Another blog post from the Nature Based Activities Group! We are focussing on the elephant camps at Koh Chang and until now this has been very interesting.
Last Sunday we had a day of discussing about how to move on with the research and processing the data we had already gathered. Not that exiting to talk about, so I will tell a bit about what we have done so far.
We started off by visiting all the five elephant camps at Koh Chang. Already at this point, we had some interesting talks with employees, tourists and managers who were all very open to tell us about their thoughts and experiences. The camps are all so different from each other, making it interesting to take them all into account in the research. It turns out that none of the elephants were initially at this island, althought the name Koh Chang means Elephant Island. We also found out that an elephant eats so much that truckloads of pineapple and coconut leafs are brought to the island every day to fill their bellies. And when one gets sick and flying a vet in will not solve it, they are transported to the mainland by ferry. Can you imagine, an elephant on a ferry ;).
Of course, we are also very much enjoying the island. It is such a lovely place, even though the area we are staying in is somewhat deserted in the evening. But this is where our study association Pangea kicks in and organizes a cosy evening full of games and interaction at Lonely Beach. It was great to see everyone again and chat about what is going on.
The following days will be about conducting questionnaires with tourists, having structured interviews with managers and eating a lot of Thai food. Still 1,5 week of research to go until the stakeholder meeting. This weekend promises to be great as we are going to visit our friends at another part of the island. Should be fun!
Written by: Fleur, Esther, Ivo, Joeri & Tom
