Winners of the first TH!NK3 round who traveled to Malaysia in August are all good at thinking, debating and writing. They all blog about development, but none all of them are experts in environmental issues - at least not me - and not all of them have some in-field experience.

This is probably why we were asked to get up from our comfy chairs, drop our beloved laptops and finally get our hands dirty!

In the Raja Musa Forest Reserve, we were shown how to plant bulbs.

We were given boots by Regina Chea (below, holding our boots), a sustainable development officer with the Global Environment Center, who said her favourite volunteers were students from universities and colleges. "Probably they don't know the significance of what they are doing but they come in big groups," said Regina. "When we have a group of 50 people we can plant 100 bulbs in half a day."

Giedre Steikunaite (below, learning how to remove plastic protection from bulbs) was always the first to volunteer when it came to sticking our hands in the mud or digging holes in the ground.

A group of volunteers planted 570 bulbs the day before the TH!NKers visited the forest reserve. We didn't do nearly as good, but were very proud of our job anyway. Ian Sullivan (below, with his plant) certainly was!

On the Sungai Pencala river we went fishing. We were at the source, where water is clean. We went fishing just to see how prawns and crabs could live in the river. We threw them back in the water straight afterwards.

As we approach the city of Kuala Lumpur, though, the water starts getting dirty. In this part of the river it is so contaminated that even touching it may be bad for your health.

Dr K. Kalithasan (below), a GEC programme officer, said that people think this is a "monsoon river", in other words, just a rainwater flow draining dirt througu concrete channels. This is why they use it as a giant trash-can.

This is why the W.A.T.E.R. project works with local communities who live by the river in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. They are now taking care of the river and the water is getting cleaner and cleaner, so maybe the kids you see below, who live near the W.A.T.E.R. cabin, a lab which monitors the water near the city, will be able to see a clean river, with fish, prawns and crabs.

These children were patiently waiting for the evening, when they would finally be allowed to break the Ramadan fast. Just next to them, their parents were selling all kinds of delicious sweets, meals and fruit drinks. You are not allowed to eat and drink during the day, but you can buy food and beverages and save them for the night. Some kids would even help their mothers sell food or go buy it for them, like the two children below. Behind them, Robert Stefanicki plays with his phone.

These were not the only kids we met. About an hour away from the rich city of Kuala Lumpur there is a place where children live in shacks. They only got running water and electricity a couple of years ago and they have schools in their communities, but still live in poverty and far away from health services. This child lives in the Hma' Meri community, part of the Orang Asli indigenous minority.

The Gerai OA volunteers help Orang Asal women and craftsmen sell their products and make some money to support their households. The women below are crafting baskets and other objects.

Men are also involved in the project. Some of them craft traditional wooden sculpture like this one, a "wedding puzzle." If the young man who is playing with it (below) manages to solve it, he will find a wife. Weird how in these communites men are the ones who hope to get married!

Visiting the Hma' Meri community involved a lot of walking on muddy paths, just as we did in the Kuala Selangor Nature Park where, again, we were recruited to plant mangrove trees. This is me getting stuck in the mud with my boots.

Iris Gonzales did a much better job!

Foreigners, especially tourists, are very welcome in the park. They are an essential source of revenue for the 270,000 residents of the surrounding communities, like the fishermen below.

Seafood restaurants and shops in this area rely on visitors like us for their survival. Local residents find jobs there as well as in the firefly park inside the nature reserve. They work as tour guides there, earning 100 Malaysian Ringgits (25 euros) per hour. They would have to work the entire day to make the same amount of money in the local manufactory industry.

Nagarajan Rengasamy, a senior center officer with the Malaysian Nature Society, said the government does not grant any support to the park, which relies on corporate funding. He said 85 per cent of donor companies are foreign, as local firms are more interested in humanitarian organization running orphanages and other assistance structures. Most donors are attracted by the tax exemption they can claim for investing in corporate social responsability, but that is good enough for Rengasamy. "You have to be in the middle between money oriented and an environmentalist," he said.

I stole the idea of a photo-blog from those by Robert and Iris. Please read them, their pictures are great!

All photos in this blog post are by the author