Nominations are open for the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards 2008, founded and organised by responsibletravel.com with UK media partners Telegraph Travel and Geographical Magazine, and World Travel Market, hosting the Awards ceremony in November 2008 in London. The deadline for the nominations is Monday 16 June.

Justin Francis, founder of Responsibletravel, announced that there are 13 categories this year including, for the first time, Best Responsible Cruise Operator. He said: ‘the cruise and ferry industry has received a great deal of attention recently concerning its impact on local environments and our aim is to encourage and reward positive and innovative changes’.

As I have commented on responsibletravel’s blog and Planeta’s Forum, I think the inclusion of this category in an award that ‘celebrates the future of travelling in a sensitive, sustainable way - that benefits local people and destinations’ is totally inappropriate. Even though some cruise operators are planning to improve their energy efficiency and waste management, the industry is still one of the most unsustainable examples of tourism, both for its heavy impact on the environment and for its all inclusive formula.

Francis said that if there is not a credible ‘winner’ they will not make an Award in this category, which would make a statement in its own right. I am wondering what sort of credible winner they are looking for.

There has been a 30% increase of cruise holidays in the past year and I don’t think this growth should be encouraged any further. I am not against rewarding positive changes, but including this industry in a responsible tourism award might sound a bit like legitimating green-washing.

I am not sure also about the category ‘Best in a marine environment’ (awarding an organisation related to a beach or other marine environment, such as turtle conservation or a marine eco-tourism trip) being sponsored by Royal Caribbean…

It has been a long time since our last post, as it is not easy running a business and keeping up with everything while travelling, especially with the sometimes precarious Internet connections and most of our time spent on the road.

We are now at the end of our this long journey which lasted over 6 months - and as it always happens when you are doing something you like – I can not believe it is already March and that I am on my way back to Europe.

We have been travelling quite a few miles through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, visiting new destinations, discovering interesting lodging options, and getting in touch with local guides and small ecotourism operators to offer our customers a wider choice of options for planning their eco-holidays in Mexico and (soon) in other Central American countries.

I’d like to think I have a decent knowledge of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, and feel confident I can give good advice to customers looking to travel in these countries. I am also pleased that we could spend a reasonable amount of time in Honduras, being the only ‘new territory’ in our trip, which turned out to be a very pleasant discovery.

Our initial travel plan also included a trip to Nicaragua and maybe Panama, but while on the road we decided to travel at a much slower pace. This allowed us to get to know the locals and experience the different regions’ culture, food and rhythms.

I still can not believe the number of people we have met in these past months who were visiting 4 or 5 countries in 3 weeks, spending most of their time on buses and planes. Not to mention some travel companies who recruit as ‘tour leaders’ people who have been to a country ‘at least twice’ (maybe for a week each time?)

I would recommend to anyone to take a longer time off work whenever possible, travel less miles and gain a richer experience from every destination.

On that note, I will be doing my best to promote the ‘Travel Slow’ philosophy with all my clients (read more about it on Planeta.com), making it one of our aims for 2008. I will also continue following the ‘Do not swim with the dolphins’ campaign as well as looking further into government regulations on tourist development in environmentally sensitive areas (a post will be coming out soon on that so please continue to follow or subscribe to our blog if this interests you)

All this, together with the development of the new gloCal websites dedicated to Guatemala, Belize and Honduras should keep us busy for a while…

I am still not sure how I liked Isla Mujeres… good place to chill out, enjoy clear waters and superb seafood, but there is very little of the Island’s life which is not revolving around the tourism industry.

Things I liked:
- The island’s crystal turquoise waters
- The Tortugranja
- The many bike rentals for visiting the island
- The frequent boat rides by the Marine Park Guards checking the snorkelling guides’ credentials and the tourists’ behaviour on the reefs.

Things I could live with:
-The ‘young backpackers’ atmosphere
- A couple of eco-chic beach resorts built with some good taste and almost hidden in the vegetation.

Things I could have lived without:
- The many ‘rent a golf cart/scooter’ to visit the island
- Some entry fees to the beach, like Playa Tiburon, near the Garrafon Park.

Things I hated:
- Hacienda Mundaca‘s gardens (see Paul McMillan’s comments about it on gloCaltravelling)
- A few concrete resorts on the popular North beach (nothing like in Cancun but still visible scars on the island’s face).
- The huge number of ‘building sites’ for beach combos and holiday private villas leaving little portions of public beach access near Punta Sur.
- The contrast between the new built holiday villas and the ‘shanty-town’ near Punta Sur, clearly not a part of any public renovation plan.

If you have been around the Mayan Riviera you can not have missed the incredible amount of posters and leaflets advertising “Swim with the dolphins programs”. They are scattered around at every hotel reception, tourist information boot, café, bar and internet point. Not to mention the huge posters and boards promoting ‘eco-parks’ which display smiling ladies riding dolphins or cute kids patting their noses.

Luckily, I found a hotel displaying a leaflet by the Animal Welfare Institute titled “Dolphins are dying to amuse you – The truth about dolphin swim-with programs”. I wish I had seen it around more often.

I will summarize a few interesting points:

- Survivors of a brutal capture: Most performing dolphins are wild-caught, chased to exhaustion by power boats. They are ensnared in nets and hauled onto a capture vessel, or herded into shallow sea cages. A few die and the survivors endure hot sun and dehydration to their final destination: a void existence in a commercial facility.

- Taken from their families: Dolphins live in complex societies with their own cultures and dialects, maintaining close family ties. Individuals are violently removed with no hope of ever being reunited with their families. Young mothers, vital members of the community, are the most sought after.

- Forced to endure amputated lives: Captivity denies dolphins the ability to engage in species specific behaviours, such as swimming at 40 miles an hour and socializing. The stress of captivity and the lack of places to hide often results in stomach ulcers.

- Bored and aggressive: dolphins are naturally energetic, playful and inquisitive. But when tasked with entertaining tourists with no way to escape they often become bored and aggressive toward humans.

- An unnatural existence: wild dolphins do not ‘walk on water’, or jump through hoops or nod their heads on cue. These are forced artificial behaviours drilled by rote and food manipulation. The staple diet of captive dolphins is dead fish, a sad reality outside the wild.

If you love dolphins, please think twice before contributing to their capture and captivity.
You might assume dolphins’ perpetual smiles show contentment, but that is just how their faces are shaped; dead dolphins still ‘smile’.

Don’t swim with captive dolphins, let them stay wild.

It is no news that I do not like Cancun, and every time I see its lagoon and that amazing long stretch of Caribbean beach ruined by the concrete jungle of the Zona Hotelera I feel sooooooooo irritated.
I landed at Cancun airport a few days ago after quite a long trip and I did not have the energy to escape as far away as possible, as I usually do every time I visit the Yucatan peninsula.

After all, I am not in a hurry; I have decided that this trip to Mexico will be longer than my usual visits…
Furthermore, I have been receiving many requests by gloCal travellers asking me to recommend a convenient place to stay when they have a late arrival or early departure to and from Cancun airport.

Since staying in the Zona hotelera was out of question, I decided to check Cancun town, as I did not know it that well.
I heard there were a couple of places that were not bad, and I have indeed found a decent place to stay a couple of blocks from the Central bus station and just 5 minutes by taxi to Gran Puerto, where you can catch the ferry to Isla Mujeres.
The place is called El Rey del Caribe, and it is recommended by many travel guides, now also by me
The rooms are facing an inner garden with a lot of green, a nice fountain and a small swimming pool. It was nice to see many different garbage bins for collecting and recycling paper, glass, and plastic. The hotel also had a few leaflets about eco-policies and a very interesting one about the many ’swim with the dolphin programs’ which are advertised everywhere along the Mayan Riviera.

Thumbs up for El Rey del Caribe then, although I still would not recommend anyone to stay in Cancun. Once out of the hotel you will have to slalom amongst cars and taxis trying to get to the main road, the Avenida Tulum, which is noisy, polluted and does not offers much more than a few places to eat at quite high prices, some shops, and the inevitable local Burger King… or was it McDonalds?

Unless your flight leaves or lands at a ridiculous time, get out of there and go to Puerto Morelos instead (you can catch any bus to Playa del Carmen, there is one every 10 minutes and the journey to Puerto Morelos is only 35 mins from the airport).