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Background
Around the world, trekking is a boom industry: people enjoy being active with their leisure time and trekking offers a unique way of experiencing remote country. Two of the potential advantages of trekking holidays, when they are sympathetically set up, is that they are environmentally friendly, and they introduce cash directly to remote mountain communities. One of the down-sides of uncontrolled, free-for-all trekking is the degradation of the environment; and examples such as the huge litter problems at Everest Base Camp and the shocking state of the Inca Trail in the late 1990’s, illustrate this eloquently. So you either need to strictly control the number of trekkers, or reduce the environmental impact as much as possible. Restricting numbers is best achieved via fiscal mechanisms, such as charging fees for specific trails, and so long as the money generated is channelled back into the area, this mechanism can be effective. However, the downside of this policy is that it can take famous trails beyond the economic reach of “normal” backpackers. So making more trails available, and spreading the impact of trekking on the environment more widely, is perhaps more fair. For this control mechanism to work, camps and other facilities have to be put in place and designed to be environmentally sustainable. Opening new trails requires strategic planning, grassroots support and an “environmental policeman” such as a mountain institute, national trust or other official body, to ensure the trail stays on the straight and narrow (if you’ll excuse the pun!).
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The Great Inca Road project follows the latter strategy: opening up new areas to trekkers and generating income from eco-tourism for remote Andean communities, overseen by the Mountain Institute of Peru. VentureCo have taken on this ambitious project, working with local Quechua villages (modern day Inca communities) to build the infrastructure along an Inca Trail that will in time become an alternative to “The Inca Trail”. You won’t find this route in any guidebooks, yet! But who knows, in a few year’s time, this trail could be as famous as its cousin in the south!