EVA Travel
Welcome to EVA - Ethical Volunteering Adventures and to my first blog on the website!
Some of you will have joined me from our very successful Facebook group and community, but others may just stumble upon this while looking for a worthwhile way to travel. I hope you find a home here with opportunities for travel on the website and a friendly, supportive membership on the Facebook group.
So what’s ethical travel/sustainable travel/give back travel? Why am I so passionate about it? Does it really make a difference? Are we just white saviours making ourselves feel important and worthy? These are questions that rightly get raised from time to time and since this website commits to promoting sustainable travel I think we should address all these issues at the outset and lay the foundations for our future.
I came to sustainable travel relatively late in life. Like many of the people I speak to, my normal holidays would have been 2 weeks in France from my base in Ireland or a holiday in America to visit family. Nothing more adventurous than that and it was the usual stay in a caravan or apartment. In 2018 that all changed and while it's a great story, I’ll tell it another time! But after yet another relationship breakdown I found myself determined to remain permanently single but with no real sense of purpose beyond the everyday matters of family and work.
So in 2018 at the age of 59 I went on my first give-back holiday to Thailand. The preparation for the trip was terrifying- I wasn’t the ‘type of person’ to head off on exotic holidays and I had never dreamed of going to Thailand. I researched the company I was travelling with to the nth degree and at that point in time it was a good, solid and award winning tour company. I put my apprehensions to one side and off I went and in many ways the rest is history.
The trip to Thailand awakened something in me that I hadn’t realised was there. We spent time with a native tribe in northern Thailand, living with the family and helping in the community. The tribe was located in the Golden Triangle and the then King was moving his people away from producing poppies used in heroin production to planting coffee. In other words, moving to a more sustainable method of living. We sat in the mud and planted fragile coffee beans, promising to come back in 2 years to help with the harvest. I worked in the sweltering heat on a mountainside wielding a machete to cut bamboo to feed the elephants.
But my journey of learning about sustainable travel was only just beginning. In 2019 I went with the same company to India and spent time at Wildlife SOS outside Agra. We weren’t allowed near the sloth bears- if you see their claws you’ll know why immediately! Once again much bamboo was chopped, much elephant dung collected and many fences were painted. I was pretty confused though as we weren’t allowed to feed the elephants by hand or take them to the river to bathe with them, as we had been allowed in Thailand. This was the more ‘ethical’ way of treating wild animals apparently and while it was a surprise to me I was willing to learn more.
2020 was a bust as far as travel went. We were all confined to base and watched in horror as a pandemic raced across the world reminding some of the early 1900’s flu outbreak, or in my case the Aids epidemic I worked through in New York.
By 2022 travel was back on the radar and I was lucky to be able to get to Costa Rica with that same company. In terms of sustainable tourism, Costa Rica was a real eye-opener. What interested me most was the feeling among the people we worked with that the road to sustainability was driven not by government policy or UN directives but by the people. Their love for the land is real and palpable and we played our small part by cleaning the beaches, planting native tree species, doing a night watch for the laying turtles and I’m pretty sure there was some bamboo cut at some point. The most challenging part of that trip was the day we spent at the ‘recycling centre’- basically all the rubbish from all the beaches tipped into someone’s back garden. We separated so many plastic bottles that day they chased me in my dreams for days to come! But it opened my eyes to the enormous issue of plastic pollution and our disregard for what happens to everything we dispose of.
Many of you will know that the company I travelled with went bankrupt later in 2022 and left thousands of people out of pocket, but more than anything for me was the deep sense of betrayal. We were genuinely more than a group of travellers, we were a family that were learning to care for our environment and make our travel purposeful.
So in 2022 I set up a money support group which in turn led to a travel hub where people could connect with the operators who had also been let down and shared the sense of betrayal. But as I became more involved in the travel end of things I had to contend with those accusations of white saviour syndrome and meddling needlessly in peoples’ lives. And so began my journey to learn more and understand the need for sustainable travel and why it isn’t the bogeyman some think it is.
As time goes on, I will revisit this topic, especially the ‘white saviour’ accusation but I think for the moment it's worth taking a look at what the UN does say about the subject. There are 17 sustainable goals that the UN is working toward for 2030 and tourism, more than any other area, cuts across all the objectives that have been set. In paragraph 131 of the Framework it states that Member States should “encourage the promotion of investment in sustainable tourism, including eco-tourism and cultural tourism, which may include creating small- and medium-sized enterprises and facilitating access to finance, including through microcredit initiatives for the poor, indigenous peoples and local communities in areas with high ecotourism potential”.
And:
“...recognise the need to support sustainable tourism activities and relevant capacity-building that promote environmental awareness, conserve and protect the environment, respect wildlife, flora, biodiversity, ecosystems and cultural diversity, and improve the welfare and livelihoods of local communities by supporting their local economies and the human and natural environment as a whole.’
So it's all way bigger than our small group but the objectives and goals remain the same. Every small action we take has a knock on effect. In an opposite way, commercial tourism is destroying communities, ecosystems and ways of life. Looking at the issues facing people in places like Santorini, Barcelona and Mallorca among others we can see that mass tourism is a force for disruption. On the other hand, small group tours that work alongside a local community assisting with locally identified needs can be a force for good and for a sustainable future
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