catherinemack – Page 6 – Ethical Traveller

Tribal Voice Communications

I can’t believe it is over ten years since I travelled to Kenya with Dr. Cheryl Mvula, to write about the extraordinary work that she had been doing with Maasai communities and sustainable tourism in Kenya’s Masai Mara. I had only started writing really, following completion of my MSc in Responsible Tourism Management. But the people I met and places I visited on that trip of a lifetime were not only the greatest reward for my studies but also the greatest reminder that giving voice to people who deserve it was what I had set out to do when I started writing.

Youth Hostel Association (YHA) UK summer camps

I have stayed in a wonderful array of youth hostels on my own, with friends and then, as time went on, with my children. But the time came a couple of years ago for me to start thinking about letting them go it alone and considering a UK summer camps. Whether I like it or not, they are getting older, and although I hope they will always holiday with the ‘old ma’, they do relish any opportunity to spread their wings just a little.

Cycling at Bedgebury Forest, UK

If you Google ‘Bedgebury’ you’ll see that this is the National Pinetum and has been the UK’s finest collection of conifers since 1925. Which is gorgeous, but not if you are my teenage boys, who sort of lost me at ‘pinetum’. If you research a little more deeply, however, and this is the point where my lads zoned back in again, you’ll find a load of cool videos of skilled mountain bikers taking on the singletrack trails of one of South-East England’s most exciting forest enterprises. Cycling at Bedgebury Forest is a superb day trip from London and a regular family day out from London for us now.

Seamus Heaney Homeplace, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland

Words fail me right now as I visit the newly opened Seamus Heaney Homeplace in his homeland of Bellaghy, Northern Ireland. A moving experience that captures not only the great Irish poet’s work, but also his extraordinary life as a family man. Here is his daughter, Catherine Heaney, talking about how she feels about its opening, the details of which were run by the family meticulously and with great sensitivity. And it shows. If you love poetry, and Heaney, don’t come to Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland without coming here.