People smugglers, misplaced Speedos and ravenous carp - volunteering with a difference in Thailand

At the first orphanage I visit, two girls - a silent toddler and the smiling, resourceful-looking child of eight or so lugging her around - have only recently been found, wandering by the roadside. The smugglers commonly kidnap children on their way to and from school, and in this case, perhaps spooked by a rare police patrol, they seem to have just dumped their merchandise and run.

At another refuge, the sight that meets me as I climb up an ochre road slashed through the jade green jungle is of a tiny boy, standing all alone in the centre of a vast dusty courtyard, almost as if he is waiting for someone. I have been apprehensive about meeting these often traumatised children, fearing that, as a man, especially an unfamiliar-looking one in this remote region of Thailand near the border with Burma, I might remind them of the people smugglers from whom many have escaped. But it seems the boys, in particular, really like it when a man turns up among the volunteers. The only other adults they see most of the time are the serene Buddhist nuns who run the place.

The ex-partying nun
In charge at this orphanage is one Pimjai Maneerat, an ex-party girl from the city who found religion and returned to her home district of Sangkhla Buri to set up a Buddhist centre and children's refuge. Some of the 50 or so children in her care are from very poor families who live far away, but many others have been rescued from the thriving local trade in people. Bogeyman myths are just that - myths - in most parts of the world but here they have a terrifying reality. Kidnapping of hill tribe women and children for work in the sex trade or for exploitation as cheap, nimble-fingered labour across the border is rampant.

Sobering, saddening, stuff, isn't it, and not, you might think, the stuff of holidays. But perhaps you are someone who is tiring a little of the kinds of trips where seemingly the only aim is to be aimless and where having a good time feels somehow compulsory. Perhaps you can see the appeal of a journey where you might come home feeling you have made the world a slightly better place.

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Some such urge has motivated the young volunteers I speak to as they take a break from digging a ditch with picks and shovels in the monsoonal rain outside the House of Hope orphanage, where the pair of girls is sheltered, in the village of Ban Mai. Like the other members of her young group, a worker for the dry-sounding business information company Informa, Jenna Morris, from Bolton but living in New York, says helping with the children has made her "appreciate everything [I] have. Everyone should do something like this."

Painting butterflies
At the nun's orphanage, Kitty Murnagha, a gap-year volunteer from Camden, takes a break from teaching and painting the open-air school rooms with scenes of butterflies and beatific nuns to describe the satisfaction of bringing the children out of their shells. "Some of them are so shy [to begin with]. But after three or four days, they're rushing up and shouting, 'Good morning, teacher!'"

Subtle rewards such as these mean volunteering holidays are not all sack cloth and self-sacrifice. There's also plenty of time to enjoy Thailand's paradisiacal dimensions. Between visits to the children's refuges, I enjoy a little R&R tube-riding down some gentle rapids on a nearby river. The idea is to stop and paddle back before reaching a certain bridge, but the deep pleasure of bobbing along under the soft sun in the cool tickling water combines with a mild urge towards rebellion to make me decide on a whim to go awol.

I lean back against the hot rubber of the tube as fat seed pods from the trees arching over the river spiral down around me, and I am momentarily transported back to a far less pristine environment: the canals of Bangkok, where I'd begun my trip. In the transport of choice, a narrowboat powered by a monstrous V-8 lorry engine, we roared up and down the waterways of this very different part of Thailand, where many hill tribe people end up in prostitution or scraping some other kind of living.

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Emitting an evil stench, the canals are frighteningly polluted now yet still, fascinatingly, somehow support life: human, in the form of the bankside-shack dwellers crazy enough to take dips in the greasy water, the vendors of cold beer and bamboo parasols patrolling the network in little one-woman skiffs and the tugboat men pulling long loads of dark, mysterious-looking industrial cargo - and animal, in the shape of the fat, mud-coloured dogfish who make the water boil when you throw them loaves of stale bread and the water monitors, mini-dragons the size of a child, that scamper up the slimy banks when you disturb their peregrination of the sludge...

Smooth western path
... Blinking back from my reverie, I find I am still floating but returned to the Thailand of hamlets and elephants, a kilometre or so beyond the bridge from which I should have returned. My rebellion sated, I paddle to the bank, only to discover there is no smooth, western path leading back to the jetty whence I had set off. I have to clamber over ancient jungle roots as thick as elephant thighs and brush aside curtains of creepers before I stumble upon a very traditional-looking Thai village. Its inhabitants' prolonged stares, as surprised as mine, finally remind me that I am wearing nothing more than the tight, striped Speedos whose natural environment is the lanes at my local lido.

The village kids winding themselves around their parents' legs, shyly agog at the stranger, recall that little boy I came across at the nuns' orphanage who, queuing up with the other children for a lesson or to wash his hands before a meal, seemed always to be alone. Unlike the girl of about his age discovered by the roadside, he had clearly found no older champion. His face was curiously unmoving, but the expression you could discern, of an uncertain wanting but, above all, of puzzlement, sums up the feeling I got from all the children and stays with me still.

TRAVEL FACTS
Simon travelled to Thailand with the assistance of Thai Airways and Real Gap Experience.

Real Gap's (01892 701890 ) Thai Experience explores Kanchanaburi and Sangklaburi, with an opportunity to visit and lend a hand at local volunteer projects. The four weeks also include an assortment of adventures such as jungle trekking, exploring the River Kwai, floating markets and restaurants, waterfall pools in Erawan and indigenous Thai communities. Price starts from £899 land only for four weeks including accommodation (hotel/guest houses), all breakfasts, airport transfer and tour of Bangkok and Kanchanaburi.

Daily economy returns to Bangkok through Thai Airways (0844 561 0911) cost from £598.

Frommer's Thailand Guide (price from £16.99) provides a practical guide to learning about and discovering Thailand.