Tiny Footprint Tours
Tiny Footprint Tours works in coordination with Mindo Cloudforest Foundation and Tiny Footprint Coffee (www.tinyfootprintcoffee.com). Dedicated to climate change mitigation, avifauna conservation and sustainable development, Tiny Footprint Tours offers a variety of tours and tour options throughout Ecuador designed to enlighten, enliven and entertain thoughtful travelers. In addition to world class birding, Tiny Footprint Tours provides hands-on experience in carbon mitigation, and coffee cultivation together with expert analysis of both. Tiny Footprint Tours operates primarily in the Andean cloudforests northwest of Quito with options for custom tours into the other faunal hotspots of Ecuador including the Amazon, Pacific coast and Galapagos Islands.
Every trip is an act of environmentalism
One ton, two tons, three tons, four. How many tons land on your door? Carbon that is. Experts estimate that the average U.S. citizen generates a carbon footprint, (defined as the use of products and services that emit greenhouse gases expressed in CO2 equivalents) of about 20 tons a year. Tiny Footprint Tours wants to change that formula and show you how, while guiding you through one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, the Mindo Cloudforest of Ecuador. Here’s how it works.
Carbon Footprint: Tiny Footprint Tours calculates the total carbon emitted for travel, lodging and food by each tour member and then plants trees with the Mindo Cloudforest Foundation to offset that combined footprint twofold.
Every trip you take, every step you make with Tiny Footprint Tours reduces carbon emissions.
What You Will See and Do
We take you to four forest reserves in the cloud forests northwest of Quito, Ecuador each at differing altitudes with varied ecologies, fascinating flora, fauna, scenery and terrains. There we provide world-class naturalist guides. You bring the binoculars and cameras. To understand carbon mitigation in the flesh, we visit reforestation nurseries and replanting projects, inviting you to plant trees and participate directly in the good karma your trip is generating. In the process we explain how carbon emissions neutralization works, how it can be integrated into whatever walk of life you choose.
To familiarize you with local economy and sustainable development we bring you to locally owned shade-grown coffee farms and surrounding rural towns and markets. You will meet the people whose livelihoods improve as reforestation, sustainable coffee cultivation and ecotourism increase.
Ecuador is home to the highest density of biodiversity per square mile/kilometer on earth, stretching east to west from the Amazon to cloud forest to glaciers down into tropics and across the ocean to the Galapagos Islands. Travel times between radically different ecosystems are short in this mega-diverse nation with good road and tourism infrastructure. Tiny Footprint Tours builds custom adventures for any traveler’s agenda.
