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

Read more...

Thailand is Booming with Tourism

I can say with certainty that I already love Thailand. Calm, friendly, honest people. A land of Buddhism that entices you quickly with its sweet flavors, fragrance of flowers, polite and gentle landscapes. It is entirely nonabrasive (we have stuck mostly away from the tourist path - 'walking streets,' the seedy brothel lore, the tired 'Cancun' and Disneyesque resort beaches to the south). Anyone with imagination or a taste for its rich history can easily see a charmed past and feel in its recent history, echoes. This is not a blog about that Thailand. This is what I wrote spontaneously on a slow diesel trawler as we crawled along the coast back to the furthest edge we could find away from Thai 'civilization.' After nearly two weeks on islands and in serene mangrove estuarine enclaves along the Thai Cambodian border here it is what I wrote. If it is for anyone, it is for the thoughtful and compassioned traveler. And, it is for the governments of Thailand, her neighbors, and the world community that flocks here. It is not meant as unfriendly. It is meant as a reminder to all of us who can ignore what role we play in the way the world develops.

It goes like this...


What would fix our world: By example from Thailand

Life has only ever taken me to moments.
In clarity in Evolutions.
I would see in a place all I loved and all at once.
Nothing like this ever came to me in Thailand.
Here, a debate with self, of new purpose, new pursuits.
China, India, Louisiana, ancestry vastly more polluted
These all ring with Life for me. Poor Thailand.
I am understanding very little here.
It sticks to my soul like a skin's lesion.

Thus, I reflect on other places, other times.
A first epiphany in Omaha, Nebraska. I am 17.
A urchin's port in Panama's Casco Viejo. I am 29.
Acrid sulfurs of country roads back home.
Distances of time. Memories held still.
Photographic emotional stillness.
Friends and acquaintances long gone.
Distances grown to revolutions.

Thailand, as ill as the planet we are healing.
Now, but now, but NOW, must remain sick, bedridden.
Venezuela, USA, The Indian Res
And all the old Colonies hovering below remark for it.
Darkness, falsely lit, in phantom shallows. A putritude.
Holding good which was evil disguised as good without evil.

A lost time. Dead monks littering roads between Buddhist countries.
Greeds, Pollutions, Degraded, Degrading.
Falsity, lacklusterness, undefined ruination with no common purpose.
Results of organized religion - Capital wealth.
King's of Ancient Nations trading arms and lands and death.
Kunckledusters who let ruin the golden gates.
What would fix our world? By example from Thailand...
"Kill the Buddha!"

....

To our lovely friends and all her kind people, forgive a wit in wrath.

This blog is going to be followed by a short series of positive inspirations about eco tourism, public environmental art, service projects that are self-starters (and work), green development lessons, new friendships and the like. But, I have to get this out there to get started on the rest.

We have two days until Calcutta, India. What can await us there?

Wrapping up Thailand, we have been enjoying the long New Year's celebrations, visiting craft, music, and food bazaars and festivals and wishing we had many of our good friends and family along to enjoy this place and make sense of what is happening here so that we should all become better stewards of the world our children's children and their children's children might one day inherit.

Thailand is Booming with Tourism. What can we learn from their losses and their fate? (A sad and deadly sickness of selfishness and mad advantages)

Read more...

Nanjing

Are you reading this? Then we have rejoined the ranks on the democratic side of the Great Firewall of China. Many thanks to a sweet girl from the couchsurfer network that clued us in to a proxy site. How I managed to decipher the instructions in Chinese....I'll never know. But here we are.

We are finally starting to groove into a Chinese rhythm; it has taken a few days. The differences between China and Japan are incredible: Japan is more focused on etiquette and manners and the formalities of life. China is bustle and fewer pleasantries and less reserved. Mind you, these judgments come from a girl that neither speaks nor reads either Chinese or Japanese.

On Sunday we managed to tear ourselves away from the sweet situation in Shanghai with our new friends Nan and Benson, and took a train to Nanjing amid a snow flurry. The train ride was fascinating: mile after mile after mile of construction. Everywhere you look, China is tearing something down and building a newer, taller, bigger version in its place. I know we keep mentioning this, but it is a constant wonder for us.

I love Nanjing. With a population that is about 10 million less than Shanghai, we are finding Nanjing much easier to navigate and explore. The city involves a bit more walking, as it only has ONE subway line, as compared to eleven in Shanghai. Yesterday we wandered all around the city, reaching lofty heights atop the 600 year old remnants of the Nanjing city wall. We explored the medical university area, gearing up for a similar experience in Changsha, and snacked on plenty of street food.

The last several nights we have spent at a basic hotel called the "Home Inn." It has a feature that we have experienced several times already in east asia: the electronic door card also activates the electricity in the room. When you enter the room, there is a small slot immediately located on the wall, where the card must be inserted before the lights, television, heat, etc can be turned on. Smart? I think so. Are you as careful to turn out the hotel lights when you leave as you are in your own house? I doubt it. The idea of energy conservation kinda falls down the tubes when someone else is cleaning your sleeping space and the hot water never runs out.

And speaking of energy awareness and conservation, we were delighted to look out over nanjing yesterday onto a sea of solar panels. Atop each 7 story apartment building were ginormous solar panels. And mind you, we weren't in a hoity-toity neighborhood, but rather, a lower-middle class neighborhood. Yeah China!! Show us how it's done!

lots of love to our readers, leave us a comment and let us know you are reading! Check out shutterfly account for photos, as this proxy site doesn't allow for uploads.

xoxoxo
brittany

Read more...