Marine Conservation in Thailand
When I started my journey with Projects Abroad in Thailand I had been a graduate from the University of Guelph. After working for a year post-grad I put aside four months to travel around South East Asia and Europe.
To get started with life in a foreign country I wanted to try to find a volunteer organisation to become involved with. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon Projects Abroad and found the Thailand eco-project. After some research it seemed like the perfect way to get on my feet while being alone in a new part of the world. I committed to a month with the organisation.
When I arrived at the Krabi airport there was a friendly Projects Abroad staff member there to greet me and help me with my bags. We drove for about an hour to my new home at the resort, Dawn of Happiness, situated on the beautiful Ao Nammo beach. We were nestled in cabin style rooms in the forest that runs along the beach. It was amazing how close we were to the wild life!
The most exciting part of getting involved with this particular Projects Abroad trip was scuba diving! In order to get certified with my advanced course it took about 5-6 dives. This includes a fish ID test where you learn the name and underwater hand signals for 50 species of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants. Once you have completed the certification you start doing dives with the group. Some of these dives will be debris clean up where we dive down and pick up rubbish we find. Or the other option is a reef check, where we count and tally numbers on the 50 at risk species we learnt in our ID test.
On our free time we were able to explore the town of Ao Nang, which was just a quick and cheap bus or tuktuk ride away from the resort. Besides that we were only forty minutes away from the bigger town of Krabi. On my very first night I joined some of the other volunteers to go to the weekend night market there. Such amazing food, art and people!