It is the mid-term break for an international high school in Singapore, and four final-year students are spending the time picking rocks up off a streambed in hilly Thailand. They are here helping a village of Paulong, an ethnic group originally from Myanmar (Burma), to try and solve their water scarcity problem by building six mini dams. While the locale is unique for them, what is more unusual is that they have actually paid a tour operator for this “volunteer” experience.

Student voluntourist in action - schools without walls!

For the students, the four-days spent working and learning fulfils a curriculum requirement. For the travel industry, the students represent a new and expanding niche market. Students wanting to discover different ideas and experiences are part of the evolving educational tourism sector. As individuals travelling to help strangers, they are part of what is being called “voluntourism”.

“This field is so new that the industry has yet to agree on an official definition,” quips a tour operator who organizes projects for well-intentioned travellers in and around Thailand.

Perhaps “meaningful tourism” better describes the new wave in travelling, as that is what an increasing cross-section of contemporary travellers, which includes school and gap-year students, people in mid-career breaks as well as retirees, are seeking.

“Today’s travellers are not fulfilled by getting on a tour bus. They want an interaction that comes from a host community,” explains Peter Semone, Vice President–Development for the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA). “They want to go and learn something — to feel and touch.”

Voluntourist in action - learn, feel and touch with the host community

Semone estimates the trend is partly a reaction to the “McDonaldization”, or the sameness, of the world. “People have to dig a layer deeper to get what we got years ago,”
he explains.

Nick Ascot of North by North East Tours based in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, sees more and more travellers who “want to expand their horizons and perspectives, to have a life-changing experience”.

Although educational tourism seems to mean a variety of things, Semone believes that the travel and tourism industry needs to start incorporating an educational component in every element of travel “because travellers are demanding it.”

This educational component can cover a range of experiences. There is the traditional approach in which typically, though not exclusively, students or seniors tour cultural sites. Or there are the more interactive adaptations, for example, groups of secondary students having a “week without walls” experience in which they learn about the environment, new cultures and even themselves from staying in a new place or university students conducting baseline studies or participating in cultural resource management courses far from their classrooms.

Meaningful travel quickly creates a bridge between cultures and languages

There are also academic-led trips that engage with an ethnic group or offer instruction from local experts, such as cooking with spices and herbs, studying a different religion, conversing with artists and architects, or sitting in a forest with flora and fauna specialists as they catalogue the immediate environment. There are meditation retreats. And there are homestay experiences, in which tourists live in local lodgings to experience the lifestyle of a particular group of people.

Destinations include rural village schools, a wildlife sanctuary’s animal rehabilitation clinic, an urban orphanage, and a national park’s reforestation project. There is a virtually infinite list of diverse options for consideration.

Voluntourism takes the learning and interacting one step further by aiming to help improve the lives of a local community over a period of time ranging from a couple days to months. It is a relatively new term that has been used more frequently since the 2004 tsunami which destroyed communities and hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and triggered an unprecedented outpouring of compassion.

Ascot is among a very small cluster of innovative tour operators in Thailand focusing on the new tourism and travellers who want hands-on learning or do-good activities. Each seems to have developed distinctive approaches in appealing to travellers.

Adding value for both the host and the guest through meaningful travel

North by North East Tours offers projects for volunteers wanting to lend a hand, such as building a school room, teaching English and computer skills or providing medical care and training countryside clinicians in the latest methods. City orphanages host older travellers to spend a half day making dinner and sponsor meals for a period of time. A group of American university students recently dug, bricked, cemented and installed new toilets for a local village weaving cooperative. Though North by North East puts together packages that include travel in Thailand, so far their volunteer projects are located mostly across the border in Laos.

Clients range considerably in age and thus in sought-after experiences. Jason Rolan of North by North East Tours has worked with some of Ascot’s older educational tourists. “They are not typically ready to spend long periods volunteering and tend to require five-star accommodation,” he says. “Yet they will enthusiastically jump at an opportunity to provide or do something beneficial for a community in need.”

PaddleAsia, based in southern Phuket for the past 13 years, teaches young students from around the region kayaking, navigation, safety and rescue techniques, and expedition-planning skills in and around natural history lessons. Their days don’t end at the water’s edge. They take samples back to the Khao Sok resort’s science laboratory where local experts or PaddleAsia’s operator, Dave Williams, lecture in the evenings.

After the tsunami severely damaged the western coastal areas north of Phuket, Williams received requests from university student groups he had worked with in the past to help them offer assistance to survivors. So far they have developed courses in dive-master training and English for people who lost their jobs and need to find new livelihoods.

Described by an industry executive as “cutting edge” in terms of the new tourism, Track of the Tiger in northern Thailand has intermingled education and volunteering in a visionary initiative called Volunteers Without Borders (VWB).

Shane Beary, who started Track of the Tiger in 1986, believes voluntourism can be a development tool to lift people out of poverty. He also uses it to create new or improved tourism “products” for what he sees is a growing market — that of the discerning eco-tourist.

The VWB Initiative runs on a non-profit basis. The voluntourists pay for the accommodation, food and materials needed in a project, as well as for a local guide or make a small contribution to a village ecotourism development fund, depending on the project.

“Without funding and assistance, there is little chance of them developing an upmarket ecotourism attraction that will provide them with a viable living,” says Beary. "By having such attractions, the locals will have the needed incentive to protect their environment and their unique way of life", he adds.

With funding and hands on assistance, Beary anticipates participating villages can build comfortable and standardised bamboo lodgings, that he and others can then send ecotourists tourists to stay in. These tourists can work with the locals planting seedlings (bamboo, rattan, wild pepper etc.) that have been encouraged as an alternative to their typical but destructive slash and burn agriculture, or enjoy other ecotourism attractions. Whilst there, the tourists can learn about the local environment and culture in an environment of mutual respect.

The four students from Singapore used the VWB initiative to help the Paulong build their mini dams. Track of the Tiger is working with a non-government group called Upland Holistic Development Programme in that village. They have started building a two-hour nature trail. The trees and plants along it are all identified in a detailed guide book with explanations about how locals use them.

Years ago, Beary and his partners (retired teachers) saw as a great opportunity in educational tourism. They established a dedicated Outdoor Education Centre, the first of its kind in Southeast Asia for local and international school groups. The centre offers several educational components, such as environmental studies, geography, organic farming, team building, leadership and community development.

“While other up-country resort operations are at 25 per cent occupancy in the low season, we’re flat out,” he says of the Maekok River Village Resort & Outdoor Education Centre in Ban Thaton, Chiang Mai province. In 2005 they registered more than 1,200 students from 14 countries.

Track of the Tiger also has made a reputation providing team-building packages to companies. Last year, when the abbot of Wat Don Chan orphanage located on the outskirts of Chiang Mai asked for help in feeding his wards, Beary suggested to a Hong Kong company that was planning staff training that it help build a hydroponic greenhouse for the orphanage to help them grow food and earn income. The project was a great success, and since then he has encouraged other companies to include a voluntourism activity in their team-building packages.

Beary also believes that multinational corporations can use their corporate social responsibility funding to partly sponsor local school groups, or their own staff, to attend one of the VWB programmes. With more travellers giving greater consideration to how and why they travel, PATA’s Semone believes tour operators are being pressured to compete on uniqueness rather than just on price.

According to Ascot, there is a big pay-off in this. Education travellers tend to stay much longer in a country than the average tourist. They look for creature comforts and are less price sensitive. “But being more knowledgeable, socially and environmentally aware and responsible means they inflict less damage on the environment than the average tourist.”

Which is how meaningful tourism quickly becomes sustainable tourism. “We have to maintain the integrity of our destinations — the culture and the environment,” says Semone. “Otherwise, the whole premise of our business is at risk.”

A picture speaks a 1000 words!

Contact information:
PaddleAsia Co., Ltd.
Web sites:
www.paddleasia.com
www.thailandbirding.com
paddler@paddleasia.com
Skype chat user name — paddleasia
Windows Messenger name — paddleasia@gmail.com
Tel:+66 (0) 7624 0952

Track of the Tiger
Tel: +66 (0) 5330 8775-6 (Mon - Sat ) 0800-1700 hrs
Fax: +66 (0) 5381 8221
E-mail:
tiger@loxinfo.co.th
tours@track-of-the-tiger.com
Web site: www.track-of-the-tiger.com

Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA)
PATA is a global organisation with Headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand:
PATA Headquarters
Unit B1, 28th Floor, Siam Tower
989 Rama I Road, Pathumwan
Bangkok 10330, Thailand
Tel: +66 (0) 2658 2000
Fax: +66 (0) 2658 2010
E-mail: patabkk@PATA.org
Web site: www.pata.org

North by North-East Travel
Tel: +66 (0) 4251 3572
Fax:+66 (0) 4251 3573
e-mail: info@ north-by-north-east.com
Web site: www.north-by-north-east.com

Web sites for reference
National Elephant Institute — Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, Lampang
Mahout and Elephant Training School
Web site: http://www.thailandelephant.org/eng/home.php3#

Greenway Cultural Exchange and International Living
www.greenwaythailand.org

This article was reprinted from the Tourism Authority of Thailand website http://www.tatnews.org/emagazine/2874.asp

Special thanks to both the writer Karen Emmons and the photographer Jason Rolan (North by North East, Director of Voluntourism)