At the start of the Christmas holidays, eleven Sixth-form geographers travelled to Thailand for a ten day study tour, accompanied by Miss McKenzie, Miss Randle and Mr Clarke. The pupils were treated to both a cultural and geographical programme which involved visiting different areas of the country and experiencing many different facets of life in Thailand.
The tour began with two days in Bangkok, during which time pupils were able to visit some of the most impressive cultural and religious buildings in the country, including the Grand Palace and Wat Po, home of the 46 metre long Reclining Buddha statue. The group were also taken on a tour of the backstreets and canals of Bangkok where they saw at first-hand the effects of the terrible flooding that had affected Thailand in the previous month.
After what was for most pupils their first experience of a sleeper-train, the staff and pupils arrived in the south of the country, where they spent two days in a small Muslim village on the Andaman coast which had been largely destroyed by the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and was now re-built in a new location further up the hillside. The pupils learnt how to make traditional foods, built new roofing panels for a house, produced soaps for the community to sell and planted new mangrove trees to protect the villagers from future tsunami. They saw at first-hand the impacts of the tsunami on the village and the surrounding environment and learn about how such area can be better protected from such hazards.
After a day relaxing in Phuket the group headed up to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand where they visited the important Buddhist site of Doi Suthep and embarked on a Thai cookery course. (I have since been informed that many parents have had the pleasure of having a Thai meal cooked for them over the Christmas holidays!) The next day a trek up into the hills above Chiang Mai was rewarded with a cultural exchange in a hill tribe village. The group stayed in traditional wooden huts and were welcomed with singing and dancing by local children in the evening. Tourism is of vital importance to these communities in allowing them to maintain traditional ways of life in these remote hills and also provides them with money to invest into sustainable energy such as the two solar panels that they have just been able to buy to provide villagers with electric lighting in the evenings. The following day brought more new experiences including a visit to an elephant sanctuary and an elephant ride through the forest, followed by a gentle cruise down the river on board a bamboo raft, where evidence of damage by the recent floods could be viewed.
A final day in Bangkok was the culmination of the trip, at which point we returned back to Repton. For most of the pupils it was an experience that will never be repeated and was far more eye-opening than they had imagined that it would be. As one boy remarked at the end of the trip, “I’ve had a truly incredible experience!” I think that is something with which both pupils and teachers would agree.
Posted on
Thu, January 12, 2012
by Repton School