connected with the places you will visit. And you will get to feel and touch the local flavours. This is different from many other tour operators who use tour leaders that hop around the world doing different tours; our tour leaders are individuals that distinguish themselves in the areas where they work – they are eminent experts about nature, culture, or activities included in the itineraries – and they also live in the places where they lead tours. In keeping with our focus on the development of eco-tourism, this way of working is mutually beneficial: it’s the local inhabitants that get a share of our profits, not someone who lives far away in a city or in a different country.

Small and Intimate

Given our specialities, we don’t organise many tours. Our travels are offbeat and different, and there is only a niche market for this kind of travel yet. In some cases we don’t even do scheduled tours, but assemble private groups of travellers on request. Most of our groups fit in a seven-seat vehicle, including the crew, and our aim is to treat you less as clients and more as friends, and hence create an atmosphere conducive to camaraderie. We’re not interested in mass travel; we’re interested in creating travel experience that are intimate and meaningful, and that make all of us better people. We also don’t sell our tours through general travel agents. That would detract from our stance of putting forth the kind of personal and special travels we do; we feel that travel agents would be unable to match the right travellers with our type of journeys. Hence we only market directly via this website, and through a network of specialised channels that can find the right clients. The maximum number of participants permitted in our tours is 10 travellers.

Personalised Flexibility

As part of our focus on treating you more of a friend, we conduct tours in a spirit personalised flexibility. We don’t book restaurants in advance, for example, but choose the restaurants along the way depending on the travellers’ feedback, so that we can match the clients to the kind of food they would like to try or the kind of pungency they can tolerate. The same applies for virtually everything else; if we find, for example, that a group of travellers is finding our hikes a trifle hard, we discuss altering the trekking routes to make them shorter or easier. During the first few days of the tour, we focus on getting acquainted with the travelling companions, and then be ready to change some things depending on the personal sensibilities of the travelling group. We also carry sufficient delicacy local foodstuffs with us in the vehicle; this is free, something to snack on when driving from one location to the next. We work in this manner because we believe that it doesn’t matter if we do a little less money if the clients end up happier in the end. 

Reasonable Prices

For the kind of service we offer, and the kind of authentic destinations where we go, our prices are remarkably low by international standards. However, we do face the vagaries of operating in out-of-the-way places. One of the quirks of travel is that the further one travels from cities and civilisation, and the further one travels from the famous tourist sights, the larger the logistical expenses and the local expenses. In remote areas, anything imported – like fuel, food, and so on – is actually more expensive due to the transport cost of having things trucked in (or flown in) as well as the small economies of scales. But for the places you will get to know, the new knowledge you will gain, and the experience you will carry with you for the rest of your life, you would be paying modestly. We also operate a system of flexible arrangements and dynamic prices for private groups or individual travellers; by making use of this system, you can considerably affect the price and level of luxury – for more on this policy, see Dynamic Pricing.

Environmental Conscience

There is one thing we don’t compromise with: the environment. We’re passionate about nature conservation, and we ensure that our tours are exemplary in environmental sensitivity. In a larger way, by organising tours to wilderness areas at the edge of tourism circuits and in places where culture survives intact, we hope to set a positive example and inspire others to emulate our type of meaningful tourism. Many of the places we visit are at the vanguard of eco-tourism, and we hope to strengthen the fledgling tourism industries so that local inhabitants – and government planners – would have an economic incentive in preserving wilderness and preserving local cultures. We are proud that local people or farmers gain an extra stream of income from our operations. It gives them some financial comfort, psychological fortitude, and pride in their culture. And we treat them with respect: we don’t want tourists to intrude into their personal space and objectify their frailty or poverty as ‘exotic subjects’ to take pictures of.

Transparent Prices

If you peruse the websites – or printed marketing material – of many tour operators you will find that in many cases you find prices ‘starting from…’ Starting from in that case means the lowest possible price for a fully-booked standard tour and often not including hidden costs such as national insurance, entry fees, and so on. Then you often find that, when the sales people feel you’re sufficiently hooked, that the price shoots up. This is marketing gimmickry, and we don’t like this nonsense – we don’t want to waste your time or our time in false hope. So the prices we quote are the highest possible price for the default tour for two participants, and we don’t even bother to quote the lowest ‘starting from’ price. There are also no extra costs: the prices we quote cover everything except extra personal expenses such as shopping, as well as international travel insurance, which is obligatory on our tours. And just as our prices are transparent, so is everything else in our operation - what you see in this website and how we conduct out tours. 

Larger Picture

There’s more to the places where we go than what’s apparent at first glance. We deal with local people – not simply local colour that makes good pictures – and we engage these local people not only to give us a service, but in a spirit of mutual learning and benefits. A local guide might take you trekking by day, and in the evening he or she will then also share a beer or friendship yarns with you. We’re also passionate about food: we believe that one of the highlights of travel in Asia – and an essential manifestation of Asian cultures – is the cuisine. So we put value on the experience of food in our travels. Ideally, we want you to feast on the local cuisine, as we do. We do give you a choice however; if you can’t tolerate spicy food, we’ll ask the cook to go easy on the chilli, and if you’re a vegetarian then we’ll go out of our way to find the best vegetarian food we can source in the area. When you book one of our tours, we’ll send you a checklist that will then help us tailor food requirements – as well as other things – to your particular sensibilities.