"Do You Need A Shoe?"

It seems that every beach on the planet is a graveyard for solitary shoes. Where do they come from? Garbage dumped into the ocean? Tsunami’s and natural disasters that wash the contents of  villages, towns, and cities into the sea? Strong winds and unexpected sneaker waves?

What happens to all of those lonely shoes, the ones that clutter the beaches of the world?

While on the island of Ko Mak in Thailand, we met a Swedish couple who came up with an idea of what to do with all those lonely shoes. They created an art project, titled “Step-by-Step.“ They collected over two hundred shoes and tied them onto and from a coconut tree that leaned precariously over the warm waters off Ko Kood.  Ewa and her husband were in in Ko Mak for 10 days, on vacation from the chilly Sweden winter, and began their project in the final three days of their stay. Their project was inspired by a similar concept that they saw on Bamboo Island in Cambodia several years before. Decorative elements (in addition to shoes) were scavenged from the beach, including plastic flowers, burly sea-rope, and the title of the project (“Step-by-Step“) written on a wooden plank and hung with frayed rope.  The first shoe that began the project was sassy. It was gold. It was called “Zha-Zha.” She was the beginning of their fantastic project.

As we learned from the ‘Step-by-Step’ Giving Tree, there are many ways to affect change some of them direct, some indirect. This is our Top Ten List of Service Projects for Beach Cleaning:

#1. Start with Something

Instead of complaining try fixing something.; the world is waiting for your help. We can all make a contribution to making our world better and cleaner. If you need a reason to clean a beach, just watch children playing in the surf. Look at how much they enjoy the water, the waves, the sand. Do you want your children, your niece, your cousins, your friends children and their grandchildren to visit beaches where trash washes up on beaches and floats inside the waves? Try picking up a few pieces of trash. People will look at you funny; they are jealous. People wonder, ‘Why is this person so confident that they can make a difference in the world?’

#2. The tools for your project are in the trash

Every time we clean trash we find some useful things in the surf. When we were once stranded on a small island with little water and not enough food (it turns out we hired the town drunk to shuttle us out to this island) we found fishing line, net, hooks and lures and broken buckets which we used to catch bait, then fish, then keep the fish alive until soup time. But, there are also tools for cleaning trash, plastic bags are one of the most common forms of ocean trash. Don’t worry if they have holes in them, you can tie knots in the bags and they can carry trash. If you run out of bags, there is fishing line and rope which can be used to lash the trash into moveable piles of rubbish.

#3. Involve the immediate community

When you are cleaning, people will spontaneously smile and thank you for what you are doing. It may not have occurred to people that this effort is something you would take on. Rather than only focusing on your work, engage people, offer explanations for what you are doing, ask people if they want to help you. The Step-by-Step project not only made a statement about how we can each contribute to the care of our planet, but it also served to clean up the beach. Some of the mobile-style strands of shoes were removed, as they blocked the beach path during high tide. However, these shoes removed from the project were taken off the beach and thrown away. Sometimes our project can evolve into a sustained effort.

#4. Make your statement heard

The ‘Step-by-Step tree had a nameplate or title hung from it on driftwood. Just the name ‘Step-by-Step’ had such a powerful force. There was the idea that we have to take many steps to make an impact on cleaning the oceans and the beaches. Publish/Advertise your work to make your project continue to grow. This about who might want to see your project. Take photographs. Contact environmental organizations, the government, and the local press of TV, newspapers, or internet and tell them what you did, why and how you did it, when and where.

#5.  Have fun

Remember that you are at the beach. Have Fun!! If you get hot wade into the water, swim, or go snorkeling. Pulling trash  out of the sea is very rewarding. Not only do you stay cool and enjoy the water, but you help the living creatures have better lives. And oftentimes cleaning the beach can help you to make new friends!

#6. Combine work and learning

Cleaning beaches and oceans can be quiet and meditative work. Even if you do this work with friends or children you are likely to find your group spread out and individuals working alone. This will be a very good time to think about better ways to do a project, how to involve more people, and, most importantly, how to find alternative ways to stop pollution and trash from getting to the beach at all. We have seen many clever ways to get people involved. Trash cans that were shaped like empty logs, pandas and other animals with open mouths, 100 liter recycled barrels that were painted in art contests were but some of many ways we have seen improvisational and artistically attractive ways to get people involved. As a child in the USA, there were campaigns to change the ways people behaved toward our planet, Smokey the Bear told people how to prevent forest fires while Woodsy the Owl had a song the he sung that said ‘Give a hoot don’t pollute, we can make a better day.’ We have also largely stopped boats from letting go waste into oceans and rivers.

#7. Take some breaks

Breathe, get shade, bring water, watch the sunset and sunrise. Taking breaks remind us why we want the beaches to be clean.

#8. Review your project

Ask yourself what you are doing, can you be more effective, can you involve more people? How?

What would have happened if you  started with no plan? How do you learn just from inspiration?

#9. ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’

I have taught classes for a long time in the USA that ask the important question, ‘Why are we planning and not taking action?’ Then I learned that many projects take a different approach. They learn from their mistakes, but do not wait to have a complete plan before they try it. Instead of using the old practice, ‘ready aim fire’ they say ‘ready fire aim.’ ‘Ready Fire Aim’ means, if you want to take an action, go ahead and do it, then learn from what did not go as you planned, learn from your mistakes, and the next time make your aim better. Cleaning beaches may seem simple. However, when you have begin your project you probably do not know everything. For example, you may not find that when you pick up trash you have followed the best route, perhaps a zig-zag cleans a beach better than a straight line. Waves do not bring trash to beaches in straight lines, so why would a straight line clean a beach?

#10. Remove your trash

Your job cannot be finished until you  can get the trash off of the beach. However, if you re lucky you will pick up so much trash you cannot carry it all away. When the ‘Step-by-Step’ artists first brought back their shoes to the ’Giving Tree’ they left it above the tree. In the night the tide was high, so when they returned they found much of their work had washed back into the sea. If you can’t carry all the trash off the beach, always move it very high above where you think the ocean cannot possibly reach.

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'Step-by-Step' the story of a giving tree

This is the story of a Giving Tree. It lives on a beach and everyday at high tide the tides come up and give it a bath. When the tide is high, its low trunk is a step to keep you dry. When the tides are low but the high sun burns the skin and the hot sand burn feet on the sand the tree provides shade and keeps you cool. Birds sit in the tree in the cool evening breezes and sing to lovers who watch sunsets beneath the branches. The tree has held many swings. Tire swings. Swings made of drift wood and washed up rope.

One day the tree was surrounded by trash that swept up onto the beach in a storm. There were many nets which had stuck together in the terrible surf. There were also toothbrushes, empty bags, and plenty of empty cans of soda (lots of straws too which lost their bottles in the surf). Most of all there were shoes. Lots of shoes. Mostly flip-flops and sandals people may have lost on the beach in the waves. There were also fishing lures, Styrofoam, and fishing floats which must have come a long, long way because they said 'Made in Japan' on their sides.

One day a nice couple arrived from the other side of the world. They had been best friends in high school. When they grew older they they married and separated. Sadly, they had recently lost the husband and wife. Luckily they met again, fell in love, and decided to get married. They were very happy people and treated each other like each day was their honeymoon. They had come to the island before the trash came back and spent every evening watching sunsets beneath this giving tree.

They picked up shoes for two days and other trash. They kept the shoes in one pile and the interesting trash they thought people could reuse in another. With empty bags collected off the beach they separated all the bottles and cans to be recycled. They put the other trash in all the left over bags.

That night, as the sunset, they counted the number of shoes they had found between Monkee and Big Easy beach. They had collected over 250 and not one matched. What would they possibly do with all these shoes without their pairs?

The next day they made jokes with the people who passed as they separated the best shoes from the most broken and torn up shoes. "Are you missing a shoe?" they asked.

But they remembered an old man they had met on an Island near Iryan Jaya, too far from anywhere in between Australia and Indonesia in the far, far Pacific. The old man collected trash and hung it on the beach as art. They had been very moved to see such amazing uses of washed up trash. The old man had told them he hung bottles and shoes in tree to keep away bad spirits and carry his message of the need to clean the oceans all over the world. He told the happy couple that the shoes had found them and brought them to his island to learn what they could do to save the oceans. They could not be here, he said, if they were not wanting to work on his special mission, because the bottles in the trees would keep any bad spirits away.

When this couple remembered the old man, they knew what they could do with their collections of trash. Over the next two days they spent half their time collecting more shoes and the rest of their time using the piles of fishing lines and pieces of of net to tie their shoes to the trunk of their giving tree.

The next day they returned and found that the waves of high tide had undone much of their work and a string of maybe 80 shoes was drifting off from the tree back into the sea. Quickly they regathered the the shoes and tied them more firmly to the tree. The tied up floats to test how high the tides came up. When the water came up the next morning the floats got seaweed on them and they were able to test where the needed to tie the shoes with more knots.

People stopped by as the couple worked on their tree. In the evening, the trunk and the main branches were completely covered in sandals and flip-flops. There were floats attached that bobbed like mobiles in the wind. They looked up and down the beach, Not a piece of trash could be seen in either direction.

"Step-by-Step", the woman said to her loving partner who held her as they watched the sunset under their giving tree, "Step-by step, together we can clean all the oceans in the world and make the beaches all beautiful again!"

"That's it." Her husband responded. They had a name for their giving tree.

The next day they found a piece of driftwood that must have washed up years before in the mangroves behind the giving tree. The wrote "Step-by-Step" on it and tied it with some rope and hung it on the giving tree.

This is a picture of the happy couple who traveled around the world to sit under a tree they loved and watch beautiful sunsets. But they found a storm had thrown trash on there beach including lots of shoes, especially sandals and flip-flops.

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The Best Kept Travel Secret in Thailand

As a tourist destination, Thailand has changed much since it passed its first travel development legislation in 1979. We know from first hand expats here how much change they have seen. Most of it, has meant tat an area once pristine, gentle, safe, and preserved has changed to benefit and grow in the ways Thais and investors believe western tourists want. This has only begun in the last 5-10 years on the eastern frontier border of Cambodia, near Trat, the capital of Pran province.

We have spent a little more than two weeks exploring the town of Trat, its temples, markets, festivals (Chinese New Year), and surrounds. Most of this time was spent in an archipelago of almost 70 tropical, mountainous, and coral reef ringed islands. While we gawked and wondered as we passed so many of these, our time was spent on Ko Mak and Ko Koot. These islands are the two largest after already fully developed Ko Chang and lie on Thailands furthest southeast border.

We were encouraged by our host to visit Ko Mak and see how development was changing these islands. We stayed at Island Hut on the furthest eastern side of the island. While nearby resorts had beach huts which started at 3,000 baht ($100 U.S) per night. Our lovely waterfront cabin cost 450 baht and there were huts just behind us for 200-300. Nearby, up the hill, was a town center, schools, and a cooking school where we had some of our best meals in Thailand (Pad Mee w/ seafood 40 baht!).

After four days, we caught a speed boat to Ko Koot and arrived in Au Bang Nau (Au means bay in Thai). While this lovely white sand beach also sports even more expensive resorts, our host is developing in collaboration with a Thai partner (whose family owns the last islander property with water access left on this island roughly the same size as my own home island back in the USA Martha's Vineyard). Eco Bandin is run by Mr. Moo and his family. It is also under a planned ecoresort development that aims to provide high quality green homes that are built from sustainable locally produced natural materials, that preserve most of the nature 'park' atmosphere so dutifully maintained and nurtured by Mr. Moo.

Building on islands is not an easy or inexpensive task. Materials are brought by boat. Soils are rough and sandy or silty in the tropics. Energy is produced by generators. Water is scarce and untreated. Part of the reason I wanted to see the eco development was it is a friend I have known and admired a long time as the western 'lead.' But we are very interested in service opportunities and sought to be effective proponents of not only sustainable, zero emission construction techniques, but also we are interested in community engagement and participation, local control, positive cultural exchange. We are blogging, and have recently linked to Lonely Planet blogsherpa which connects travel encounters, ideas, and community dialog. [Any proceeds received from the blog will be reinvested into our service efforts.] As we have noted, our aspiration is not to shape and change the lives of people we are visiting, this is a nice happenstance, but more to shape the lives of other travelers and those from our communities and peer groups at home.

Moo's place Eco Bandin is already one of the best kept secrets in Thailand. [Bandin Eco, Moo, Bangbao, Koh Kood, Tel. (066) 086-0522929, Bandinkokood@gmail.com ]. He is the kindest host, chef, gardener, and thinker. He can wax eloquently, though a soft-spoken guy, on the history of the islands, the impacts of development, stewardship of the oceans and island nature, trees, birds, and island animals, flowers, children, family, international travel, photography, Thai food, and so much more. Every day Moo spends his time baby sitting (he has three beautiful children 5, 2, and 8 months) and maintaining the properties gardens, forest, rubber plantation, and building and repairing the structures that make up Eco Bandin. The place is rustic. Some of his bridges are a little disorientating and thus awkward to cross the first time. But between Moo's kindness, the amazing Thai cooking of his wife, his sister-in-law, and himself, his knowledge and connections on the island, and his beautiful location and lush tropical gardens - it was a fantastic find for us to have so many interests interwoven by the best kept secret in Thailand. Of course, in writing this blog, I am actively trying to encourage more people to find out about this best kept secret and to keep it going. When we chose to not support places like Moo's Eco Bandin we support an opposite course of events and poor environmental planning. Everywhere else we visited, forests were bulldozed, burned, heaped up in piles, lands entirely cleared, houses built unsoundly and without proper environmental, structural, or green engineering. Ancient trees were replaced with new species imported at great cost from the mainland.

Moo told me stories of the property that surrounded Eco Bandin. It is especially sad because it speaks about what an even better best kept secret in Thailand these islands could have been and used to be (very recently). The small monkeys which are indigenous to the island have been nearly completely wiped out. Also, the tiny indigenous island pig, numerous rare birds and snakes, giant brackish river fish, hugely diverse and prolific lobster, crab, and shrimp populations, and many indigenous trees and plants are disappeared, going extinct, and being eaten up. And this has happened to Ko Koot for the most part in the last five years!

Here are Ko Koot's nearly extinct wild pigs being fattened up for holiday feast

What can we do as tourists, naturalists, and volunteers, to assure that properties we visit are environmentally 'greener', locals are treated fairly and respectfully, and governments enforce laws of stewardship?

Staying at Eco Bandin was such a pleasure. Visiting and learning about the production of rubber from the rubber plantation and micro-factory, studying the birds, plants, trees, and natural environs, swimming and exploring the adjacent white sand beaches (totally empty of people), hiking the forest, eating and visiting and pondering our human fate, star gazing into skies not ruined by electric lights, fishing, snorklling, squidding, rowing the boat out for sunset/moonrise on Chinese New Year. And endless volunteer and educational opportunities to help maintain the forest, rivers, waterfalls,, beaches, and ecosystems on the precious natural outpost, guarding and stewarding and investing in its unique and critical future.

It was for us the best kept secret in Thailand, but, it is a secret worth sharing. If we support good stewardship and sustainable, respectful forms of tourism in Thailand we can all put out money where out mouths are and heal the planet as we heal ourselves.

Moo's place is not expensive - about $15 U.S. per day for a private beautiful rustic cabin with private bath and all meals included. Moo also saves you money by getting you the best prices for scuba, bike or moped rental, boats and ferries etc without a commission.

Bandin Eco, Moo, Bangbao, Koh Kood, Thailand
Tel. (066) 086-0522929, Bandinkokood@gmail.com

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