RUMBUK (India): Answering the call of nature over a pit of manure with no flush water in sight and learning how to churn butter may not be everyone’s idea of a great holiday. But in India’s “Little Tibet”, the remote Himalayan region of Ladakh, a pioneering scheme to offer tourists the authentic tastes of mountain life is taking off — and could hold the key to preserving a fragile ecosystem.

“Himalayan Homestays,” as the programme is called, started out as one environmental group’s way of protecting the endangered snow leopard, which roams the high-altitude plateau and towering peaks on the border with China.

In the past, villagers here hunted the predator that each year bit into their earnings by killing 13 per cent of their livestock — sheep, goats, yaks and dzos, a cow-yak hybrid.

“We wanted to do something that would serve as an incentive for the villagers not to kill the snow leopard,” explained Rinchen Wangchuck, the head of the non-profit Snow Leopard Conservancy.

Now, residents have a new source of income.

Wangchuck says his group helped villagers transform their wish to operate run-of-the-mill guesthouses into a niche tourism concept that would boost their income and protect the delicate environmental balance in the rural areas.

Five years on, the homestay programme — which allows trekkers to sleep and eat with families in the Hemis National Park or Sham and Zanskar mountains — is catching on as a local model for eco-tourism.

About 15 villages with 65 households are involved, charging couples $17 a night for their stay.

ALTERNATIVE SANITATION: For 35-year-old Swedish tourist Melinda Kinnaman, her stay at Padma Dolma’s home in the tiny Ladakhi village of Rumbuk gave her a true break from her work back home as an actress — a taste of a simpler, old-fashioned life.