Dianne Sharma-Winter Writes:

Every cloud has a silver lining, sometimes even gold.

This belief had sustained me through the first month of a course of training in Ayurveda in a small-unexplored area of Kerala, India’s premier state for the practice and study of this ancient science.

Even though I was aware that one-month course would barely scratch the surface of the vast ocean of knowledge that is Ayurveda, I was more interested in learning about the practical forms of massage and herbal treatments to adapt to my own massage practice in New Zealand.

I have lived and travelled in India for many years and always avoided the courses offered specifically for tourists. My reasoning is that the marketing of the mystical east doesn’t always come with a quality control certification. Also, there is always bound to be a cross-cultural confusion. Students from the west want to be explained why the east is east and how they can cross the ocean of western ideology to the east. That can take a lot of class time.

So before I enrolled on the course, I had an understanding that in terms of Indian society and caste, someone who earned their money in this way was somewhat lower on the social scale than the doctor who supervised the treatments. The idea of rich white women arriving to learn what is not such a well-respected job could result in some cultural and professional confusion, at least that was the risk I knew I was taking.

It proved to be correct, so I won’t dwell on the details of my course of learning there. While the doctor who delivered the lectures seduced me into learning and adopting the practices of Ayurveda into my life, I found the practical classes in the afternoon less than useful.

There was a lack of boundaries between some student and the instructor based on this cultural confusion added a lack of respect or dignity offered to anyone who offered to be a massage model. One woman would practice the massage movements accompanied by her pseudo orgasmic moans that she thought the model should have been exuding instead of whimpers of embarrassment.

By the time the end of the week began to loom, I would make plans to put as much distance between myself and my classmates as possible.

Malabar Gold

I took it upon myself to begin to explore this little visited part of Kerala and learn a bit about the place. While I was unhappy with my course, the locals looked friendly and their food was sublime.

When I first arrived in Kannur, I had gone to the Kannur Beach house, a lovely home stay run by Rosie and her husband Hazzir. They gave up careers in Singapore to come back to their home place to open up the heritage house they had bought on the beach when after tourists began to knock and ask for rooms. Sensing that tourism could be a viable income and lifestyle for them, Rosie and Hazzir relocated their family back to Kannur and opened the Beach House. They are both wonderful and stimulating conversationalists and the most charming of hosts. Their business has paid off for them although rose admits that their parents living nearby both still ask them when they are going back to Singapore to get a real job. Meals are superb and Rose will go out her way to organise anything you may wish.

Kalarippayattu- a divine martial art

Olivier, a dancer from Paris who photographed every meal that was set before us in the guest house had come to Kannur especially to see two things, the ritual festival of the Theyyam and the oldest form of martial art in the world, the Kalarippayattu.

He was disappointed to hear that his schedule didn’t allow him to stay another day for the Theyyam but Rosie had organised for him to go to a local dojo to watch a training. We set off in a rickshaw along rutted roads, got out and walked when the hill got too steep, followed a path through coconut tree lined paths to a humble mud and hut which was the dojo.

There were kids of all ages tumbling around on a hard dirt floor, an altar set in the corner and a wiry looking black belt Master standing around.

The training began with an elaborate offering to the deity in the corner, including some amazing body movements which were something like a karate kata but a hundred times faster and more elaborate. Then the real fun began! The leading fighter in this dojo was the twelve year old daughter of the master himself, she fended off four boys at one stage and leapt and jumped so fast that our cameras could only catch a blur. Having studied the Chidokan form of karate for many years in New Zealand, I recognised forms from that style echoed in the movements of these kids on the hard dirt floor.

We were impressed to the point of having tears in our eyes, thanked the kids for their performance and left like kids who had shared a secret world as we oohed and ahhhed and giggled our way back to the rickshaw.

But there was more to come

Theyyam

That night as Olivier headed off to the airport I took a rickshaw in the opposite direction to a village square where there was to be a performance of a Theyyam.

Seems that the origin of the Theyyam has been lost in the mists of time, so ancient is the practice. In more recent times, Theyyam have evolved into the form it is now because of the lower caste people being barred from entry to Hindu temples. Nothing daunted, they created their own individual forms of worship and celebration the most spectacular of which is the Theyyam.

Every village will tell their story in a different way but the event is staged around a story of the Hindu gods or a local god, as the story is enacted the dancers take on the paint and the part of the god in an elaborate ritual which happens back stage while the crowds mill about and picnic and pass babies around, all waiting patiently for the moment to come.

When the dancer who has been ritually prepared observes his face in the mirror he is said to become at that moment a vessel of the god, then he is lead out in a costume of flames and towering headdresses.

Impervious to the fact that half of his costume is on fire, he runs and leaps and his eyes roll wildly, he has two bodyguards on either side to protect his physical body.

Eventually things calm down and the god is bought to again, People line up to make offerings and ask for blessings or advice.

By five in the morning, the excitement is over and people start dwindling back to their homes, I find the rickshaw wallah and go home with my head full of sparks. Imagine that kind of ceremony in the days before electricity, before television, before we all got so sophisticated! It would have scared the living daylights out of most kids!

Early morning at the chai stall

To be closer to the course of study, I moved into the township of Kannur. It’s rare to see another foreigner here who isn’t here to study Ayurveda or the Martial Art, most of the food is local and it’s difficult to get a meal in the evening. The locals are big on breakfasts though, I begin, a pre-breakfast ritual with the owner of the place where I take a room Mr Rajan Kumar.

We both wake early and it’s cooler outside my room than in. We both share some hot water together, and then I make coffee while he gets himself ready.

Then together we drive to a local chai stand where locals in the know await the early morning delivery of hot vada, crunchy fried round doughy bite of delight. Usually taken with sweet milky chai

He smokes and we watch groups of locals all out in the early morning air walking for their health. We laugh at ourselves for being so lazy and keep promising that one morning we will walk to the chai stand for our fried bread and cigarette but we never do.

By the time we have returned to the house, Rajan’s sister has prepared breakfast tradition style. Every day brings a new delight, a new way to eat rice or banana or coconut.

Evening meals create a bit of a problem; so I go to a local Muslim dhaba and order whatever is vegetarian on that day. They make a wonderful little sweet that I can never seem to get enough of and I end my meal of curry and rice and curly crunchy paratha with that.

The men who eat there are mostly workers from nearby building sites and the meals are slapped down on tin plates, Hot water laced with Ayurvedic spices is served all over North Kerala is a healthy alternative to icy cold water. I begin to get a taste for it, the heat and the herbs reassure me as to its safety.

Backwater Bliss

The next weekend I set out for an overnight float in a boat in the little known Valiyaparamba or Bekal Backwaters is in the far north of Kerala in the district of Karsagood.

Bekal was once the opening for the spice trade route, its wide river stretched from the forests where pepper grew in wild indigenous abundance and the dreamland of early Arab explorers. Pepper was then the valuable Malabar Gold; in Europe it often doubled as currency in the height of its dizzy rise to the top of the tradable. The Portuguese were the first to wrest control of the monsoon soaked forests of Malabar from the Arabs, after came the Dutch and the English. Forts dot the northern coastline, canons still perch like hopeful overs on aging battlements. Bekal Fort is one of the most impressive examples of forts in India. The Karsagood district is only a short train ride from Kannur. The owner Jaganath meets me at a local station.

He seems a little sorry for me to be having a houseboat to myself. I tell him I am more than happy to be out of town, on water and with the cool ocean breeze in my hair. There are two men on the boat to take care of my every need which seemed a bit extreme but I was too charmed by the boat and the watery landscape ahead to be bothered by aloneness, I just revelled in it!

The food continued to delight and confirms my opinion that South Indian food is one of the most delightful cuisines in the world. The staff are unobtrusive and discreet, I laze and watch the world float by in shades of green. Islands interconnected by bridges and roads form a system of four rivers where mail and bread is delivered by boat, where fishermen repair their nets against the sea that pounds one island in the distance. We get off and walk through preserves of forests hiding the very herbs I was learning about in Ayurveda and coconuts drying on the beach, covered in nets to keep the birds away.

As I drifted off to sleep there was the sound of the pounding of drums from a village Theyyam, there was the resounding echo of the sea and the quiet creak of the boat as it listed lazily with the tide.

The next weekend I took the evening train to Goa where I had planned to meet a friend. The train was air-conditioned and the conductor promised to wake me when the train halted briefly at Canacona so I could leap off at the station closest to Palolem, the beach where I like to stay in South Goa.

Its not always a good idea to arrive in India anywhere at that hour but I was encouraged to think there might be some rickshaw action when I spotted some tourists obviously waiting for a train. Eventually one arrived with another two passengers for the train yet to arrive. He charged me outrageously but I didn’t complain. I was happy to know that my pre arranged room would be open and all I would have to do was walk in and go to sleep.

Kannur is so centrally located; I think to myself that it’s amazingly still unexplored. Most tourists to Kerala head straight to the south, which is just as fine, but Kannur still has that untouched kind of feeling. I was beginning to feel that I was on a journey of how many places can you reasonably visit from the township of Kannur for a lovely weekend break?

The Western Ghats

With nothing left to do but head for the hills, I did exactly that. Booked myself into Wynberg Resort in the tea and spice growing highlands, an area called Wayanad in the Western Ghats of Kerala. This area shares a border with Tamil Nadu and though the distance from Kannur to Wayanad is short, the road is steep and winds through ancient forests.

Mr Rajan had offered to drop me by car on his way to Bangalore but the plans fell through at the last moment and I decided to go by bus.

Wynberg Eco Resort

As the bus wound itself around the hillside in spirals that rose like the pepper vines around the Western Ghats, I began to wish I had taken a car. That this would have been the wisest course of action was confirmed when I got to the assigned place to meet the owner of the resort and than had to go halfway back by local bus! But after another mere twelve or so kilometres in a rickshaw and I was there and being welcomed into my little eco hut at the Wynberg Resorts.

Lunch is served and as I eat the owner’s daughter arrives home from school and introduces herself. She is wonderful self-assured and an uninhibited conversationalists. She takes me on a walk around the property built by her father Vanchy who is a wildlife enthusiast and photographer

He is also a bit of an eco warrior; the resort has organic gardens, a methane plant and runs on solar power.

Within half an hour I am bamboozled by the girls knowledge of the plants and the jungles around her that my pen could hardly keep up with her flow of information.

Although the resort edges both the National Park of Nagahole and the Nature Reserve area of Tholpetty both areas had suffered fires and were closed to the public at that time. Apart from swinging idly in my hammock beneath towering acrea nut trees, I took a day to drive around and sightsee. A brief sweep of the brilliant green curve of tea gardens, the impressive 13th Century Jain temple at Sultan’s Battery, where a man explained how the construction of the Jain was involved cosmic alignments amongst other things. The ancient rock art atop a winding staircase built into a limestone mountain at Edakkal Caves are said to date from the stone age.

North Kerala the land of loom and lore is the ancient enigmatic India from every fact. There is the legacy of the various nations they traded with and still do today, there are ancient traditions and secret people flashing in the monsoon soaked forests and a cosmopolitan lot of locals.

As we flashed around the countryside, where wild elephants can and will roam freely across the road there was glimpses of the “tribal” people. These are the descendants of the original Dravidian race of people and ‘very secret people” said my driver.

Such is North Kerala, a secret place just waiting to be discovered!

Diannes websites:

• http://diannesharmawinter.com/
• http://diannesharmawinter.com/blog.html

“How many times have you been travelling and visited a school or community or local charity that you would love to help? The school needs books, or a map or pencils; an orphanage needs children’s clothes or toys. All things that, if only you’d known, you could’ve stuffed in your rucksack. But once you get home you forget, or you’ve lost the address, or worry that whatever you send will be stolen before it even gets there…”

Kate Humble did not just wonder, she has done something about it and set up a website to help you know what best to stuff your rucksack with, when you travel. StuffYourRucksack.com

I travelled to Morocco with Venus Adventures and part of that trip was to stay with a berber family in the Atlas mountains.  Our guide Julie Paterson suggested what we should take to share – pens, paper, jewellery, soccer balls.  It was great to be able to share something from our rucksacks with this small community.  As the sun went down and the snow threatened, I spent a memorable hour in a candlelit room with an 8 year old girl trying  on jewellery and making shadow puppets on the wall.  No word of language in common, but a world shared.

The idea of volunteering in another country has long been considered the province of students and recent graduates; images of intrepid twenty-year-old Peace Corps workers in a remote Sierra Leone village might spring to mind. Today, however, the idea has reached far beyond that to become accessible, and highly popular, among travelers of all types and ages. Volunteer travel has grown so popular that a term has even been coined for it: Voluntourism.

Foreign destinations are luring American citizens who want to sightsee, while at the same time engage in community service. Companies and websites specializing in voluntourism have sprung up by the hundreds, and volunteer vacations can be found in all parts of the world, doing all kinds of activities – from digging wells for clean water in South America, protecting the elephant population in South Africa, or working with children living in orphanages.

It was this last type of volunteer vacation that hooked me – in fact, inspired me to write a book about my experiences. In 2004, I became involved with a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas called The Miracle Foundation, which manages orphanages in India and recruits sponsors and donors to support the children living there. I began volunteering for the foundation and sponsored a child, a ten year old boy named Santosh, living in the state of Orissa in northeastern India. The founder of the organization, soon invited me to accompany her and a group of other volunteers to Orissa. And so it was that in March 2005, I found myself in India for the first time – a ten-day volunteer trip that I was to make, it turned out, many more times over the years since.

The village is remote, and it took forty-eight hours of exhausting travel to arrive at the ashram where the children live. By the time we arrived, all ten volunteers in the group were suffering from sleep deprivation and culture shock; the overwhelming throngs of people, the smells and sounds that awakened all the senses at once. The streets filled with bicycles, rickshaws, cars and cows with the constant, blaring beep-beep of the horns that rose above it all. Mostly, the frantic poverty that does not let you rest.

Caroline had briefed us well on both India and expectations for our week at the orphanage, but nothing could have prepared me for what I felt when we turned through those gates. Dozens of children were lined around the drive in a semi-circle, waving and chanting “welcome” over and over. I climbed out and they swarmed all over me, reaching for my hands and touching my feet in blessing. I was overwhelmed, lost in the sea of small bodies; smiling, barefoot children who asked nothing from me more than simply being there.

As I would soon come to find, in India these “invisible children” are everywhere – they fill the streets, the railway stations, the villages. Others have been trafficked or taken into indentured labor to pay off an old family debt. They are orphaned by AIDS and malaria, simple infections or sometimes, nothing more than poverty – their parents cannot afford to feed them. Many are homeless, overflowing orphanages and other institutional homes to live on the streets. Amidst the growing prosperity of India there is an entire generation of parentless children growing up, often forced into child labor and prostitution – more than twenty-five million in all.

But there in Choudwar, a small town about a hundred miles south of Calcutta, one man named Damodar Sahoo had dedicated his life to providing a home and family for some of these children. Before The Miracle Foundation, he had constantly lacked enough food, clothing and supplies to adequately provide for those he had taken in – children who had nowhere else to turn.

Mr. Sahoo, known to everyone simply as “Papa,” greeted the volunteers heartily, chewing the betel nut that turned his teeth red. He gave us a tour of the compound while the children trailed us, rushing past each other to claim a volunteer’s hand. They were everywhere, always underfoot, craving our attention. As I walked along four or five clung to each arm; when I sat down they filled my lap, their slight frames making barely an imprint against my skin.

I spent the following days just being with the kids, befriending them, playing with them. Our days at the ashram were filled with games, reading, dancing and laughing. It felt a lot like summer camp. There were puzzles, English flash cards, hopscotch, frisbee and the hokey-pokey, which the children wanted to do over and over once it was taught to them. I began to discover who they were – their individual personalities and dreams. I watched the shy ones come out of their shells and self-confidence blossom.

As it did, their “best behavior” fell away and they were normal kids, not always sweet and perfect but often mischievous as well. When they thought I wasn’t looking, they would shove each other out of the way or bestow thunks on one another’s heads in annoyance. They used the language barrier to their advantage, pretending at times not to understand when the adult volunteers said it was time to put a game away, reminding me of my daughter when she was young and seemingly deaf to the word “no.”

We began to make friends, and I discovered that they were just as curious about us and our lives as we were about them. The kids spoke varying levels of English, largely dependent on how many years they had been living in the ashram and attending school. Some had a large vocabulary and conversational skills; others spoke little more than a few words of English. I found it was surprisingly easy, however, to communicate without sharing even a word of common language.

In many ways they were just like other children I’ve known with homes and families of their own – except for their neediness, their raw hunger for affection, love, belonging. In the midst of the games, laughter and silliness that we engaged in all day long it became almost easy for me to forget that they were orphans. When that reality came crashing back it never failed to hurt my insides with the same breathless intensity as it had the first time. Especially when it intruded unexpectedly, as happened one afternoon.

Caroline and Papa had arranged an ice cream party. Two tables were pulled into the courtyard as the frozen cartons were delivered. The kids lined up eagerly from youngest to oldest to be handed their paper cups of ice cream as we scooped it out in a battle of time against the sun blazing overhead. As we served the icy treats and listened to the kids slurping away, I noticed that Santosh, the boy I sponsored, was nowhere to be seen. I asked some of the other boys about him, and they pointed toward the top of the stairs.

I went up and found him sitting alone, seeming sad and listless. He wasn’t interested in the ice cream. A house mother named Madhu passed, and I asked her to help me find out what was wrong; I was afraid Santosh was hurt, or sick. Madhu took him into the boys’ dorm and talked to him for several minutes.

“He misses his mother,” she said simply when she came back out.

I felt it in my heart, and knew that although they loved us being there it could sometimes only make them miss the presence of their own parents. The good of all these caring surrogate parent figures – Papa, Caroline, the house mothers, the volunteers – outweighed the heaviness of sorrow, to be sure. But it was easy to miss the sadness, at times, in the presence of love that filled the ashram. I was reminded anew that these children all carried secret grief and damage inside them, often hidden or temporarily forgotten but never erased entirely.

I sat with Santosh on the edge of the concrete walkway outside his dorm room. Draping my arm around his shoulders I squeezed reassuringly and held him against my side. I knew that his mother had died when he was so young he couldn’t possibly remember her, not really; but to mourn the idea of a mother, that huge absence in his life like a great gaping hole – that was another thing completely. We sat together, not speaking, while in the courtyard in front of us the other children slurped up their ice cream noisily.

Shelley Seale has written for National Geographic, The International Ecotourism Society and The Voluntourist, among others, and is a contributing author to The Voluntary Traveler. She is also the author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, which tells the true stories of some of the inspiring children she met on her journeys through the orphanages, streets and slums of India.

The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India

The Voluntary Traveler

What intrigued me most was the “Ayahuasca ceremony”. Ayahuasca is a Quechua word meaning “vine of the soul,” and is a powerful, vile-tasting drink made from a jungle vine. The shamans use it as way of unraveling the self, and it is supposed to be able to cure anything, from physical illness (like cancer) to psychological pain (depression) – or put simply, it is a good way to clean up any baggage, big or small, in your life… I felt like fate had thrown an unusual opportunity onto my path.

You have to be brave to take Ayahuasca because of what you may face. Visions, hallucinations and vomiting are all part of it – it cleans you from the inside out. But whether your experience after drinking Ayahuasca is scarey or not, depends on how many demons you have to purge out of your mind, body and soul. You may face all sorts of past trauma, self-destructive beliefs, or emotions. One thing is for sure though: the end result is always positive. Now I am not a kook, or a recreational drug-taker, but what convinced me to do it was a positive National Geographic article about Ayahuasca on the internet. It turned out to be the most mind-blowing, fascinating and beautiful experience of my life.

I had fasted all day to prepare myself for the ceremony that night. Myself, 3 shamans, and Angel my translator were seated on cushions, with vomit buckets in front of us. The shamans puffed away on jungle pipes, preparing themselves for the long night ahead. I was given a cup of Ayahuasca – disgusting, brown, fermenting sludge, which I gulped down very reluctantly. Lights were turned out and the shamans started to sing icaros (ancient spirit songs) to me. Their voices vibrated and reached high or low notes effortlessly, and each voice sounded like at least two people – truly beautiful to listen to, they sounded like angels. I could feel myself float off to another realm, their voices carrying me like a drifting feather to another world.

After about 20 minutes I vomited up the Ayahuasca, which is part of the bodily cleansing. In some strange way it felt good to get it out of me, all sorts of toxins seemed to come out. I started to have trouble breathing. I am not asthmatic, but have suffered odd stress-related breathing difficulty in the past couple of years. The shamans told me not worry, it would pass. It did. Twenty minutes later my lungs felt 10 times bigger and I was gulping deep breaths. Amazing.

Eventually I began to hallucinate, seeing fluorescent colours and cartoon-like insects swirling around me. I watched them, as they closed in on me, trying to suppress me, constricting my body. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I asked. I got the message back that it was negative energy attached to me, and to flick it off. I did, and it all disappeared. The shamans believe negative energies are actually spirits who attach themselves to you to create trouble.

Then the visions started. People and events came into my mind, things that had happened in my past that I needed to make peace with. In my mind I would ask questions – why this or that happened, why this person had been in my life. For every question I asked, I got a very clear, precise message back. It was like having a direct phoneline to God. Anything I asked about my past, present or future, I was advised on.

The whole ceremony lasted around 8 hours, with the shamans taking turns to sing to me as I worked though my past. I was visited my deceased friends, I found answers to many questions, and I felt an intense bliss. Now, several weeks later I still feel the positiveness and relief of old baggage gone. I feel privileged to have been part of an ancient ceremony and to have listened to the amazing, beautiful icaros, and I know I will go back to do another ceremony to open my mind to bigger things.

Keep an eye on Venus Adventures website for a future trip to Peru!!!

Julie Paterson Venus Adventures – Global Trips for Women who Love to Travel

Our Motto:  “Life is uncertain – eat cake!” Venus Adventures specializes in women-only holidays and short breaks to fascinating destinations:  Morocco, Egypt, India, Ethiopia,Turkey, Mali, Jordan, Vietnam, New Zealand

We were in Iquitos, where our trip had kicked off – an oddly large city set within the Amazon jungle, connected to the outside world only by boat or air – no road comes to Iquitos. A thin, long boat transported us 140km upstream to where we were to have our Amazon jungle experience. A twitchers paradise, we spotted many familiar birds on the banks along the way – terns, herons, king fishers and cormorants. It was exciting to be going into the wilds of the Amazonas and not know what lay before us.

Arriving at our eco-lodge, we had a delicious lunch, were given half hour to rest, before we were whisked into the nearby jungle with our jungle guide Moises, to see what creatures we might find. It is not easy to spot animals at the best of times with 5 noisey, gumbooted gringos behind you, but in the heat of the day the jungle is pretty quiet as most animals are resting.

And who can blame them, the heat was incredible, the humidity high, and we were all dripping with sweat. Siesta sounded like a good idea, but first we had to complete our 3 hour jungle march. We were rewarded with distant views of monkeys high in trees, as well as close views of the tiny pygmy marmoset monkey, darting around a mahogany tree and sucking on the sap. They are so cute! I so wanted to stick one on my finger, but we weren’t in the zoo. Oh well. We also saw a very large tarantula, fortunately high up in a tree. Moises said it was a rosey-haired one. As opposed to a pink-toed one. A tarantula with pink toes? That I had to see…

And we did – that night…when Moises dragged us out on our night hike to look for creepy crawlies in the dark…we found 2 pink-toed tarantulas sitting on palm trees, and at close range (ie, I could have stroked one if I was foolish enough). I would almost go as far as to say that a tarantula with pink toes is kinda cute.

However there was nothing cute about the piranha we went fishing for in a side-river the following day. Moises met us 5.45am for our next activity on the agenda of Jungle Boot Camp. Catching piranha. Me being a vego, I just took photos of the others folly, dipping their bait in the water off their bamboo rods, and trying to flick the piranha out of the water before he’d taken all the bait.

The fun part was watching everyone try and get those vicious little gnashers off the hook. With a dozen caught, we were allowed to go back to the lodge, where the piranha were cooked up by the chef for lunch. Jungle Boot Camp was turning into Fear Factor! I was assured by the others that the prinaha actually tasted ok, they just weren’t very meaty.

The heat was still a big issue for us, it just seems to sap all your gringo energy. That and the fact that we had activities before and after breakfast, lunch and dinner. No wonder we were pooped. All I wanted to do was strip off my long sleeves, long pants and gum boots and throw myself into the nearest river, piranhas or not.

Finally we got our chance when Moises took us by boat back into the main flow of the Rio Amazonas. No free lunch though, first we had to do an hours worth of fresh-water dolphin spotting. I could handle that. The wide, quiet, and very murky waters of the Amazon river revealed a couple of pink dolphins with unusually short dorsal fins, and also a couple of smaller grey dolphins. Awesome!

Then, finally our moment had come. Moises assured us that the brown colour of the Amazon was just silt and minerals from the snowy Andes mountains, and that swimming would be fine – like we needed convincing to get in? Splash! we were in being swept along by the current, loving the refreshing feeling. A boat came along with a Peruvian film crew on board – they had spotted a pod of five pink-faced tourists in the Amazon river and came over to get a shot.

It was time to go back to the lodge for our final yummy lunch, before our longish journey back to Iquitos. As we ate, the next lot of new “jungle campers” arrived with fresh smiles and clean gumboots. We smirked to each other as we knew what lay before them. Lunch over, hot and tired, we gladly boarded the boat home, enjoying the cooling breeze of the boat. Back in Iquitos, “Jungle Boot Camp”, was officially over…mmmh cool drinks and fans! But we had just spent three very full days in the Amazon jungle – how fantastic is that!

By Julie Paterson      Venus Adventures – Global Trips for Women

Their motto:  “Life is uncertain – eat cake!”
Venus Adventures specializes in women-only holidays and short breaks to fascinating destinations:   Morocco, Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Turkey, Mali, Jordan, Vietnam, New Zealand

If someone told you that you could visit the places you’ve always dreamed about visiting and that you could do it whilst paying nothing for your accommodation, you’d ask them whether they had a: accidentally swallowed those mystery green pills that had been gathering dust on top of the fridge for the last two years, or b: finally cracked up worrying about their psychology dissertation? You definitely wouldn’t be expecting that they were stone cold sober and telling the truth. A few months ago you probably would have been right, but that was a few months ago…before helpandhost.

Its a new kid on the block for resources for volunteer travel, but I think I can see its niche and where it can grow to.

Someone has dropped out, and there is room for one lucky woman to join this trip – especially the week sailing in the Galapagos.

More information on Ecuador Trip: Face Book Skigrlz Website

We are proud to announce that National Geographic Adventure Magazine rated us as one of the Best Adventure Tour Operators on the Planet, including one of the Top River and Sea Outfitters, for service, education, sustainability and spirit of adventure. We’ve been green since our beginnings in 1985, and we’re still doing our best to protect the places we visit.

Moments in Time

Lyn Baker the founder of Tiger Travel spent many years travelling extensively throughout India as a professional photographer  – she has an eye for the country, for its people and its culture.

The idea of sharing India with small groups of women travellers seemed a great way of adding to her relationship with India.  So Tiger Travel was born.

“The empthasis during our women’s holidays is on sharing our taste for adventure with you as a traveller and not as a tourist! In addition by keeping our travel groups small a personal touch is maintained in order to enhance the feeling of independent travel. It also enables us to take you to the more remote areas in an eco-friendly and sympathetic manner.”  Lyn Baker

CHECK OUT Lyn’s LATEST BOOK MOMENTS IN TIME
(available from www.blurb.com)

Women Travel for Peace brought five intrepid women to Senegal to work with local farming women. Together we built a well for the women’s farming plot. As a result of our contribution, the local women now have water year-round to farm their crops, and they are able to work a shorter workday. When you work 365 days a year under the African sun, a shorter workday makes a vast difference.

- check it out

There is no easy solution – simply to stop travelling will have enormous economic impact on small communities for whom travellers provide a major economic boost to the local community. In New Zealand – tourism is set to overtake exports as New Zealand’s top export earner. There is also the potential to put an economic benefit to forests not being cut down, because of the benefit in terms of tourism.

On the other hand tourism is a major contributor to climate change through the cost of flying, increasing numbers are seeing the degradation of pristine environments.

One solution that is growing is the kind of travel that has a lighter impact on the land, and includes a great cultural engagement with local people, and adds value to the country we are passing through. So the growth of Volunteering, and work in exchange for board – systems that have been pioneered by the Wwoofing movement – Willing workers on Organic Farms.

I have just come across a new network – Work Away - gap year and volunteer in exchange for food and accommodation