Trip Themes

Southeast Asia is a wonderful, safe place to experience new sights, sounds, tastes, smells and textures and to understand the worldviews and ways of being of the peoples we are visiting.

As in past years, the central focus of our trips is to experience societies and cultures through personal contact with local people. We introduce you to our friends made over 40 years, visit them in their homes and places of work, sometimes travel with them, and share and learn with/from them. Where we do not have friends, we engage the people we meet to learn about their lives. For Vietnam and parts of Laos, we use a small travel companies to help us make arrangements. Fifty dollars of your trip fee is used help meet development needs we see as we travel.

On each trip we focus on some deeper themes, and select our destinations, activities, discussions and selected readings around these themes. This year we will focus on the following:

• Efforts to maintain/rebuilt the natural environment and cultures in a world that is increasingly mobile, commercialized and homogenized.
  

• Sustainability and development in a time of limits. We will explore the “Sufficiency Economy,” a model of development proposed by the King of Thailand. This model is now being promoted by U.N. agencies We will discuss the model with experts and as we travel we will seek out examples of its implementation. And, we will see the opposite--activities that have short-term gain for some, but disregard the long-term sustainability of people and the environment. (Note: A district in Nan Province we will visit in Trip 2 has been designated a “model” of the sufficiency economy.)
  

• Ethnic diversity and relationships between lowland Buddhist and upland tribal peoples and the worldviews that connect/divide them. The historical and current impact of the West and of Asian neighbors (China, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos) on each other.