Thailand and Laos Touring Camp for Teenagers

A supervised travel programme rather than a taught course. The group is deliberately small — a minimum of twelve and a maximum of sixteen participants — and travels with a qualified director and camp leaders at a ratio of one adult for every eight young people. There is no lesson timetable: the itinerary itself is the programme, and it is the same for everyone on the departure. The working language of the group is French.

The price covers the return flight from Paris with a stopover, full board, accommodation for the whole stay, all travel on the ground, the activities named in the programme, full supervision by Zigotours team, repatriation and personal accident cover, and Zigotours educational and administrative follow-up before and after the stay. It does not cover personal spending, visa fees unless stated otherwise, vaccinations and other formalities, activities not named in the programme, optional extras, the cancellation insurance or the operator's fixed-price guarantee. Connections from other French cities to the Paris departure point are listed under extras.

The group sleeps in simple hotels of the guest-house type and in small bungalows, and, during the trek in the Bokeo reserve, in a house built in a tree forty metres above the ground. Rooms hold between two and six people.

Full board is included for the whole stay. Meals are taken in small restaurants and street stalls along the route, which is where the group meets Thai and Lao cooking at its most ordinary and most interesting. During the stay with the DAAW Home association in Huay Xai the group helps prepare its own meals, and in Chiang Mai there is a Thai cooking class.

In Bangkok the group explores the klongs by long-tail boat among the stilt houses, visits the Grand Palace and Wat Pho with its reclining Buddha, and works its way through the city markets. At Huay Xai on the Mekong there is a day trip to a waterfall for a swim, a stop in an ethnic village on the way back, and the herbal saunas and Red Cross massages of the town. The Gibbon Experience in the Bokeo nature reserve takes two days: moving through the forest canopy on zip lines and walking the reserve with local guides who know its wildlife. The programme ends in Chiang Mai with the White Temple on the road north, the city's temples and its large craft market, a swim and a cooking class.

This is a touring camp and it has no single campus. What is available is what each stop provides: simple guest-house hotels in the towns, village bungalows run by the DAAW Home association with a shared kitchen, and the treehouses of the Bokeo reserve. Travel between stages uses local and private transport that meets the safety standards of the country — night buses, ferries and tuk-tuks among them.

The Laos section is built as an introduction to responsible tourism, it will mean giving up some comfort in exchange for a more direct contact with the people who host the group. The Gibbon Experience exists because poaching, logging and slash-and-burn farming are destroying the primary forest of South-East Asia; the treehouses and the zip-line network were built to fund its protection, and the money the group pays goes back into that work. Participants sleep in a house built in the canopy, forty metres above the forest floor.