Amid all our ongoing election drama, air pollution woes and dengue fever outbreaks, we thought we’d take a second to acknowledge five tourists who are going viral today for the good work they’re doing.
Yesterday, two male and three female tourists were spotted walking the kilometer-long strand of Ban Laem Pong beach in Krabi province’s Muang district picking up trash.
In a video recorded by a passerby, the tourists can be seen picking up trash scattered along the beach and putting it into large black garbage bags.
“There’s a lot of trash and nobody’s cleaning. Everybody’s cleaning only near their place but everything around is not clean, so it’s not nice and beautiful. It’s a beautiful place and it’s sad to see so much trash and nobody cleaning,” said one of the male tourists, identified by local media as 38-year-old Latvian Uldis Baumais.
“We come here for 10 days and we don’t like what see around, so we just take trash bags and come and clean.”
Though it wasn’t immediately clear where the rest of the volunteer clean-up crew hails from, it’s probably safe to assume they were traveling together.
“Aren’t we embarrassed?” one Thai netizen commented on the video.
While another wrote: “I dare say that most tourists that bring food and drinks onto the island and leave trash everywhere are Thai.”
Laem Pong Beach authorities told Workpoint that while littering is prohibited there, many tourists, drawn by the beach’s silence and serenity, sadly still leave their trash all over the beach.
The tourists’ decision to clean up the beach times out pretty perfectly with the growing virality of the so-called #TrashTag challenge, which according to Forbes, is encouraging people all over the world to clean up their nearby green areas and post before/after photos.
So far there are more than 27,000 photos with the hashtag #trashtag on Instagram from all corners of the world.
Here’s a participant from Nepal:
France:
Russia:
Some clean-up glam from Sri Lanka:
And of course, Thailand:
It’s even taking off in neighboring Myanmar, where our Coconuts Yangon team took a look at the movement yesterday. Here’s hoping Thailand fully embraces the challenge.
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