From Current Students
Field Trip to Eco-Tourism at Hanno City
ALI Sabet Md. (Bangladesh)
Ecotourism field trip at Hanno city, Saitama prefecture organized by Dr. Thomas Jones, Assistant Professor, Meiji University was wonderful, fascinating and significant field trip on Ecotourism in my life. The word “Ecotourism” was known to me as a common popular word but its real literal definition or inherent meaning was quite unknown to me before this field trip. After coming Japan in august 2011, this was my first field trip at nature and it was opened my eyes about Ecotourism through practical knowledge, sharing information with the local guide and local people and specially from professor T. Jones.
This field trip provides us opportunity to observe the very greenery woodland of large area, different kinds of living species, paddy field inside the forest where one farmer was cutting the rice, different kinds of old and younger trees, watching groups of migrant buzzards using thermal currents to take off and traditional Saitama landscape from 195m height. Local guides were very generous to describe about this ecotourism site and they make us honored offering different kinds of homemade food and local sweets at the end of the tour.
According to the literature of ecotourism, it is an environmentally and socially responsible travel, generate funds and support for conservation efforts, and provide benefits to local host communities. From my observation, this ecotourism site tries to fulfill all most all the criteria of ecotourism but still needs some initiatives for generating local source of income, activities to attract more foreign and local tourists and more involvement of the local people.
