Bangkok--7 Jan--TAT
Lost in the Mangroves
Explore the mangrove village of Leeled and not only will you find a way of life unlike anywhere else in Thailand but also a heartening lesson on how villagers, using their own resources, are reversing damage inflicted on the natural environment.
The boat quietly pulls away from the Leeled dock. Within moments, we are deep in a maze of quiet canals winding through a mangrove forest that a few years ago was open sea. Kingfishers flash electric blue as they dart through the nipa palm and lampoo (Sonneratia) trees, crab-eating macaques cavort in the upper branches, and a heron stands stilt-like in the shallows waiting to spear a fish.
We cruise through a lost world with plants that suggest a pre-historic rainforest. The setting is pristine, pre-human, and the clear water is free of garbage. It is hard to believe that four short years ago, this was a cesspool.
Leeled is a small coastal village nine kilometres northeast of Surat Thani, the departure point for the popular beach resorts of Koh Samui and Koh Phang-ngan in southern Thailand.
Images TAT Its stilt houses dot the thick mangrove forest that walls the town off from the Gulf of Thailand. Here, visitors discover a part of Thailand quite unlike any other they’ve experienced.
Thailand’s coastline stretches 3,219 kilometres in an arc over the Gulf of Thailand from Cambodia to Malaysia, and along the Andaman coast from Malaysia up to Myanmar. It is divided roughly 10-to-1 between sandy golden beaches and mangroves. In the past few decades, coastal forests have been devastated by villagers cutting nipa palm and other trees to make charcoal and fishing stakes, and by shrimp farmers who fouled the marshlands and polluted the water.
Leeled rose to this daunting challenge with surprising speed, becoming a model for villagers here and abroad. Along the way, it has turned one of Thailand’s overlooked regions into a magnet for visitors.
The starting point for a tour is the Nature Learning Centre. This was built as part of a Community-Based Tourism (CBT) project to educate Thais and foreigners about mangrove forest ecosystems and their vital importance. Visitors explore it on ecotours organized by tour agencies in Bangkok and Surat Thani.
LEELED ECOTOURISM
A Model for Sustainable Community-Based Tourism
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