Mechanisms, not slogans

Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos have limited plastic collection outside the main cities, and a tour vehicle handing out two small bottles per person per day across a fortnight generates roughly 350 bottles for a group of twelve. That is the thing to fix first because it is entirely within our control.

• Every vehicle carries a 20-litre refill container. Guests are asked to bring a reusable bottle; if you do not have one, we give you one at the start of the trip and it is yours to keep.
• Where the refill container is not practical — long boat days, multi-day treks — we carry larger bottles rather than small ones, which cuts the plastic by about three quarters for the same water.
• We ask our hotels not to place small bottles in the rooms of our guests, and most now comply. Where a hotel refuses, we tell you which one it was rather than quietly absorbing it.
• Picnic lunches on trekking and boat days are packed in reusable containers carried out and back. No cling film, no polystyrene boxes, no plastic cutlery.
• Rubbish from vehicles and boats comes back to a town with a collection system rather than being left at a rural stop. On the Mekong and in Lan Ha Bay this is a firm rule for our boat crews.

What we do not claim: we are not plastic-free. Hotel amenities, restaurant straws and roadside purchases are outside our control, and a page that claimed otherwise would be lying.

The tak bat, the dawn alms round in Luang Prabang, is the clearest case in the region of a religious practice damaged by the way it is watched. Monks walk before sunrise to receive food. Coaches now arrive at 05:30, visitors stand in the line with flashguns, and food of the wrong kind is sold to tourists to hand over.

Our position, applied to every guest:

1. We brief you the evening before, not at the roadside five minutes beforehand. The briefing is ten minutes and it covers why this matters.
2. If you come, you watch from the opposite side of the street, seated or standing back, at a distance where a normal lens does not reach a face. No flash, ever.
3. We do not buy food for guests to offer. If you wish to give alms, our guide will explain how it is properly prepared and where, and most guests decide not to once they understand it.
4. We do not schedule the alms round as a fixed itinerary item for a group. It is offered, individually, to those who want it.
5. The same rule applies everywhere else: ask before photographing a person, accept no as an answer, and do not photograph inside a working temple where a service is taking place.

We would rather a guest skipped the tak bat entirely than attended it badly, and we say so.

We do not take guests to orphanages, residential children's homes or schools as a visit. This is not a soft preference.

• Orphanage tourism has created a demand that, across the region, has been met by recruiting children who have living parents. A stream of paying visitors is the funding model, and the visits are the product.
• A rotation of strangers through a residential setting is harmful to children regardless of the visitors intentions, and no child in that position can meaningfully refuse to be photographed.
• School visits interrupt teaching for the benefit of the visitor, and the gifts that usually accompany them set up a pattern of children approaching foreigners for things.
• We ask guests not to hand out sweets, money or pens to children at roadsides and in villages, and our guides will say so at the first opportunity it arises rather than afterwards.

If you want your money to reach children in the places you travel through, we will name specific registered organisations working on family-based care and education in each country, and you can give to them directly. We take nothing from that, and we do not build a visit around it.