What type of a tourist are you?

Take our ecotourist quiz and find out.

1. While visiting a national park, you can do with:
a) A camp site with tents and an open toilet.
b) A comfortable room with attached toilets.
c) An eco-lodge with 'all modern amenities'.

2. After a long journey to a unique and fragile nature tourism destination, you discover that authorities levy an environmental tax of Rs 1000 per person per entry. You would:
a) Pay willingly.
b) Hesitate and think twice.
c) Get angry and curse the person at the ticket counter.

3. Your hotel advises you to conserve water and suggests you use one bucket of water a day only. You:
a) Agree immediately and encourage fellow guests too.
b) Grumble and agree reluctantly.
c) Want your money back.

4. When you go to a tourist site, you enquire whether the site has displaced locals or diminished the supply of water to them or even deprived them of their homes or livelihoods.
a) True b) False

5. On holiday you spend your money on:
a) Local cuisine and craft.
b) Branded clothes and accessories.
c) Exotic cuisine from far and wide.

6. While driving to your holiday destination you see a group of ethnically dressed locals. You:
a) Watch from afar and don’t disturb them. b) Walk up politely and request their permission to click their photographs. c) Chase them through the fields with your camera and start taking their pictures furiously

7. While visiting a coral reef you:
a) Just swim at the reef edge. b) Go snorkelling and scuba-diving. c) Go motor boating and collect shells, conches and pieces of coral as souvenirs.

8. At the end of your trip you dispose of all trash properly or take it with you until it can be disposed of properly.
a) Always.
b) Sometimes.
c) Never.

9. You think feeding wild animals is:
c) Not a good idea. b) Harmless. a) Such fun.

10. Finding out about special environmental regulations, ecotaxes or permits:
a) Is my duty. b) Is a necessary bother. c) Is my travel agents problem

11. You light campfires:
a) I don’t. b) On designated camp sites and use waste sticks from the ground that are no larger in diameter than an adult's wrist and keep campfires small. c) Anywhere. Pulling branches off dead or downed trees. Even plastics, foils, and trash can be thrown in to make the fire better.

12. On nature trails, you:
a) Keep quiet, stay on existing trails and walk in single file
b) Get bored and wish you weren't there.
c) Talk a lot, take short cuts and walk over areas with soft grasses or plants.

13. Exploring nature sites—in small groups, by walking, hiking,or cycling—according to you:
a) Is the best way to explore it. b) Would have preferred doing it in a car. c) Is a stupid idea, instead would prefer to go to Las Vegas and have a blast

14. You love to travel and visit far away places because:
a) Want to learn about other people and cultures.
b) You are a terribly lonely person and seek an escape from your sad life.
c) You can show off and sound learned in front of your friends back home.

Key
a) 0 points; b) 10 points and c) 15 points.
0: The perfect ecotourist! (and we know you lied while taking the quiz)
5-25: OK, you're trying very hard to be an eco-conscious traveller, but can do better
30-60: You could do with more sensitivity as a tourist.
65-135: Locals find you obnoxious, the ecology is stressed out thanks to your demands. Behave!
140 and above: Gosh! More egotourists like you and who would need weapons of mass destruction to destroy the planet?