10 Green Places To Stay

Alastair Sawday — “one of the UK’s most respected hotel reviewers,” according to Sunday’s London Times, author of a series of guidebooks on “Special Places to Stay,” and also a committed environmentalist — has a new book coming out this week, “Green Places to Stay.” The Times reveals Sawday’s 10 favorite green places from around the world.

The choices include boutique hotels and eco-lodges in the U.K., the Caribbean, India, Jordan, New Zealand, Ecuador, and Guyana. The yurts in Mongolia sounded most appealing to me… “the wildest place in the world,” says Sawday, and only $35 a day, meals included. Some of his other observations though, make you wonder. Sleeping on the floor and doing without plumbing in Ladakh may well be “very satisfying and green” to a visitor, but I note that after a week or so, those visitors zoom back to their modern homes on a jet, while the “balanced, happy people” who live there year after year, don’t have that option…?