Alternative tourism

Going from island to island, chilling on beaches and snorkelling in crystal blue waters seems a hard life, but when there's no escaping the amount of rubbish all around you, it really is. I arrived at Koh Phi Phi and outside my hostel was this sign for a beach clean, although I would've moved onto the next island by then so was not able to take part.

Luckily, my next stop was Koh Lanta where I saw that they too had a Trash Hero on the island and were doing a cleanup the following afternoon. They're a non-governmental organisation that do beach cleans (and village cleans) around many parts of SE Asia.

The following day I headed down to the meeting point with a few keen people from the hostel and met with Mayaan and Fafa who ran this clean up, along with an eco friendly guesthouse in the old town of Koh Lanta. They gave us each a glove and some bin bags and told us where best to go. We found all sorts of waste, but there were a lot of discarded fishing and crab nets, tangled in bits of drift wood and stuck beneath rocks. Some of it was wedged so deep under the rock it was near impossible to get out.

There were 28 volunteers (including three kids) from all over the world helping out with the cleanup but no locals. This was because Thai people are a little "scared of the rain" so decided to stay indoors, but we were told that Trash Hero in Koh Lanta has been received well by the locals, especially the children, and that they have been getting involved with previous cleanups. Hopefully this is also leading to a behavioural change amongst them with regards to waste disposal.

Despite the terrible weather, in about 1.5 to 2 hours the 28 of us collected 25 large bin bags worth of rubbish. This would later be collected by the waste disposal company on the island and taken to 'trash mountain' where rubbish would often be incinerated since this is how people used to deal with it back in the day (when it was mainly just organic waste).

I also found out that recycling companies here send beer bottles back to the beer company for them to recycle. A closed loop system that I could definitely get behind.

The following day I decided to do a bit of alternative sightseeing and took my bright pink scooter to trash mountain. I looked very out of place and got some strange looks but it was definitely worth it. You could smell the mountain before you could see it and the road leading up to it was covered in litter that had either blown off the back of a truck or from the mountain itself. There was nothing holding the mountain back, with it was spilling out into the street and little radioactive looking streams below. I've included a few shots of the landfill site below.

This cleanup made me realise how little the country is able to manage its own waste let alone imported waste from the West. Although having said that, it was a really enjoyable experience (which I repeated with Trash Hero, Langkawi a week later) and is definitely a great movement making a noticeable impact that I'm sure will continue to grow.