Romantic Valentine Trip:

Take Your Valentine to the Rainforest

14 February 2003 – Make this year's Valentine's gift your most memorable ever!

The Valentine gift of a lifetime…a romantic eco trip for you and your partner to the sumptuous Rainforests of Ecuador!

Valentine's day is traditionally the day for proposing marriage or even remaking those original vows – but what's the most romantic setting for those questions?

Places like Rome or Paris are the traditional backdrop but the modern couple could well want something more original and perhaps more eco friendly.

How about declaring your love in the spectacular green depths of the Ecuadorian Rainforests, with the sound of the teeming jungle night life all around you?

That‘s what Trips Worldwide and the World Land Trust, a conservation charity committed to purchasing and protecting threatened habitats, are jointly offering as a nine day Valentine's eco romance trip of a life time. This very year you and your partner could be leaving Heathrow on a freezing February morning to fly to the warmth of Quito, the capital city of Ecuador. After a day to acclimatise in a colonial hotel you'll travel on to the slopes of the Andes on the borders of Ecuador and Peru for an extraordinary holiday you'll remember for the rest of your life.

Set right in the heart of this vast rainforest is the Kapawi Ecolodge, an eco tourism gem recently included in the British Airways ‘Tourism for Tomorrow' awards. Its twenty wooden cabanas – stilt houses – are built in the traditional local style on the edge of a vast jungle pond. This is an area that was virtually untouched by outside influences until the 1960s, and the decision to develop a tiny area for tourism was taken with extreme care. Everything has been planned to combine great comfort with sympathetic eco practice – the huts are built with dowels not nails, the power and water heating come from solar panels, the water is purified through charcoal then purified by UV rays. Even the soaps used are bio degradable! It's an opportunity to live in the very heart of the rainforest in the way that the local tribe, the Achuar, have done for centuries while exploring the landscape made famous by a dozen Tarzan adventures.

This is a region literally teeming with exotic plant and bird life. There are guided orchid trails beneath the giant trees hung with orchids so numerous that many haven't even yet been classified. Ecuador is famous for the diversity and beauty of the wild bird population – on a trek through the forest you can see parakeets, humming birds and tanagers in jewel like colours flying through the jungle canopy.

You and your partner will have a week at the eco-lodge in one of the most beautiful and romantic settings in the world – walking, canoeing, or simply soaking up the experience of life in the treetops of a South American rainforest.

And perhaps most memorably of all – as part of the all inclusive price of this nine day Valentine's trip, you and your partner will each receive 100 acres of rainforest in this area which will be managed and protected by the World Land Trust's partners. The WLT was formed to raise funds to purchase and protect critically threatened habitats. You'll receive certification of your "ownership" of these acres, plus a twice yearly newsletter about the habitat and the species that have been saved and protected there. You can come back later to visit the region where your acres are sited and see how the flora and fauna of the region are being protected.

April in Paris may have seemed like the ultimate in romance, but this year, for a Valentine's memory that will last forever, why not spend Valentine's Day in the beautiful and exotic heart of the Ecuadorian Rainforest!

The all inclusive price per couple including travel, hotel accommodation and rainforest acres starts at £10,000 per couple.

For further details and information phone John Burton at the World Land Trust on +44 (0) 1986 874422 in Halesworth, Suffolk.

Or, if you are looking for something a little less extravagant, why not give your Valentine an acre of rainforest?

Give your Valentine a Rainforest – More information on saving an acre of rainforest for Valentine's Day.

Find out more about the rainforest on our projects page.