ETHICAL TRAVELLER:Catherine Mack on responsible tourism
I KNOW THAT Paris for St Valentine’s Day is a cliche, but it is so easy to fall in love there. As an ethical traveller I am also in love with Paris. I am spoiled, as I live in London and can therefore take a train – and there’s no better way to get to Paris than by Eurostar.
Have a quick glass of bubbly at the champagne bar in the magnificent St Pancras International station and, three hours later, you can do the same in the centre of Paris. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s worth a trip to London just to experience it.
For ecofriendly accommodation, stay in a wooden lodge surrounded by forest in Versailles, 20 minutes by train from central Paris. It’s run by my favourite ecocamping company, Huttopia (www.huttopia.com). For €105 a night you can watch the sun come up in the morning from your wooden deck, zap in on the train to watch the Eiffel Tower light up in the evening, then come back to the lodge’s wood-burning stove.
If you prefer hotels to
huts, then one hotel chain to check out is Accor (www.accorhotel.com). It won a French Responsible Tourism Award in 2008 for its sustainability practices. Its beacon hotel is the Novotel Gare de Montparnasse, the first Parisian hotel to be given the High Quality Environment label, ensuring better insulation, energy-efficient lighting, good waste management, low water and energy consumption, and ecological materials such as carpets, wood and paints. For a less pricey (and less central) option, Accor’s Ibis Hotel
at Porte de Clichy has
installed solar panels to take the edge off its energy consumption.
For green travel, Paris, je t’aime. Hire a bike at Huttopia to explore Versailles and the surrounding forests, or make the most of the city’s exemplary new cycling venture, Vélib’. This enables you to hire one of 200,000 bikes dispersed over 1,450 terminals just using your credit card, with the first half-hour free of charge (www.velib.paris.fr).
The Paris Respire (Paris Breathes) scheme has closed some of the city’s main arteries, such as sections of the left and right banks of the Seine, to motorised traffic on Sundays and public holidays. (This is people-watching heaven by the way, with an eclectic mix of Parisians showing us how to saunter in style.) For more details on these and other cycle routes see www.paris.fr.
Non-cyclists can cuddle up in the back of a Cyclobulle, an electric chauffeur-driven tricycle run by a company based on Rue de Cléry, in the second arondissment. Travel from one central location to another, or pay €19 for a 30-minute guided tour (www.cyclobulle.com). Ask them to drop you at one of the city’s organic farmers’ markets (bio in French), such as Boulevard Raspail on a Sunday morning or Boulevard Batignolles on a Saturday. The Saturday-morning market in Saint Honoré, in the first arondissement, is small but very central and usually has a few organic stalls.
Taste the real thing ready-made at one of several good restaurants specialising in local and organic produce. You can shop and snack at Biotifull Place, on the first floor of the Printemps store on Boulevard Haussmann, or, if you are heading for Notre Dame, check out Le Grenier de Notre-Dame.
Le Potager du Marais is good if you are exploring the area’s famous boutiques; in the Oberkampf district, Alter Mundi’s Fairtrade and organic deli and cafe is the foodie bit of its ethical shopping chain (www.altermundi.com).
For details of these and
more (and markets), see www.nouveauxrobinson.fr.
It all gets your juices flowing. But that’s Paris for you.
macktourism@yahoo.co.uk