I bought my Aquapure Traveller just before departing for 5 months in the Thibetan plateau, "mainland" India and Asia.
I would be delighted to hopefully reduce the dreadful problem of plastic water bottles. Imagine what 5 months in India, Malaysia, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and even walking in New Zealand, could have built up in waste water bottles!
The main focus of my trip was to work on an anti-globalisation project in Ladakh, on the Thibetan plateau. They are trying to fight off the detrimental effects of westernisation. Ladakh is high altitude desert, with no rain (until recent global warming caused a little), so waste is a big problem, caused by both locals and tourists. Even if it is collected, all they can do is dump it on the edge of the desert.
In the capital, Leh, there is a great shop called Dhomsa, who makes dreamy apricot lassis, but also sells very cheap boiled water and sterilised, re-used plastic bottles. This cuts down greatly on plastic waste. We only had to go there for the lassis, thanks to my Aquapure Traveller!
Once outside Leh, however, water has to be boiled or carried in plastic. I lived as family, on a farm, in a valley out in the mountains. In the past, the snow and glacial melt water which waters the area was strictly controlled, so that certain rivers and streams were kept pure for drinking water, as they ran through village after village. Now there is pollution everywhere, and thoughtless trekkers, seeking their mountain wilderness, have managed to spread Giardia, as they have done all around the world.
Fuel is dried animal dung, sticks or gas cookers, which have been transported in. Formerly, there was no need for cash all were happily self-sufficient. Now, the desire for cash items, such as gas and western education, means that many leave their villages and travel to cities to seek cash, or leave their families to guide trekkers during the summer.
This is causing great problems for the farms who are left without their traditional family labour. To buy in immigrant labour costs more money and so the spiral continues. Already we could see the problems arising from this, with a couple of tired old women running a farm that would have had men and children all working on it.
The Ladakhis drink great quantities of salt butter tea, but unless the fire was already lit for cooking, I would have felt embarrassed to use up their fuel just to boil my drinking water. It was wonderful to be able to just fill up my flask from the nearest stream and drink as much as I wanted without compromising my independence or their fuel.
Apart from the family in Ladakh, I spent the rest of my time in guesthouses, where I had no facilities to boil my own water, but I could just use the bathroom water and my flask. It could be re-filled from tap water in any cafe, with no cost to me and no waste. As tourists, we cause so much damage, so it was one weight off my guilty shoulders.
My trusty flask carried me around the fairytale desert fortresses and brilliant saris of Rajastan, the jungles of Malaysia and Thailand, the Mekong and the fireboat festival in Laos, the temples of Ankhor and "Mount Doom" in NZ.
I soon learnt that I could not eat curry in India, (I can anywhere else) but once I stayed off that, I had wonderful health all the way through Asia. Except when my room-mate caught a tummy bug and passed it on to me for a few days, I had none of the stomach problems which I had been warned about and was generally healthier than at home. I am sure that some of this could have been due to the reliable drinking water, as I me so many travellers who had been seriously ill.
Jasmin
|
