Lithuania cycling tour along the Baltic sea

Planet

We aim to minimise water and atmospheric pollution from any specific tourism development we use.

This tour is low carbon emitting by its nature - most of the route people travel by bikes, there is only one transfer by minibus/bus is included on this tour; rental bikes then are transported in trailer (not by separated motorised vehicle). To decrease the air pollution, we choose to work with transport companies offering newer, energy-efficient vehicles.

We aim to achieve zero litter policies everywhere. Therefore we encourage travellers to avoid disposable plastic and to recycle. On this self-guided cycle tour we provide all our customers renting bikes with reusable plastic bottles for drinking water.

On this tour we recommend having lunches in local restaurants located in small towns and villages of Silute region. As this is an agricultural area, the restaurants use local and seasonally grown food that cuts down food travel miles.

We recommend going off the beaten track, getting extraordinary travel experiences in the pristine nature and leaving it untouched afterwards.

This is a biking tour so the majority of time is spent either on two wheels or two feet helping to keep the emissions produced on the trip down. We also eat locally produced wherever possible to keep food miles in check.

Sourcing locally grown or produced food (with lower food miles) - this tour is organised in agricultural country, which produce a lot of local food products, and for dinners we always choose menus including more locally grown products and traditional dishes.

Offering vegetarian/plant-based and low dairy foods (which reduce CO2 emissions). We always offer for dinners a vegetarian menu as an option. Tourists should inform us in advance about this choice that we could inform hotels and restaurants (in order not to waste food products if informed too late);

Reducing energy use in our office which is now established in energy efficient building: heating in winter is controlled depending to weather conditions; in summer we don't use air conditioning - instead we use horizontal blinds to close windows from outside; low energy bulbs, etc

Hiring local staff to reduce travel
- our office is based in klaipeda where the tour starts and ends;
- luggage transport is done by local service providers the shortest possible route, for example, the luggage from Šilute to Nida on Day 5 is transported first by the Šilute hotel to a harbour, then by the ferry across the Curonian Lagoon to Nida and finally by local taxi from Nida harbour to hotel (the route by car is only 50 km instead of 200 km if driving only inland route via Klaipeda).

People

On this trip we provide a list of recommended local museums and galleries of local handicrafts with preference to small family owned places (some of them don't even have fixed entrance fees and survive from donations), for example, fisherman's household-museum in Rusne, amber gallery in Nida, etc.

On this tour we prefer accommodating our guests at local hotels rather than in international chain hotels, for example, family owned GILIJA Hotel in Silute and NERIJA Hotel in Nida. Luggage transportation is often done by hotel transport.

We also use family-owned boat transfer services across the Curonian Lagoon from Vente or Minija village and to Nida Resort located on the Curonian Spit.