Challenges

Difference between the Rongai and Lemosho routes to Mt Kilimanjaro

August 8, 2012

There are several routes that you can take to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro each offering different views, experiences and challenges to overcome. Charity Challenge has selected two of these Kilimanjaro routes:- Lemosho from the West side and Rongai from the East.

These are two of the less frequently used routes. They each offer some stunning views of the mountain and surrounding countryside. This article will help you to decide which one is correct for you when signing up to your Kilimanjaro summit climb.

Rongai Route

Our trek up this route gives 7 days and 6 nights on the mountain. You will take 5 ½ days to go up and only 1 ½ to come down! The route comes in from the East and follows the Rongai route via the Mawenzi Tarn, which is located in the foothills of the majestic Mawenzi – a secondary peak on Kilimanjaro. Here you spend a day acclimatising before continuing on to the summit. The extra day at Mawenzi includes trekking around an area of awe-inspiring scenery; and this day really helps to increase success rates on the route. On summit night you join the famous Kilimanjaro crater rim at a point known as Gilmans Point (5685m) before setting off

for the 2 ½ to 3 hour return trip to the summit, Uhuru Peak.

On the descent from the mountain you will pick up the busy Marangu route back down the mountain and experience the different terrain that this trek offers.

Rongai is a trekking route and there will be no areas where you will be required to use your hands to ascend.

Lemosho Route

This trek comes in from the West and you spend 8 days and 7 nights on the mountain. This will involve 6 ½ days of ascent and 1 ½ of descent. This route is more undulating that Rongai and more time is spent acclimatising as you cross the impressive Shira Plateau. The extra day means that Lemosho8 has a slightly higher summit success rate than Rongai7. This is the route that was chosen by the celebrity Comic Relief trek that we ran for Chris Moyles, Cheryl Cole and Gary Barlow. It passes through a real mix of terrain from rainforest to desert to glacier. There is one section of the route which may require you to use your hands to ascend – the Barranco Wall. This is not a technical climb but is the only slightly steeper ground on the trek. Those with a real fear of heights may prefer Rongai. However it is only short, not severe, and the guide will be there to assist you all the way. We have never had a trekker fail on the Barranco Wall.

Continue Reading…

Challenges, Responsible Tourism

Getaway to a greener challenge!

July 31, 2012

So you want to raise money for a Charity that is close to your heart? But you are also very aware of Global issues and are determined to make a difference worldwide?

Then our newly launched Cambodia Jungle Trek, aimed at directly ‘giving back’ to the communities and Rainforest of the Cardamom Mountains, might be the challenge for you, as we looked at putting this challenge together with Community Eco Tourism especially in mind.

The Cambodia Jungle Trek starts and ends in the village of Chi Phat, located in the heart of the Southern Cardamoms Protected Forest, it is a location that has been severely affected by warfare, commercial logging and hunting.  Chi Phat is also known as the birthplace of the Community-Based Ecotourism Site (CBAT), an organisation that has set the standard in the country, providing a wide array of green activities

Preservation of the Cardamom Mountains requires working in close partnership with the communities living in the region. Decades of instability have left many families hovering around the poverty line. However, in providing for their families, many have engaged in activities that have actually put the region’s wildlife and forests at risk.

By participating in one of our Charity Challenges, it is not only your chosen charity that benefits, Charity Challenge also donates on your behalf to a project that directly benefits the local area of the trek. In the case of the Cambodia Jungle Trek,  we donate to the work of Wildlife Alliance.

Wildlife Alliance is the leader in direct protection to forests and wildlife in the Southeast Asian tropical belt.  Their mission is to combat deforestation, wildlife extinction, climate change, and poverty by partnering with local communities and governments.

So how do they do this?

Wildlife Alliance’s focus is directly on the people of the Cardamom Area performing everyday duties to sustain a living without destroying the rainforest, instead of training a few teachers to return to these communities to convey our ideas. On example of their good work can be foundhere  – After 18 months of campaigning, Wildlife Alliance has finally obtained the cancellation of a banana plantation that would have cut the Southern Cardamom Rainforest in half.

To check out their mission statement and find out more, follow the below link.  http://www.wildlifealliance.org/mission-strategy/

So what made Charity Challenge choose Cambodia and Wildlife Alliance?

The idea of raising awareness and helping our participants to experience firsthand the direct results of the work locally of Wildlife Alliance is an opportunity of a lifetime. If the experience of trekking in Prime Rainforests and sleeping amongst wildlife in their home territory is not enough we wanted to give you the opportunity to meet the beautiful people of Cambodia and help raise awareness of the effects of deforestation that is caused not just to the wildlife within the rainforests and the villagers surrounding the area but how cutting down the vital rainforests has an effect globally.

When you join the Cambodia Jungle Trek you will have the opportunity to visit two field sites of Wildlife Alliance and witness their good work first hand. You will stay in Homestays in Chi Phat and experience the local communities around the Cardamom Mountains but also on returning to Phnom Penh visit Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center.

If you’ve been inspired to take on the challenge of a lifetime with our Cambodia Jungle Trek and change the world for the better, you can learn more about and book onto the challenge here.

To learn more about all our charity challenges, and find out how else we get involved with responsible tourism. Please visit our website at www.charitychallenge.com, and to keep up to date on all our challenge news, subscribe to this blog by clicking on the orange RSS button, you can also enter your email address into the adjacent box to subscribe to our mailing list.

Challenges, Inspiration

Cuba Carnival – Trevor Gibbs writes about the biggest fiesta going down in Cuba

July 23, 2012

The ‘Pearl of the Antilles’, Cuba pulsates to the rhythms of its Latin and African origins. The land of the rumba and the salsa, this Caribbean jewel has been partying for centuries; since black slaves began holding dances to commemorate the festivals of Corpus Christi and Epiphany. Indeed, Carnival can justifiably be considered one of the island’s oldest traditions.

Until the late 1990s, Carnival was always held earlier in the year to coincide with its religious roots, a time when the Spanish overlords allowed their slaves a few days off to reproduce the songs and dances of their African homeland. For the past few years though the festival has moved to the summer months, when the streets of Havana and Santiago de Cuba explode in a riot of colour and comparsas (performing groups). The largest and most traditional of the carnival celebrations take place in Santiago, whilst in Havana there is music, dancing, outrageous costumes and fireworks, with parades running the length of the Malécon, Havana’s broad waterfront.

As well as the faroleros dancers and the hypnotic blend of traditional and contemporary music, the parades also include allegorical floats and the imposing presence of the Muñecones, huge satirical caricatures of well-known politicians and other famous people. Many of the groups that take part in the festival are drawn from the neighbourhoods of the Cuban capital and much community pride goes into their performances. Each year one day is also set aside specifically for children, with clowns and magicians joining the thronging masses.

For anyone who has never experienced Carnival before, it is a dazzling kaleidoscope of Cuban rhythm, dance and colour and every year spectators are invited to join in with the fun. For those looking to immerse themselves fully into Cuban culture, this visual treat is also a great time to experience a rich range of Cuban cuisine, with roasted pig (puerco asado), tamales and chicharritas on offer…all washed down with some cold Cuban beer or some of the island’s famous rum.

Dates for this year’s Carnival are from the 21-29 July in Santiago de Cuba and from the 3-10 August in Havana.

To keep up to date on all Charity Challenge news and recieve our latest blogs, please subscribe to our RSS feed via clicking the orange button in the top right, and enter your email address into the adjacent box to subscribe to our mailing list. And for more of Trevor’s view on the world, check out his action packed blog at:http://alizardwandering.wordpress.com/

Challenges

Welcome to the Jungles!

July 20, 2012

Jungle trekking is a great way to explore the jungle and to get closer to the sounds and sights of such an amazing eco-system. For many, the Jungle represents the ultimate getaway from the mundanely of the office and urban living, but it’s important to remember that every jungle is different.

Here at Charity Challenge, we offer 3 tropical and totally unique jungle Challenges.  So if you know you want to take on a jungle but are not sure which, then the below guides will hopefully help you decide which challenge is for you!

 

THE SUMATRA JUNGLE TREK

 Challenge in a Nutshell: On this this unique 11 day jungle Challenge, you take on a challenging and truly exotic itinerary that entails 6 days of hardcore jungle trekking, camping in the rainforest, tracking wildlife, river walking, meeting local people, tubing down the rapids of the Bohorok river and a taking some time out to visit the Gunung Leuser National Park’s Orangutan feeding platform, where you can observe these beautiful creatures in their natural habitat. Continue Reading…

Responsible Tourism

Climate Care helps us beat the audit blues!

July 6, 2012

It’s audit time again, and our financial team are having end of financial year blues! I’m sure many of you out there can appreciate this feeling… it’s something that comes around once a year. Rather than experiencing the infamous post-Christmas depression, it’s that time of year when spreadsheets and number crunching starts to take over our lives, and the office turns into a frenzy of paperwork and reports…

That’s the bad news. The good news is that each year, around this time, we at Charity Challenge make our annual carbon offset payment to climate and development experts, ClimateCare, the excellent organization with which we work to offset the emissions produced from each flight, for every participant and staff member who has travelled with us the last year.

To put it briefly, over the last year we sent over 1500 participants on challenges around the world. For each person, we use ClimateCare’s calculator to calculate how many tons of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere on each overseas flight. We then make a payment at the end of each year, which goes towards ClimateCare’s projects which  not only reduce carbon emissions, but also deliver wider social, health and environmental benefits, making a real,  difference to people in some of the poorest areas of the world.

This year we are making a huge payment of just over £23 000! And in fact, the reductions made from 2008 to now have been enough to ground the equivalent of about 20 full flights (assumed 348 passengers) from London Heathrow to New York JFK.

We are amazingly proud and pleased to be affiliated with ClimateCare. As a company, ClimateCare develops emission reduction projects throughout some of the world’s less-developed countries[SB1] , with a particular emphasis on sustainable development. The offsets we purchase help to fund a portfolio of projects in many cases  situated in countries where we have challenges, such as Brazil and Indonesia. An example is the Wayang Windu Geothermal plant in Indonesia.  Carbon finance is funding the second phase of this power plant, which uses heat from under the earth’s surface, displacing fossil-fuelled grid electricity.

Responsibility in tourism is becoming more and more pressing, as scientists, environmentalists and experts within the travel industry continue to discover how detrimental a poorly operated travel expedition can be to the environment, societies and communities visited. Think about all the waste created by fast food; vast amounts of packaging; electricity and air conditioning left on in rooms; excessive use of water to rehydrate and cool down, and, obviously, the emissions given off in international flights. Added up this sounds difficult to combat. Why not just give up travelling abroad altogether? The fact is that tourism plays a huge role in creating jobs and bringing in money to local economies. Being responsible is a duty of all tour operators, in order to help to create better places to visit, as well as a positive experience for the local people by engaging them in our activities as much as possible.

At Charity Challenge this responsibility begins in transit, by helping to fund projects which fund clean renewable energy sources and improve energy efficiency in some of the countries we visit. More importantly, it helps us to repair some of the damage that we cause to the atmosphere when arranging international flights for our participants.

To read about the projects you can visit ClimateCare’s website, and to find out more about Charity Challenge’s dedication and commitment to making our operations more ‘responsible’, check out our Responsible Tourism pages and download our RT policy. These are soon to be revamped, so watch this space!