Gypsyfeet

Travel to Experience is our company’s mantra.

We are travel enthusiasts who believe that travel should lead to deep impressions and experiences. And we will do our best to bring this to you.The way we do this is to make sure you get an insiders view of the place where you travel – through homestays, through local cuisine, and through participation in festivals, as well as interaction with the communities where we travel.

Experiences can be varied – if you are a wildlife enthusiast, you’d want to spend more time at the National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries. If you are interested in culture, you would like to participate in the numerous festivals that come up throughout the year in the region. Or, if you are a nature lover, you’d love to walk and hike as much as possible.

Look through our Trip plan, and see what activity is to your liking.

The North-East region of India, and the adjoining country of Bhutan is where we currently operate. It is blessed with abundant natural beauty and an interesting culture that is vastly different from the rest of India.

We like to show you around our backyard.  A Gypsyfeet coordinator will accompany you in your trips. Click here to know more about the folks at Gypsyfeet.

And lastly, why the name Gypsyfeet? We all have a little bit of the Gypsy in us, we all like to pick up our bundles and travel to new places every once in a while. Don’t you?

When you travel with us, you are a fellow Gypsy and not a tourist.

OUR RESPONSIBLE TOURISM INITIATIVES
We are completely committed to the cause of sustainable and responsible tourism. Here are some of the concrete steps we have taken to promote responsible tourism in North-East India:

1. Working with community based tourism initiatives: Gypsyfeet consciously seeks out community based tourism initiatives that benefit communities with limited sources of income. As part of this, we take our guests to community based tourism spots – examples of this: Mawllynong, a village in Bangladesh/India border where the community has built up an excellent tourism inititiative. Since we identified this village we have been taking our guests there to help the local community efforts.

2.. Emphasis on stay in eco-friendly houses and home-stays : We understand the burden tourism puts on the local community resources. Rather than large concrete structures that require huge amount of resources to sustain ( and are a blight on the landscape) we put up our guests in ethnic houses/home-stays whereever feasible. For example, in Majuli island on the Brahmaputra river, our guests stay at a bamboo and thatch house built in the ethnic style and run by a local household.

3. Small group size: A large group of tourists can disrupt normal life of the community they are visiting. We consciously keep our group sizes small in order to ensure minimal impact as well as have a more normal interaction. Our group sizes are 5-6 guests per trip compared to 15-20 person group sizes of other tour operators.

4. Promoting local craft: We encourage our guests to buy directly from the weavers/ artisans rather than from city stores so that the maximum economic benefit goes to the producers.

5. Promoting conservation efforts: Our trips include lesser known destinations such as Ultapani in Assam and Balpakram in Garo Hills in Meghalaya where the local youth volunteer in forest conservation efforts. We eventually hope to include volunteer tourism as part of our packages – thereby helping in the tourism efforts as well as benefiting the community economically.

6. Promoting local culture and instilling pride in heritage: We take our guests on village tours and home visits to experience living culture. This is an important part of all our packages.