I have been living in Thailand since 1989. I have travelled extensively throughout the Kingdom and wanted to share my wonderful experiences of Thailand with others. I talked with many travellers here in Thailand and saw a need to take visitors away from the normal tourist areas filled with large tour buses and groups. The biggest complaint I heard from visitors is “there is no real Thai culture… it’s staged for the tourists”. This is because they keep following each other around using their guidebooks and never see the real Thailand.
In the course of setting up a travel agency here in Thailand, it took about 2 years of research to find the areas that were safe and could handle visitors. I spoke with village headmen, temple Monks, Hill Tribe villagers, National Park officials and local bird experts. I then had to train staff that would take care of our clients with excellent service and provide correct information about Thai and hill tribe culture, Thai food, Buddhism, birds of Thailand, etc.
I lived in a remote area of north Thailand at Wat Thaton temple in the town of Thaton on the Burmese border for more than 3 years. I taught English to Monks, novices, high school students, the Thai Army, local and tourist police. I also did hill tribe programs by taking a small number of tourists to hill tribe villages to spend the evening. All the money for the trek went to the villagers. I bought clothes for the children, medicines and blankets for the families. I paid the villagers to build a bamboo schoolhouse and paid a teacher to teach Thai at the school who could speak their language. I taught them how to dispose of waste properly, keep the children and village clean and to use spoons instead of their fingers when eating which was a big source of their health problems. I provided vegetable seeds and logan and lychee fruit trees for planting.
This was fine until I left the temple then the school stopped and the health problems returned. I talked with the Abbot of the temple and he now has a school for the children at the temple. He has a nurse looking after the children and takes those to the clinics that have problems.
While I was there I help start a guest home where travellers could stay in a Lisu hill tribe village and go trekking in the jungle and visit primitive hill tribe villages in the area. This was not easy, as the villages we visited didn't want visitors as they wanted to maintain their lifestyle and culture. They have seen other villages that accepted tourists turned into a village without harmony and their culture was gone forever. These villagers were farmers and didn't want to look at tourism as a source of income.
I understood the problem as I have seen what a tour operator can do to a village. To most tour operators in Thailand money is first and they don't care about the hill tribe people or their way of life.
I stayed in these villages and met with the village headmen many times. I learned about their culture, way of life, religion, and do's and don'ts. We then came up with a plan that worked out well for the villagers and our clients.
For the Jungle portion of the trek I had to teach the guides to use different trails so it could grow back. They make a hut out of bamboo and banana leaves for sleeping and I taught them not to clear-cut and not to return to an area for at least two months. No more hunting of birds or wild animals.
Without the local culture we would not be able to give our clients the experience they are looking for. We also encourage our clients in helping the local people we visit.
Next month, Randy talks about the difference between tourism and eco-tourism, and provides us with some guidelines about the kind of questions we should be asking ourselves when visiting Thailand or going on any kind of eco-trip.
Randy who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1948 has lived in Texas for more than 20 years and in Thailand since 1989 can be contacted by e-mail on: allthai@all-thailand-exp.com. For more information on trips to Thailand, see: http://www.all-thailand-exp.com
In some cache’s you may be lucky and come across a
“Travel bug”, these are small metal dog tag beetles with a number
on. If you decide to remove this from the cache you must put it in
the book. Once you get home look up the Travel bug online and see
what its mission is, some want to reach a particular destination,
others just want to visit as many places as possible. Your mission
once you have discovered what the bug wants to do is to help it on
its way by planting it in another cache, which hopefully helps it
get nearer to its goal.
Friday – the shopping trip
to Mtwara took 5 hours whilst Esther searched all over town for
enough chickens to feed this crowd whilst the goat in question was
tethered outside the Boma bleating for a few hours. Saturday –
kitchen a hive of activity chopping, cutting, marinating and
counting bottles of water, soft drinks, plates, glasses, knives,
forks etc. Last minute panic appeared non-existent – my own
memories of the night before a major event of this importance were
very different!
The official party arrived in a flurry of dust as about 40 cars
swept into the school ground. In the background was the celebratory
sound of drums and chanting, and there were dancers that we could
hear but not see from our corner of the school ground. Because they
were so late we abandoned all attempts at ‘silver service’ and put
a couple of desks in the centre of the room as a buffet and allowed
them to help themselves. We were advised to do this so that we
could not be held responsible for delaying them and influencing how
long they took to eat!
After they had eaten the
District Commissioner invited the whole Boma team into the room,
introduced us and gave a short speech of thanks for providing such
a wonderful lunch. He acknowledged that the Boma is run by Trade
Aid and proceeded to thank Trade Aid for providing this opportunity
for employment and the development of tourism in the Mtwara Region.
The Prime Minister's photographer recorded the event and held a
photo shoot taking a number of pictures on the Trade Aid digital
camera.
After picking up
our rental car at the airport and after some looking on the map we
found Surahammar Manor. A fantastic place in the Mälar Valley with
romantic surroundings! And such a family atmosphere! The owners
themselves welcomed us and we got a high standard room facing the
parkland. All rooms are individually decorated with elegant
antique furniture. And we really enjoyed the welcome dinner with
Swedish schnapps. In the evening we went early to bed, talked about
our wedding and revelled in that pleasant tired feeling in your
body and serenity in your heart that only a great day can
bring!
but not. We
were fishing from the Manor’s park! After some hours we had got
four salmon trout and thought it was enough. In the evening we
prepared them together with the cook. Never has a dinner
tasted so good!
Sciacca is not really on the tourist trail
although it is extremely pleasant and some of the upper town is
really picturesque. There is no really cheap place to stay, though
the Paloma Bianca in Via Figuli was not really dear. The main
appeal of Sciacca for me is the fact that it is an ideal place for
an excellent bus trip to the hill village of Caltabellotta. Sicily
has so much to see [I missed the lovely west coast and most of the
interior, including a terrific Roman villa] that I suspect a lot of
people never make it to any of the smaller towns. Even though I
obviously saw them at the cost of some better known larger places,
Erice in particular, I feel that it is a pity not to sample some
and this is a beaut. From my knowledge of Sicilian hill villages I
would say that somehow they are less picturesque from a distance
but quite as good when inside them as those of the mainland. On the
ride to Caltabellotta it is going up high, rather than heading for
the village, which gives the pleasure and you need to be well up in
the village to see it at its best.
This was only my fifth night out of eleven but already lack of time
was forcing me to adjust my plans. I had meant to go right around
the island anti-clockwise and hopefully to do a trip into the Villa
Imperiale inland. I now realised this was far too much to take on
and I abandoned any notion of reaching the west coast or Segesta, a
spectacular site to the west of the island’s capital, Palermo. This
meant cutting from the south coast to the north at Palermo itself.
I decided on one further southern escapade first – a trip to the
ancient Greek settlement of Selinunte It was necessary to change at
Castelvetrano from the bus bound for Trápani to the local minibus
to Selinunte and the modern village of Marinellla which is little
more than the accommodation for those going to see Selinunte. It
turned out that the wait in this rather ordinary place
[Castelvetrano] was going to be over an hour and a half, and then
when the bus was quarter of an hour late.
The eastern temples were mainly erected in the sixth century BC and
one of them, Temple E as it rather prosaically named, was
reconstructed in the 1950s. Apparently this was and is
controversial but I feel no qualms about it as long as some are
left as they are found. Whatever, it is a magnificent building and
I am sure a full size re-construction must be the best way of
illustrating to children what these temples were like. The
Acropolis area contains another five temples and most of the
ancient living area as well as the remains of the great walls.
These walls, however, are older than the rest of the remains,
having been built after the city had been destroyed once by
Carthage in order to defend the high ground from further
destructions.