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Modern-day travelers are often equipped with cameras or camcorders when they go travel. When they arrive at their destination, they take pictures and leave, and enjoy these pictures when they go back home. However, the days of the camera-toting tourist may be numbered. Insensitive travelers are being ordered to stop pointing their cameras and camcorders at reluctant local residents. Tour companies selling expensive trips to remote comers of the world, off the well-trodden path of the average tourist, have become increasingly irritated at the sight of the visitors upsetting locals. Now one such operator plans to ban clients from taking any photographic equipment on holidays. Julian Matthews is the director of Discovery Initiatives, a company that is working hand- in-hand with other organizations to offer holidays combining high adventure withworking on environmental projects. His trips are not cheap; two weeks of whit-water rafting and monitoring wildlife in Canada cost several thousand pounds.

Matthews says he is providing holidays without guilt, insisting that Discovery Initiatives is not a tour operator but an environmental support company. Clients are referred to as “participants " or “ambassadors”.We see ourselves as the next step on from eco-tourism, which is merely a passive form of sensitive travel - our approach is more proactive.

However, says Matthews, there is a price to pay. “I am planning to introduce tours with a total ban on cameras and camcorders because of the damage they do to our relationships with local people. I have seen some horrendous things, such as a group of six tourists arriving at a remote village in the South American jungle, each with a video camera attached to their face. That sort of thing tears me up inside. A camera is like a weapon; it puts up a barrier and you lose all the communication that comes through body language, which effectively means that the host communities are denied access to the so-called cultural exchange."

Matthews started organizing environmental holidays after a scientific expedition for young people. He subsequently founded Discovery Expeditions, which has helped support 13 projects worldwide. With the launch of Discovery Initiatives, he is placing a greater emphasis on adventure and fun, omitting in the brochure all references to scientific research. But his rules of conduct are strict.In some parts of the world, for instance, I tell people they should wear long trousers, not shorts, and wear a tie, when eating out. It may sound dictatorial, but I find one has a better experience if one is well dressed.I don't understand why people dress down when they go to other countries."

In the first paragraph we learn that Discovery Initiatives.