Tagged “Environment

8 posts

Sifting through Arts Cafés in Siem Reap

We had originally planned to spend our first day exploring the ruins of Angkor Wat but found ourselves completely exhausted after the long day of travel from Bangkok. Instead we rested in the comfortable hammocks of the Khmer family-owned Golden Temple Villa and later made…

A Window to the Wetlands: Thailand to Cambodia by Train and Tuk-Tuk

The train from Bangkok to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet leaves Hualamphong station every morning at 5.55am. At 4.50am we left our hostel to make the short walk to the station. The city streets were already bustling with newspaper deliveries and families of sellers…

The Great Hornbills of Langkawi

The following day, at the crack of dawn, we boarded the ferry that would take us to the island of Pulao Langkawi , just a few kilometres south of the Malaysia-Thailand border. The ferry journey itself was only a couple of hours, punctuated by one…

The Cameron Highlands: the Land of Tea and Strawberries

I was quite looking forward to the bus ride up to the Cameron Highlands, envisaging a slow drive along winding jungle paths into the green, misty hills. This was before I had experienced driving in South East Asia however, having only had a little taste…

Samoa - The 'Last Place on Earth' (until December)

In the morning that we arrived in Samoa, we were supposed to be heading to the local fish market, but secretly not relishing the thought of staring at a lot of dead or slowly suffocating creatures, our attention was drawn elsewhere...by a group of men,…

Hawaiian Hawaiʻi

Our first stop in the South Pacific was Hawaiʻi which I had been looking forward to visiting, especially since learning about indigenous Hawaiian culture from a Hawaiian man (who was going home to Hilo) on the boat. Not surprisingly, prior to Western contact, Hawaiʻi's native…

Passenger Liners and Environmental Practice

The Cruise Line International Association (a body representing the interests of North American cruise companies) reported in September that the cruise industry is one of the fastest growing areas of tourism. The environmental practices that cruise companies choose to either adopt or neglect will therefore…

Santa Monica: Putting the 'me' back in Environmental

Santa Barbara may be the official Californian home of the annual ' Earth Day ' festival (first started there back in 1970) but Santa Monica is proud to have been surfing the sustainable movement wave for some time before the word sustainable 'beca me a…