| |
|
|
|
What is
The Day12 Project? |
|
|
About us
|
|
 |
Independent travel has become
very big business and The
Day12 Project
has been set up to address some of the environmental and ethical issues facing backpackers
(particularly the amount of money we
spend) and to provide a few solutions
to these issues. You can help
us by sending us your writing and photography,
joining the mailing list or even making a donation.
And at the bottom of the page, we answer the perennial
question of why it's called 'Day12'
anyway...
If
you know something we don't,
tell us at info@day12.com
|
|
What is the day12 project?
|
 The
Day12 Project
is a not-for-profit, multi-media travel resource run by
a group of writers, photographers, journalists, students,
teachers, promoters, DJs and
designers from around the world who are concerned about
the social and environmental impact of our journeys.
Day12.com was originally set up as an
online travel magazine to give talented backpackers the
opportunity to publish their writing and photography so
that we could try and work out what travel had become in
the forty years since the first hippy jumped in a Combi
and drove to Goa. As
we read, however, we found a movement which had grown far
beyond its origins, and discovered that the amount of money
being spent by backpackers, and the cash being invested
by businesses and governments to attract that spending power,
meant independent, youth, student, gap-year - whatever you
want to call it - travel had become a major industry; one
which was having a far greater environmental, social, cultural
and economic impact than we expected .
|
|
|
Problem
#1
We've
got too much money!
|
|
It may
not feel like it when you're near the end of your trip,
counting the pennies to see if you can afford a beer (or
a bed), but backpackers spend a fortune.
In 2003, according to the Australian
Tourism Commission
(ATC), 115,000 British
backpackers visited Australia.
The average gap-year traveller
spends around US$12,000 in
the twelve months they're on the road. Multiply
one number by the other and you have an industry worth well
over a billion dollars a year. And
that's just the Brits. The
Germans represent a similar
number. Then there are the
Dutch, Swedish,
Israelis, Irish, Aussies,
Kiwis, South
Africans - you get the picture. It's
a LOT of money.
It also became obvious that
there exists a huge gap between the philosophy of independent
travel; that of minimal damage, of learning something about
those places we visit, of a closer relationship with the
local people, and the economic realities of those countries
we frequent as backpackers. The
areas we visit and spend our money in are the very places
most in need of cash to aid their development, but around
70% of the money we spend leaves the area because the company
who owns your hotel isn't based locally, and may even be
based in another country (the travel industry calls it 'leakage').
Only a very small amount of
the money we spend benefits the people who live locally.
|
Please
dispose of your chewing gum sensibly
photo: Mircea
Mocanu
(Romania)
However,
we spend more during our stay in Australia
than the average Japanese business
traveller, which means we are also responsible for altering
the local economic infrastructure until tourism becomes
a 'mono-crop'. Imagine what
would happen if a tsunami hit Australia's
Gold Coast,
or Whitsunday Islands.
Before 26th December
2004, 74% of the economy of the Maldives,
and 64% of its employment, was based in tourism.
top
|
|
| |
|
Problem
#2
It's
all about numbers
Backpackers
are much more environmentally aware than their package tourist
counterparts but we do still have a profound impact on the
places we visit. Because
we fly Round-the-World
(all the way) we are responsible for a lot more CO2
than a family of four flying to Spain
for a fortnight (around 4 tonnes per backpacker per gap-year).
Thank
God they're not made of ivory!
|
On
the up-side, we don't stay in the large resorts and so don't
consume as much water and electricity as package tourists
(typically 28 times more water and 7 times more electricity
than a local inhabitant).
We
rely heavily on our guide books - and naturally so, people
have been using them since an Egyptian
compiled the first guide for merchants around AD50,
and they're bloody useful when you step off a delayed train
at two in the morning and need to find a hostel - but because
we are following the same route, we tend to visit the same
places - and their gift shops. When
you buy a bowl made from Kauri
wood, an endangered tree native to New
Zealand, it's not just your mate
back home who gets a little memento of your trip. There
are 115,000 Brits queueing up
behind you to buy the same bowl for their mates. That's
a lot of Kauri trees.
So
if our money doesn't help the places we visit, and we're drowning
the world in CO2
from our flights, not to mention the social and cultural impact
of our journeys, shouldn't we just stop travelling completely?
top
|
|
TRAVEL
IS IMPORTANT
"While
the world's politicians are picking fights, the world's
backpackers are meeting up on beaches and learning they
don't have any enemies." from FOOTNOTES
magazine
And that's where The
Day12 Project
begins.
To say we shouldn't travel
is to lose an opportunity. As
we step off a plane and start to learn more about the world,
the world learns more about itself. Our
money can support local employment, and it can
stay in the area, we just need to spend it in the right
places.
We need to learn how to travel
'responsibly'. See
our sustainable tourism made easy
section for a few ideas. Many
excellent definitions of 'responsible' travel exist but
at Day12 we're working on simple,
clickable solutions to the nagging questions that surround
our wanderlust. We also need
to be more vocal and support those charities and environmental
lobby groups who are working to minimise the social and
environmental repercussions of our journeys. At
The Day12
Project we have
big plans for the future of backpacking, but we need to
start somewhere.
Street
sign, New
Zealand
photo: Antje
Armbrust
(Germany)
top
|
|
Solutions
The Day12
Project has been
designed as a starting point for your journey. Somewhere
to research your trip, ask questions of those who have gone
before, advise those following in your footsteps and maybe
look outside your guide book for information on your next
destination. If you've just
got back from a trip, give future travellers the benefit
of your experience; write for the magazine or send us a
photo gallery. The
Day12 Project
has lots of plans up its collective sleeve to help you lessen
the impact of your journey, but let's start with something
simple -
|
|
|
Forest
in New
Zealand.
Nr.
Orcland
|
The many thousands
of guidebooks bought every year are not printed on recycled
paper but we can help you make
those essential 800 pages a little bit greener. If
you click through to online booksellers
amazon.co.uk from Day12.com
and buy your guidebook, a percentage of that sale comes straight back
to us (through a programme called Amazon
Associates). We
in turn donate that money to one of the organizations in our
trees section to
support forests, endangered tree species or carbon offset
programmes. That also goes for
anything you buy from Amazon
for your trip including mp3 players, CDs
and digital cameras. It's not
going to cost you any more than going to the shops (you'll
even save the bus fare) and you know that a percentage of what you
spend will be used to plant trees.
top
|
|
We
need your help
The social, economic and environmental
issues surrounding travel are enormous. As
backpackers we shouldn't be damaging the world in
the course of our journeys; we're much too aware of the
issues. Through our discussions
with backpackers we've come up with a solution and, with
your help, we can make a huge difference. Tell
your friends. Over the next
few months we'll be announcing lots of opportunities for
you to lessen the impact of your journey, most of them for
free (Sh! That
bit's still a secret), so if you're a writer or photographer,
a film-maker, graphic designer, web designer, musician,
journalist, promoter or DJ
we need your help to reach the many hundreds of thousands
of travellers there are out there. It's
time to shake the industry up a bit, and we need your talent
to do it.
We're not sure if we can honestly
say what travel 'is', we're not even sure we want to be
able to, but we do know that travel isn't about seeing that
monument or visiting that temple. Travel,
for us, is the excitement of stepping out of an airport
into a new city for the first time, but at The
Day12 Project,
we believe that what you do after that is, frankly, your
own business. Just don't forget
to write it down, or photograph it, and send the results
to us at info@day12.com
top
|
Whakatane,
New
Zealand
photo :
Joerg
Klenert
(New
Zealand)
|
|
|
The island of Koh
Samui, off the south-east coast
of Thailand, is typical of how
backpacking opens an area to mass tourism. Home
only to a small group of coconut farmers before the first
backpackers arrived in the 70s, it now has its own airport
and you can fly direct from Europe.
Backpackers rub shoulders with
package tourists on Chaweng Beach
and it's often difficult to see any difference between them.
As backpackers
we've noticed that there's a day, usually a couple of weeks
into a journey, when you realize you haven't thought about
home for 24 hours or so. You've
adjusted to the mid-day heat, or at least learned how to live
within its boundaries, the moment of doubt you experienced
as you waved goodbye at the airport seems laughable now as
you step into the luke-warm surf for a pre-breakfast swim.
You've shrugged off the conventions
of home and you're just travelling. Conversely,
we found that those people out on a two week package to Thailand
were already talking about home a couple of days before they
left. They were wondering how
the cat was. They were thinking
about 'popping into town' on Saturday.
They were already back at work!
And we, lying in our hammocks
with eleven and a half months of travelling ahead of us were
thinking, "We're only just
getting started!" There's
a moment, be it after twelve days, or ten, or more, when you
wonder if you'll ever need to carry more than you can fit
in a backpack ever again.
If you're looking
for an answer to the perennial question of whether you're
a tourist or a traveller, we think day 12, and its mindset,
might be it.
top
|
|
|
|
|
day12 magazine
