Travelling ethically, and having the confidence that your visit is doing more good than harm to a community, can be the most empowering way to explore the world.
And good comes in queer forms. When the U.S.-based educational travel company Reroot hosts its LGBTQ+ tours of Cuba, not only do they rely on a team of fairly paid LGBTQ+ Cubans to share with participants on topics dear to their heart, like healthcare, food, dance and history, the company also has donation requirements for travellers, asking them to bring goods to Cuba that are otherwise difficult to get there because of U.S. sanctions.
“We send a list of donations that we require people to bring, and people get so into it,” says Reroot founder Dr. Kiona. “On a recent trip, we needed size 12 high heels because we have drag queens that really need that kind of thing. People will collect from their own communities to redistribute medications and syringes and pre-worn clothes and things like that. Our travellers are genuinely good humans and it’s a pleasure to be around them.”
Growing up on Hawai’i (called Big Island by mainland Americans), Kiona was taught that guests need to be invited to a place, that they need to bring gifts and need to leave the places they visit better than how they found them. In 2016, she launched a blog called How Not to Travel Like a Basic Bitch, which playfully coached travellers on how to be more ethical. Over time, Kiona, who had acquired four degrees by age 27, wondered if she was basic herself, for giving advice about places she had never visited. In 2018 she directed her energies to Reroot, which draws on the skills and knowledge of local experts to provide clients with immersive, interactive travel experiences.
“How I operate my company flips tourism on its head,” says Kiona. “Usually travellers come to places and they tell tour guides or tour companies what they want to see. ‘I want to see a waterfall, I want to learn this.’ For what we offer, the locals have curated programs on what they want the travellers to see and what they want the travellers to know.”
Because of her rule about needing to be invited and letting those who know best direct the journey—to tell the stories that they want to tell—Reroot has focused on three destinations where they have found people who have “invited in” their approach to group travel: Cuba, Hawai’i and El Salvador. They offer an LGBTQ+- and ally-focused trip to Cuba (the next one is August-September 2024), which relies solely on LGBTQ+ hosts to deliver the travel program. So during the healthcare session, the class addresses how trans people in Cuba get hormones, how people with HIV are treated and how the country provides access to gender-affirming surgeries. “We make sure that the education that we’re providing is targeted toward relevant issues for travellers.” Even the farmers that the LGBTQ+ group meets are gay.
Kiona, who is not queer herself, is planning to queer up a Hawaiian itinerary with experiences based on the Hawaiian concept of māhū, a third gender which transcends male and female.
Even on the non-queer-targeted tours, the Reroot itineraries are not exactly straight. “For the dancing class, for all of our tours, you get to choose your own dance partner’s gender,” says Kiona. “We often have a lot of lesbians on each trip, so we’re not beholden to traditional gender roles.”
Reroot has been invited to do a tour hosted by Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, based in Norway, so that may be their next offer. “These Indigenous peoples follow reindeer herds and don’t believe in borders,” says Kiona. “But they have been affected by climate change. As the ice has melted, new vegetation has cropped up, and along with it, new borders have cropped up. It’s interesting because they face oppression in ways that aren’t, compared to other Indigenous people, financial. But they struggle with access to their traditional foods and culture.”
We asked Kiona if, now that she’s been running her own tour company for a few years, she has refined her advice on how not to travel like a basic bitch.
“Pricing is really important. A lot of people think they can do things cheaper on their own, but oftentimes, operators will undercut each other and people aren’t making a living wage. I would encourage people to book through a local company, not through a foreign company,” she says. “Then I look at expertise. What is this person’s background? Are they qualified to talk about these subjects, or are they just selling something that sounds good?”
