Volunteer holidays are a tough sell. Holidays are supposed to be about fun and relaxation—a break from reality if you will. Volunteer holidays, on the other hand, serve up reality in spades and often at greater cost. A holiday spent making the world a better place, however, is a meaningful and memorable experience. While beach holiday photo albums invariably start to blend into each other, you’ll still remember every minute you spent volunteering in the mountains of Nepal, in a village in Vietnam or on the Inner Mongolian steppe.

The Global Volunteer Network

For volunteer holiday opportunities in Asia, start at the Global Volunteer Network. Founded by a Kiwi, it has placed over 15,000 volunteers around the world in the last decade. It has an affiliation with the UN and was once famously endorsed by Bill Gates. More importantly, it won’t throw you into the deep end without a life preserver or set you up as a dupe English teacher.

They operate in five countries in Asia―Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam―and cooperate with a variety of on-the-ground community projects. In Vietnam, caring for disabled people and orphans is big. In Thailand you can look after animals rescued from private zoos. In Nepal this September, they put together a two-week hike to Everest Base Camp to raise funds for an orphanage. In May, there’s a Nepal trip specifically for the over-50 set. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all. One of the coolest opportunities is a bike trip which takes you around Vietnam, stopping in at community centers and orphanages around the country.

China-based Holidays

For China-based volunteer holidays, check out Habitat for Humanity and Roots and Shoots. Habitat has regular building trips in Yunnan while Roots and Shoots does spring tree planting trips to Inner Mongolia. Less officially, Shanghai-based charity Heart to Heart runs annual trips to rural parts of Anhui to help kids with congenital heart defects, while Shanghai-based group Stepping Stones has recently started doing English-teacher weekend trips to Henan.

What to Expect

The work you do on a volunteer holiday isn’t easy and the conditions are sometimes pretty basic. GVN’s volunteer blog (you'll need a vpn) is full of tales of wide-eyed Americans stepping off the plane into miserable social conditions where they are expected to help humans who have experienced abuse on fundamental levels. It’s not glamorous to clean up gibbon poop at the Wildlife Rescue Centre in Thailand. At the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, you’re up at the crack of dawn.

Nor are these programs even particularly cheap. GVN charges US$97 just to apply to take part while two weeks volunteering in Vietnam runs US$1,597 (excluding flights to and from). But people who’ve done it speak about the life-long friends made and the deep sense of fulfillment. Shanghai expat Allison Blackman and her family volunteered at the Elephant Nature Park. She writes, “Watching my children overcome some small adversity and working shoulder to shoulder with them and my husband, even scrubbing pumpkins, was incredible.”

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