Travel blog about Tangkahan

Post by Rika

 

Please follow the post of Rika's Travel blog to read about her Tangkahan experiences.

lying in my hammock in front of my room and watching out for eagles and hornbills - bliss!

Tangkahan – A happy update

Post by Rika

Wow! What an experience! The Tangkahan project has taken a huge leap forward since my last trip in April; a fantastic concept is emerging from its individual parts. It was always clear that those parts build an eco-system, yet the resources to build an infrastructure for its management were not available until now. During the past half year RAW Wildlife Encounters did incredible work to bring together a fantastic team of people and I am proud to be part of it.

Sonya, is Australian, who has travelled the world, has a solid background in sustainability, and is just outright a fantastic person, who gets things done.

Emma, is British, a young and ambitious teacher who already gained a lot of experience in East Asia. The children are taking to her like the bees to the honey and she has fantastic ideas on how to lift the English club to the next level of becoming a true ‘Tangkahan Education Centre’.

Then there is the group of local rangers, Ika, BimBim, Jack, Darwin, Herder and Suka, who are a driving force in all the projects, yet with a most recent focus into organic farming. Again the local community proves their sense for conservation and sustainability. A strip of land right at the margins of the rainforest is to be used as organic fruit farm while doubling as a buffer zone to palm oil plantations.

And last but not least there is Jess and her RAW team, running the eco-tourism in Tangkahan, supporting LPT and CTO in developing a wider tourist concept for the area, and supporting CRU in creating sustainable business solutions for the elephant camp, which is the backbone of the rainforest conservation and the tourism.

There is still a lot of work to be done: MOUs will have to be negotiated and signed, plans and proposals have to be finalised and tweaked to satisfy the needs of as many stakeholders as possible, energy and Internet are still issues which need to be tackled, and money is short at every end. Although the aim for the future is to be self-sustained and independent from grants and charity, those sources of funding are still heavily needed.

RAW’s business concept already includes the support of the communities they are operating in as part of their corporate responsibility programme – as a matter of fact this is RAW’s ethical make-up and philosophy, and Sonya, Emma and I will mobilise our networks, pull all of our knowledge and resources together to find funding for our respective focus points of the Tangkahan project.

Something that looked like a Herculean task back in April appears achievable now that those fantastic people are pulling their forces together.

If you are interested in sponsoring or volunteering your expertise to the Tangkahan project, please post a comment on this blog.

The Tangkahan blog now has a team of authors. Gosh, those Google accounts are not really straight forward. However, Bimbim and Ika are invited to contribute to the blog and everybody with access to the new Blogger account called Tangkahan can write up stuff. 

Initially I thought we might want to have separate Indonesian and English blogs but probably we should just try to meet and mingle here. Whoever feels like translating a post can still link into the post of other language. So my dear co-authors, start posting!

Theo