The terms green travel, eco travel, and green tourism are basically interchangeable. The concepts don’t refer necessarily to vacations with a concentration on nature or wilderness. In fact, green travel can take you anywhere from the Australian Outback to the bustling cities of the United States and Europe.

To be a green traveller, you simply need to incorporate the basic ideals of green living into your travelling experience. For instance, if you are mindful of recycling at home, you will want to carry that habit over into your traveling and be careful to recycle wherever it is you might journey. Perhaps take a bike tour instead of a bus tour, and leave a lighter carbon footprint on the place you are visiting. Don’t litter when visiting someone else’s country, city, or community.

There is also a social context to green travel. You don’t want to do anything that would negatively impact on the eco-structure of the place you are visiting, and neither do you want to do anything that has a negative cultural impact, as well. Be respectful and mindful of tradition and cultural practices. Many societies outside of our own have time honored methods of doing things that differ greatly from ours. Before you visit a foreign place, try and learn a little about the traditions and heritage of that region. Green travel extends to socially aware travel. It’s a natural crossroads.

Green travel aims to turn the negative effects of tourism into something more positive. Travel and touring can be beneficial to a region’s economy and disastrous to its eco-system at the same time. This is particularly important to remember when visiting natural sites. An eco- traveler does anything he or she can to enhance their positive impact and minimize the negative impact of their visit. Like taking a hiking tour instead of a driving tour, being sure to leave the location as clean or cleaner than when you arrived, purchasing souvenirs from native artisans instead of purchasing factory-made items from fancy gift shops.

If your idea of eco travel, however, is to experience nature or wilderness, then you may want to visit some of the world’s most exotic green travel destinations, which include:

• Loango National Park, Gabon - A mostly unspoiled area of Africa, and home to free roaming large mammals like elephants, gorillas, hippopotamus and forest buffalo.
• Dubai - The ecotourism industry in Dubai helps to protect the desert habitat and the species that live in it, like the exotic Arabian oryx, a large white antelope that was once close to extinction.
• The Galapagos Islands - Visitors to the Galapagos are accompanied at all times by an accredited park ranger to ensure that you enjoy the natural beauty of the islands and the threatened wildlife that inhabits these without causing damage to their environment.
• New Zealand - One of the most beautiful places on earth, this isolated island country draws ecotourists in droves and engages in environmentally and culturally sensitive tourism strategies and practices at local community, private business and government levels.
• Kenya - Kenya is not only home to some of the world’s most sought after safari destinations, it is also full of virgin rainforests, mountains, lakes and pristine white sand beaches.
• Daintree Rainforest, Australia - The oldest continually surviving rainforest in the world, with an intricate ecosystem that supports species found nowhere else on the planet.
• Madidi National Park In Bolivia - Bolivia’s diverse landscape offers a variety of different ecosystems to explore, from the Altiplano – a high mountain plateau where Andean civilization first flourished – to dense Amazonian rainforests like the jungles of Madidi National Park.

Enough planning can ensure a fantastic green travel experience. In this day and age, all kinds of eco-friendly options are available to visitors who are willing to take the time to plan ahead. You can begin your green travel by planning to offset your carbon emissions from air travel. Some airlines, like British Airways, offer you the opportunity to offset the carbon footprint of your trip by making a donation based upon your flight plan. These donations are then passed on to eco-friendly technologies like hydroelectric production or solar production. Such an offset will normally cost you anywhere from $10 to $50 depending on your flight.

The next thing you might want to consider doing while making your green travel plans is to book lodgings at an environmentally friendly hotel or hostel. There are more and more places to stay that will give you green travel options and they can easily be found on the Internet while planning your trip.

Finally, try to book activities that are earth friendly rather than not.

These are just a few easy ways that you can make your next holiday a green travel experience.

To learn more about ways to go green, save money and help the planet, go to www.FreeTipsForGoingGreen.com and subscribe to receive a FREE email daily containing great green living tips for making your home, office and life greener and more eco friendly. For more details, visit FreeTipsForGoingGreen.com

Traveling green (that is, eco friendly traveling) has different facets and can mean different things to different people. You can make your own travelling experience eco friendly, however, by doing or using the following:

1. Green Transportation

Your green travel starts with how you decide to get to your destination. Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases responsible for causing undesirable climate change on the earth due to human activities. As a lot of carbon dioxide is released into the air by the burning of fuel through the normal transport methods we use, we would therefore need to reduce our level of fuel consumption to reduce the level of these gases in the atmosphere. You can play your own part too when you travel by using green transportation.

Some of the options you may have is to simply go walking. If you are only going on a short break within your city or your destination is not that far, you may just walk to it. Alternatively you can use a bike or even row a boat (that is if your final destination is reachable by water), to get to where you are going. These are some of the best eco friendly ways of moving around, at least for short distances.

Another option is to travel via public transportation instead of driving your own automobile. This has the advantage of reducing the number of vehicles on the road, thereby reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

2. Eco Tourism

Eco tourism allows you to understand the impact of human activities on the environment and to appreciate the need to preserve natural settings while exploring nature. Through eco friendly tourism you will experience travel with the intention of contributing and participating in the local communities of your destination, conserving and sustaining their environment, learning/appreciating their culture and getting hands-on experience on ways of being green. Eco tourism is not just nature tourism, it is responsible tourism that involves leaving/preserving the environmental settings/resources of your destination as they are, for others to use too. To get a true eco tourism experience you will need to pick the right travel company and ask plenty of question to ensure you get a true eco tourism excursion. You may want to explore eco tourism as another type of green travel.

Some of the world’s greatest eco travel destinations include:

• Fjords Of Norway - Norway is a leader in environmental policy and takes extreme care to protect and preserve its unique and pristine coastline and towering fjords.
• Kerala, India - Known as ‘God’s Own Country’ and one of the most sought-after destinations in Asia, boasting some of the richest biodiversity on the planet.
• Dubai - The ecotourism industry in Dubai helps to protect the desert habitat and the species that live in it, like the exotic Arabian oryx, a large white antelope that was once close to extinction.
• New Zealand - One of the most beautiful places on earth, this isolated island country draws ecotourists in droves and engages in environmentally and culturally sensitive tourism strategies and practices at local community, private business and government levels.
• The Galapagos Islands - Visitors to the Galapagos are accompanied at all times by an accredited park ranger to ensure that you enjoy the natural beauty of the islands and the threatened wildlife that inhabits these without causing damage to their environment.

3. Eco Retreats

Where you will stay while traveling can be green too. In an effort to encourage others to be eco friendly, you may want to patronize eco retreats; these are lodging establishments employing eco friendly practices. There are plenty of green/eco retreats you can choose to stay at, yet, there are varying degrees of being green amongst them, however. Some of the kinds of things you should expect to see or get from these establishments are organic foods, use of renewable electricity like solar power, chemical-free pools, innovative eco flooring and furniture, green waste disposal like composting etc. Some of them may even provide you with bicycles to move around or low-energy car pools saving on energy and lowering carbon emissions.

All of these are possible ways you can go green on your travels not have to spend more on your travels to use them.

If you are interested in learning more about ways to go green, save money and help the planet, go to www.FreeTipsForGoingGreen.com and subscribe to receive a FREE email daily containing great green living tips for making your home, office and life greener and more eco friendly. For more details, visit Green Living Tips

Monteverde, Costa Rica has become a hot spot for tourists for obvious reasons. The small village is located in the mountains and every direction offers incredible views. You will find there are many tour possibilities in Monteverde.

A tour that offers many thrills and chills is zip lining over the canopy. The staff will clip you onto the cable and send you flying across 600 meters of open space, you’ll be extremely high and will be able to see the canopy from above. Now, that is a great combination.

If you are avoiding adrenaline, try the suspended bridges. You can go to Selvatura and see the canopy in another very personal way. Up at Selvatura you can also experience the hummingbird garden. It is truly incredible something to be that close.

Costa Rica is known for having a lot of bio-diversity and every area of the country is different. Be sure to hike one of the two reserves in Monteverde. If you’ve got a good eye or ear you might see and hear toucans or monkeys.

If you want to learn about the forest while hiking, you can hire a guide for a private tour. With this option you will have a better chance at seeing animals. The guides are trained to know all about the cloud forest life.

Another great thing to do in Monteverde is visiting the frog pond. You can see the Poison Dart Frog and the Red Eyed Tree Frog. Overall there are 28 species represented inside.

For those who enjoy everything outdoors, try horseback riding with the company La Estrella. You can spend an hour, an afternoon or the day riding through the forest. The trails wind along the tops of the mountains. Be sure to watch the sunset over the Gulf of Nicoya.

After you have spent the day enjoying the tours, be sure to spoil yourself at one of the fine restaurants. Don Juan and Morphos are great choices and if you are looking for the local place, go to Donde Henry. As for desert, Stellas Bakery is where its at.

And the place to lay your head is a place literally in the trees. Hidden Canopy Tree House Hotel has four tree houses available. Treat yourself to their waterfall showers and be sure to catch the sunset on the patio.

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The teenage olive ridley sea turtle was just 15 years old as she waited 500 yards offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific ocean off Ostional Beach in a small land that, more than 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named “Costa Rica”, the “rich coast.”

The nearly daily afternoon tropical rains of November had slipped away as the marine turtle waited in anticipation. The moon was in its final quarter and, though she did not know why, it was having an effect on her.

As it has done for uncountable eons, the moon was gracing the earth with its timeless phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing this olive ridley turtle ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away, another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles. For more than 100,000,000 years it had been thus: vast migrations of ancient creatures, culminating when the moon was in this phase.

Life is always magical. Just a few months earlier, this turtle was foraging in the middle of the Pacific Ocean more than 2,500 miles away. And the tens of thousands now alongside her were scattered across several million square miles of ocean.

Although there was plenty of food far out in the Pacific, something had begun to stir within her. Hundreds of thousands of marine turtles felt the same timeless need to return to Costa Rica. They, and she, were all going back to where they had hatched.

Now, months later, she waited in the soft moonlight just a few hundred meters from her destination. She was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had traversed, she had encountered several different male olive ridley sea turtles in the clear tropical waters and bred with them in the deep ocean. Like her, they too were being affected by something unseen, a force nearly as old as life itself. It was something so compelling that her species had been going back to the same Costa Rica beach since the days of dinosaurs.

In the tropical night this olive ridley sea turtle was waiting. She had somehow returned to the very beach where she had hatched in 1995. We do not know how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where she started life. There are only a handful of nesting beaches on earth and they are not very big. In fact Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters long. Now part of Costa Rica’s Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is almost certainly the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on earth. Incredibly, in 1995, the year this turtle hatched, some half a million female olive pacific sea turtles had come ashore to nest here in huge waves. These massive invasions are called “arribadas.”

For fifteen years, the mother of this hundred pound marine turtle joined massive Costa Rica arribadas annually and she would have done so again except that she drowned in an illegal shrimping net just a few weeks before. Thousands more were killed by long line commercial fishermen. Even more died needlessly by swallowing plastic bags carelessly discarded. So many have been killed, the race is endangered.

Of course, the hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore know none of this. In the tropical pale moonlight, we can see them even though they are still half a mile away. There are now so many gathered that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for at least a mile and never get a wet foot. We can only gaze in wonder and awe as they gather silently. These ancient beings will never know that they were here long before there was a dinosaur walking the earth. They cannot appreciate our capacity for destruction or efforts at preservation. They only know that this little stretch of beach is where they’ve always come.

Then, though no one knows why, it happens. As quietly as they first appeared, as silently as they gathered, their patience has been rewarded and they begin to come ashore. A single olive ridley turtle followed by a second. Then there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—even more than that—each intent on one task: bringing new life. All night they come. And all day, day after day. It is a wonder of magnificent Costa Rica and as timeless as the phases of the moon. It is the spectacular display of life called Arribada.