Established in 2003, Wild Asia is a social enterprise sensitive to the connections between natural areas and communities reliant upon them. Fundamental to its growth has been the equally sociable building of partnerships with businesses that share similar social and environmental sensitivities.

“Our ultimate goal is to promote sustainable practices that will minimise adverse impacts on the environment, ensure that local communities are engaged and that local cultures are respected.”

- Wild Asia

Responsible Tourism Initiative

In addition to several other programs and initiatives – focusing on sustainable agriculture; the establishment or enhancement of ‘natural corridors’ where wildlife can live and move with minimal human interference; and direct financial support (amounting to 25% of Wild Asia’s annual profits!) to causes in Asia, for example, through seed grants – Wild Asia directs a far-reaching Responsible Tourism initiative (RTI) which:

“aims to promote the best practices of sustainable tourism in Asia. Our goal is to demonstrate that there are clear financial incentives for doing the right thing. The reward for tourism operators is simple; we offer them unique marketing opportunities to reach out to a growing global market for responsible tourism. The reward for travelers – ecologically and socially sound tourism – is just as important, because they make choices with their conscience and their budget alike.”

For travellers, there are clearly presented responsible tourism guidelines and an interactive responsible tourism map spotlighting tourism practitioners in Southeast Asia committed to responsible tourism. (Far from compendious, the map is more of a demonstration of how little is out there right now, something sure to change in the years ahead.) Complementing both is a professional Wild Asia travel team using the organisation’s intimate knowledge of the region to help ethical travellers “maximise the spread of the ‘tourism dollar’. This is important in supporting the local economies of the communities you visit and will also be an excellent way to discover the real Asia (minus the gloss and hype).”

Responsible Tourism Award

As if not already busy enough, Wild Asia is the force behind the Responsible Tourism Award (RTA), established in 2003 and now an annual occurrence. Billed as the first pan-Asian award for excellence in responsible tourism, the RTA recognises tourism accommodations in Asia that are making a difference.

Although submissions for this year’s RTA are now closed, the award presentation will be hosted in Kuala Lumpur from 27-30 October in association with the international CSR Asia Summit. The CSR Asia Summit is another annual event focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the Asia-Pacific Region. The 2008 Summit welcomed 300 people from 27 countries and regions to discuss CSR issues in Asia.

In conjunction with the awards, Wild Asia will lead its annual ‘RT in Action’ two-day training workshop on 29-30 October 2009. It is designed as a way to bring tourism professionals – property owners, managers and tourism professionals, as well as media – up to snuff on sustainable principles in tourism using case studies from the region.

“By sharing the winners’ best practices, and demonstrating how easy and beneficial responsible tourism is to implement, we hope other operators will be inspired to take the first steps to change,”

- Wild Asia.

Further information

• This is an abridged version of an article written on the whl.travel blog.

As well as participating in the clean-up itself, BVM also produced a video explaining why the clean-up was necessary, and how to remove the Crown of Thorns without causing further damage to the coral.
The weekend kicked off with registration and opening ceremony at the Tioman Marine Park Centre. The event attracted over a hundred volunteers comprised of local dive shops and external dive clubs. The dive sites were then split amongst the groups, and we headed out to start collecting. Over the two days BVM collected 93 Crown of Thorns, and more than a thousand Crown of Thorns were collected from around Tioman in total.

Another part of the weekend was a beach litter pick in conjunction with the local school in Tekek. The university students gave a presentation on rubbish, and how it can be avoided by the “3 R’s – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. We then hit the beach, sorting the collected rubbish into material groups as we went. Then back at the school the children discussed how the 3 R’s could be applied to the collected rubbish. Finally the day was rounded off by making bottle rockets out of the collected litter.

Zainald grills his Halal Satay in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown / Photo by Stephen Chapman

Most people around the world will be familiar with a Chinatown, often the location of cheap sleeps and hives of activity day and night. I recently returned to Kuala Lumpur and was granted a fascinating perspective on this area from the point of view of a Malay and it emphasised something extremely important.

Whether it’s based on a desire to rough it and to get under the skin of a place, or on Chinatown being known as a backpacker hangout, many travellers end up gravitating there.  When you use Chinatown as a base from which to explore, particularly in Asia, there is a tendency to believe that it is in some way representative of the culture and character of the city within which it’s based, and for Kuala Lumpur and many other cities around the world this is far from the truth.  It is no more representative of a city in Asia than it is of San Francisco, New York or London.  There is no denying its value and influence, particularly on Kuala Lumpur, but it is only a small piece of the cultural jigsaw that makes up a city.

Why stay in Chinatown?

Chinatown is never the best first impression for a new visitor.  Often regarded as dirty, unpleasant, unhygenic and undesireable. Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur is never on the list of a Malay person’s places to go, let alone somewhere to sleep and eat.  “Why stay in such a hole when there are some incredible, clean, well run low-cost places in a far more seductive parts of the city?” I was told, and I must say that I have to agree, not that there aren’t some decent places to stay in Chinatown.

Most Malaysians are of either Indian, Chinese, Indonesian or Malay descent and like so many ethnically diverse communities around the world they haven’t always integrated particularly well with one another.  The cultural mix that makes up Malaysia is fascinating and is a truly unique blend that has influenced the food, the architecture, the arts, and religion significantly, but there is definitely a Malaysian identity that prefers to distinguish itself from these influences as being truly Malay, not Indian, not Chinese.

Do we engineer our experiences fit our expectations?

I first arrived in South East Asia almost ten years ago now.  At the time I was fresh faced, lacked any real experience of eastern culture, couldn’t understand why there was a hose next to the toilet, or why anyone would eat curry for breakfast.  Although landing in Kuala Lumpur wasn’t quite the baptism of fire that Bangkok can provide, as a 19 year old travelling alone it certainly felt no less alien.  I remember my arrival well.  The sweltering heat, draining humidity.  It was strange, exciting, energising.  I’d heard so many exotic stories about the distant and seemingly fictional cities of Bangkok, Saigon and Phnom Penh – all evocative of truly foreign lands, so alluring and full of Eastern promise.  The drug smugglers, the sex stories, the history, the movies, it all conspired to formulate my expectation and sense of adventure.  The dirty, small alleyways of Chinatown fit the bill nicely and satisfied my fantasy, but this was not an introduction to Kuala Lumpur or Malaysia.  This was a Chinatown.

On my first night I stayed in a small guesthouse above a restaurant, wandered through the night market, ate some streetfood, woke up to a strange breakfast of Nasi lemak.  I loved Asia, I loved Chinatown.  I explored other parts of the city on foot and marvelled at how developed it was.  In Chinatown things were cheap, colourful, busy, intriguing, more stimulating than the huge modern, familiar shopping malls that dot other areas of the city.  For a traveller it’s character and culture we yearn for.  We want to see something different to what we have at home.  We yearn to experience. However, allowing our desires and expectations to overtake the reality of what exists is foolish and unfair.  Kuala Lumpur is an incredibly modern city and it’s important to take home that message as well as the unfamiliar, cultural and historical experiences we have.  With increased maturity, greater world experience, better knowledge of the city, and a very local insight into the country I now realise that my first impression was incomplete to say the least.  It probably served more to satisfy my own expectations than provide me with a true insight into how people live in Malaysia.  I think this is what the whole concept of ‘Going Local’ is based around – understanding a place for what it is, not what you want it to be or expect it to be.

Cultural integration

As you become more conscious of cultural enclaves in cities around the world – Chinatown, Little India, Little Italy -  it becomes fascinating to see how people can cling so rigidly to the culture they’ve grown up in as the world around them changes.  Whether they relocate for a new life somewhere completely different, they still wish to import their old ways and systems.  This cultural mixing takes place all over the world as people migrate and make demands on their new home to recognise the heritage they left behind, but do different cultures and communities ever fully integrate and accept each other, or do they always remain like foreign bodies within a host?

As another cultural dispute arises in the UK around the wearing of a veil in school it seems as though a lack of willingness by immigrants to understand another culture’s concerns or to compromise on the values they once left behind makes it extremely difficult to find common ground.  Does this mean that some immigrants will always feel discriminated against by their own refusal to assimilate into the very culture they sought to benefit from and change their lives with.

Some of the best Satay I’ve ever eaten is made by a Malay man called Zainald in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown – he’s been trading for years and is about the only Malay vendor in the area – there is indeed hope that not everyone is divided and that we can all live together successfully.

I spent most of my early work on research – from looking at the way people were using forest remnants to hard-core taxonomy; to be honest, it was always the villagers I have worked with that have given me the most inspiration. Seeing people not being respected by the “system” or being taken advantage of by expanding industries (plantations to tourism) are all my drivers for wanting to make things work – making business work for the environment and the communities they operate in.

MTF: What is your background and what initially prompted you to set up Wild Asia?

Research, research, research. Well grounded in modern biological sciences but after graduating, I found myself working on conservation issues with WWF – from marine to forest conservation. Wild Asia was my next step really – to build a new platform to seek new approaches to conservation. It did not happen overnight though and our starting point was my first website – wildborneo.net – which was setup to assist travelers find village tourism enterprises and a means to bypass mainstream tourism operators.

MTF: Can you explain a bit more about what you do?

My day to day job is shared between nurturing Wild Asia – a team held together with very little cash, lots of motivation and very little free time – and also working as an adviser for a wide range of conservation projects. Usually these are projects funded by international aid but we find, more and more, that these are projects we have dreamt of, such as the natural corridor initiative.

MTF: How succesful has your work on Oil Palm plantations been and why is it important?

Our whole approach is to work from within, and so one of our biggest coups was to be drawn into one of the largest oil palm companies in the world. It took over a year to build their trust but we are now in a position to influence change – this has ranged from influencing the protection of natural areas; advising on approaches to sustainability and simply making plantation managers build better relationships with the local community. This is potentially of wide ranging consequence as these ideas now have a higher chance of being picked up by the other companies.

MTF: Why did you get involved in the tourism industry?

Tourism in Malaysia – or Asia – is most often than not based on natural areas and its people. These are the very environments we want to see conserved. We also saw that a clean “environment” and “local communities” is relevant for the entire tourism industry and not restricted to those so called eco-tourism operators. It was only natural, again, that we started looking at ways to influence this industry.

MTF: What are your hopes for the future, both for yourself and Wild Asia, and for the environment and world of travel?

Its a moving goalpost isn’t it? For whatever progress we make – we never quite seem to get there. Thats the nature of our times. What we see though is that we can make a difference, however small, its simply important to keep sharing, keep talking and keep connecting to connect with yet more like-minded people. Its this critical mass – whatever that may be – that I hope we can build which would kick start some major wins.

MTF: What advice would you give to a travel company that wants to make a real difference?

The one thing I have learnt is that to make RT work on the ground, you need patience and a strong financial base. Once you can get started and that you have a viable business, work to understand what responsible travel means; you can start by filling up our responsible tourism checklist!

More information:

• Listen to Dr. Reza Azmi on Kuala Lumpur’s BFM radio talking about Wild Asia and how it all got started.