Good-Deed Travel in Mexico: The value of being with a group

by Jamie Rhein on

First off, I’m the type that is happy to be alone. Sometimes groups get on my nerves. Sometimes, I feel like I belong with the crowd just fine. Other times, being in a group gives me the feeling that I am wearing the wrong style clothing. Instead of a cocktail dress, I’ve worn jeans or vis versa.

I seriously had not a clue of what to expect when I headed off to Mexico to help build houses. I barely had time to pack. When my daughter and I were heading out the door, I couldn’t find the left shoe of the pair I planned to wear when I wasn’t hammering and sawing. I gave up and grabbed another. What I have found, in general, that it is hard to do good-deeds on ones own. My biggest successes have been when I am part of something bigger than myself.

For this good-deed trip, we had to be at the airport by 6:00 a.m. to hook up with the group scheduled for the Southwest Airlines flight two hours later. There was comfort in being handed a list of the people in my travel group and their name tags by one of the trip leaders. I felt hooked in with a purpose, a reason to be along, and not like one of those body parts that we don’t really need. I had on the right clothes. It didn’t matter that I was only in charge of keeping track of five people besides myself. The words, “Here’s your travel group,” roused me from my early morning bleary state of a lack of sleep.

Two people in my group were college students, two were high schoolers and there was my daughter. The college guys were brothers. The high school guys were friends, and none of the pairs knew each other beforehand. As I handed out the name tags, to be worn around our necks at all times, it felt good to be pulled into the realm of a other people. It felt weighty. We were a subset of a larger group on the same Southwest Airlines flight.

As soon hit the airport in Columbus, I remembered one more advantage of traveling in a group instead of going it alone. In general, someone else has done the hard part of figuring out logistics. You can even get matching luggage tags which helps keep bags together.

Another advantage of traveling with a group is that when the flight is delayed for two hours, there is someone to play cards with or to color. Or to watch your stuff while you sleep. I learned that even high school age students like to color in coloring books. One girl brought them along.

Being in a group is almost like stepping on a conveyor belt. You can get from one point to the next without thinking about how you’re going to get there. So many details are taken care of by someone else. If a person has a busy life when not doing good-deed travel, it’s a bonus to have someone else do the thinking. It’s not that my brain was left with my missing shoe, but I didn’t feel the need to be “on,” or the one with the answers.

Here’s another bonus. When your flight is late arriving at a connecting airport, when you are part of a large group, the plane gets held for you. We hoofed it in Phoenix from one gate to the next, our name tags swinging, checking all the while to make sure we were all accounted for. The plane also waits for your luggage to transfer. If I had been on my own, I’d have gotten to know the airport much more than I would have cared to, and heaven knows when the luggage would have arrived.

In all, over 160 of us went to Mexico which involved three different flights from Columbus to San Diego. Our flight had about one third of the total. The youngest person on the trip was 14. The oldest was over 60. Most people were high school age. The small group subset helped reinforce the idea that being on a do-good trip meant being part of a larger purpose where building relationships was an important part of building a house. For parents who are sending adolescents out of the country, this system also ensures that an adult has some notion of what their kid is up to and that he or she won’t be left out, or left behind.

Once we hit Amor Ministries campground in Mexico, about an hour from Tijuana, except for our assigned work groups, and large group meetings, we were free to group up or go it alone as we saw fit. Traveling in a group means that there is someone who can help get those tent stakes in hard-packed ground. Someone else knows where other stakes are available when all of yours don’t work.

The real value of being part of a larger mixed age group, like we were, is the varied conversations one can have. Chatting took on various forms and levels from trivial to deep. With 160 plus people along, there’s always someone to talk with if you feel like it. Or if you don’t feel like it, who cares? There are plenty of others so you can be left alone–just not forever.

With a trip such as the one I went on, people forge friendships, if only for a week, with people who have a common purpose. This is a powerful feeling. One is not swirling about the planet in a random way trying to find footing, but instead there you are with others who have gathered for a common goal. Let’s build a house. A person can not build a house alone, even if one has built a house before.

If you happen to be one who travels on your own, latching onto a group for a brief while, might be one way to look at life from another angle. It’s not just the finished houses that have value, it’s the feeling of connection that develps after a few days. Friends of mine who have participated in Habitat for Humanity type projects have said the same thing..

From what I’ve found, most people who travel in groups have a welcoming spirit, and if you’re willing and able, will find a place for you. They might even share their food.

This picture is of my work group in charge of building one of the 12 houses that the 160 of us built. The first picture is the frame. The two high school boys of my travel group were also in my work group. I’m the front row, 2nd from the left. See the name tag? My T-shirt says, “Don’t assume I cook.” In a group, I don’t have to.

Villages all over the world open their doors to tourists

by Iva Skoch on

The search for authenticity is central to postmodern traveling. Nobody, or almost nobody, wants to be the token tourist and be treated as a token tourist.

Many destinations around the globe are starting to figure that out. Instead of assuming that “rich Westerners” want to sleep at the Marriott and sample foreign culture only by sipping a “theme martini”, places like Thailand know that more and more travelers want to experience the authentic life average people of Thailand are living: feeding pigs, planting vegetables, harvesting fruits. Swapping places, if you will.

The Guardian has an interesting article about the “community tourism” phenomenon. The author spend time with the “mountain people” in Ja Bor in north west Thailand, a three-hour drive from Chang Mai “on a road of endless hairpin bends”.

Visitors apparently “stay in a local home mattresses on the floor with outside washing facilities or in a large dormitory-style building, and are fed lavish amounts of food from the villages ubiquitous rice fields, its fish farm, organic vegetable garden and from the nearby forest, nurtured by sparkling streams. Close to a waterfall is a delicate bamboo shrine to thank the spirits for carrying water to the rice fields. And then there is coffee production. Dried by the sun, roasted over an open fire and sifted on bamboo platters, this arabica coffee bears a Fairtrade label and gets sold to Starbucks.”

Aside from the Starbucks piece, it sounds blissful.

Pandas in zoos

by Jamie Rhein on

When I read about giant panda Ling Ling’s death in Japan, besides confusing the Ling Ling that visited the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. in 1972 with the Ling Ling that just died at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, (see post) I also found out that there are only 1500, or thereabouts, pandas in the wild. That feels a bit alarming. That’s a smaller number than the number of students in many high schools in the U.S.

With the Ueno Zoo without a panda, perhaps they might get a loaner. Zoos do loan animals. In 1987, China loaned the San Diego Zoo two pandas that procreated. Now the San Diego Zoo has the most giant pandas than any other zoo in the United States. Head to the Giant Panda Research Station if you go here.

Where else can you see pandas? Here’s what I’ve found so far.

  • At the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the Giant Panda Habitat is a place to experience panda life and learn about a panda’s life cycle.
  • The Memphis Zoo has a panda pair, Ya Ya and Le Le. The CHINA exhibit highlights the pandas and other animals from this part of the world.
  • The Atlanta Zoo, the 4th zoo in the U.S. with giant pandas has a mother and her cub.
  • At the Adelaide Zoo in Southern Australia, you’ll be able to see pandas in 2009. The hope is that Wangwang and Funi (male and female) will mate and the zoo will be able to have a role in the conservation of these animals.
  • The Madrid Zoo has a panda pair on loan for the next ten years.

Dispatch from Sumatra’s nastiest swamp (part 1 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on


Forget for a moment the dreadful conditions in this miserable Sumatran swamp, which include being eaten by tigers (seven in the surrounding area last year). Just getting here is an ordeal in itself. Start by taking the 1,400-kilometer flight from the capital, Jakarta, to Sumatra‘s bustling northern port, Medan. Then it’s a grueling twelve-hour ride straight across the island’s dramatic mountains-and poorly maintained roads-to the Indian Ocean, where a puttering speedboat will be waiting to make the hour-long trip upriver.

If all goes well, you arrive at camp for the daily rationing of rice and canned mackerel. This is assuming you secured the four permits required for a visit to this hidden corner of Leuser National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Yet despite the remoteness or food or the fact the Suaq Balimbing field station is in the middle of a flooded swamp, the scientists here couldn’t be happier at their return. “We were all waiting for this place to reopen,” Andrea Gibson, a PhD candidate at University of Zurich who had to delay her orangutan fieldwork by three years because of the station’s hiatus, said to me.
There’s no question why so many researchers clamber to be here. The site rocketed to fame in the mid-1990s with the discovery of tool-use among orangutans, the only primate besides chimpanzees with such abilities; it remains the only location with widespread tool-use. Later work contributed to a landmark paper in Science that demonstrated the existence of orangutan culture. This modest patch of swamp, quite frankly, boasts some of the smartest apes in the world.

But an upsurge of violence from the long-running civil war at the end of the 1990s forced the Suaq primatologists, as well as wildlife researchers across Aceh, out of business. Only now, with a peace treaty in place, are they trickling back. Nowhere has the homecoming been more dramatic or anticipated than at Suaq Balimbing.

As the boat pulls into the dock-a rickety piece of plywood-the field station looms large, looking almost palatial against the backdrop of dense jungle foliage. But once on top of the riverbank, you realize the camp, which consists of three tiny rooms in two wooden shacks, is about to burst at the seams. Fifteen people, including three graduate students from Zurich, an Indonesian student, a cook, and several field assistants jostle for space alongside generators, laptops, food supplies, and an entire department store of wet field outfits hung out to dry.


None of this, however, was around a year ago, and with that in mind, Suaq’s transformation seems nothing short of miraculous. When the field staff evacuated in September 1999, hastened by the execution of the head assistant and violent skirmishes nearby, they left behind two sturdy buildings, one of which had six rooms. By the time they returned for a brief survey in 2006, everything had gone up in flames. “The rebels had been using our camp, so the military didn’t burn it down for nothing,” the camp’s principal investigator explained to me. Equally disheartening, the boardwalks used to traverse much of the 350-hectare swamp had rotted away.

After completely rebuilding the station last February, albeit on a smaller scale, the staff spent much of the summer blazing a new, 46-kilometer trail grid, an absolute necessity when tracking orangutans day in and out. They started collecting behavioral data last September.

The civil war’s impact on the Suaq jungle, on the other hand, was quite unexpected. When President Suharto fell from power in 1999, illegal loggers almost overran the station. “Then the civil war stemmed that,” explained Ian Singleton, a Medan-based orangutan researcher who oversees logistics at Suaq. “The illegal loggers and poachers didn’t want to risk being shot. So the civil war was extremely good for conservation.”

Continue to part 2.

Cash and Treasures: Travel Channel’s family friendly fare

by Jamie Rhein on

I have become enamored with Cash and Treasures, the Travel Channel’s show dedicated to digging up things and making money while you’re at it. For the last three weeks, I’ve caught the Wednesday night, 10 PM episode and picked up some ideas for places to stop on our trip west this summer. The number of treasures one can dig up in the United States, Cash and Treasure’s primary focus, is impressive.

Unlike a lot of other travel shows where one wonders if the world has any children at all, new host Kirsten Gum, who is the replacement for Becky Worley who had twins, chats with kids in every episode. Gum heads to family friendly places where kids are as welcome as adults to pick up digging tools and have at it. Gum also seems to enjoy the kids she is talking with, and for the most part, doesn’t use them as photo ops. They are given time to talk about what they are finding. At the dig spots, Gum delves into the history of the area and why whatever is being mined is considered worth finding.

Along with finding out where and what to dig, people who tune into the show can find out how to make some money off their finds. Gum takes her stash of whatever she’s found during that particular episode to people who show her how to clean it, mount it and turn it into jewelery. Many of the businesses have been in operation for years and the people who run them are experts. Since each place Gum has visited is worth a detailed mention stay tuned. One place will be the focus of one post. Gems, bones, gold and fossils are on the menu.