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Sep 07, 2014 Features / Columnists, My Column
A friend sent me a report on the least visited countries. He sends me many things, from bare-breasted women to religious quotations to health findings. Of course, he could find these things because he is retired, so he has time to keep his brain active.
I immediately doubted the source, so I researched it and found that ‘Travel’ is indeed a genuine source on tourism. It has contributors all over Europe who research hotels and tourist arrivals. They also research eateries, tourist locations, and even the kind of tourism available.
For example, Sint (St.) Maarten has a beach and an unwitting tourism attraction, the arriving aircraft. People on the beach get an adrenaline rush watching the planes coming in and appearing to be landing on them. At one point the aircraft is a mere thirty feet above people on the beach.
The other side of the coin is the takeoff. People get fun taking the blast from the full-throttled jet engines. They call it jet surfing.
Other countries offer sun, sea and sand. When the people come the additions are the food and the beverages. Of course, nightlife is crucial to any tourism package, so every country that is a tourist destination offers a lot. I was certain that the years Guyana kept talking about its nature tourism, it would have become a leading tourist destination in our corner of the world.
The report stated, “Last week, France was confirmed as the world’s most visited country. Here’s where to go if you wish to avoid the tourist hordes. Least visited country*: Guyana (177,000), according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation report
Often classified as part of the Caribbean, this country is part of the South American continent. It’s known for its virgin rainforests, political volatility, cricketing prowess (Clive Lloyd, the successful West Indies captain is one of the country’s best known sons), and its fading colonial capital, Georgetown. (By Jolyon Attwooll)
Tourists, for the greater part, come from Europe and North America. They want something that is missing from their country but surely, they do not want to see garbage-infested streets, face blackouts and of course, the people waiting to rob them—not that there are no robbers in other tourist destinations, but it would seem that Guyana has more than its fair share.
I had the good fortune to travel around the Caribbean and I saw the tourism products. These were mainly beaches, but the guides focused on rum and rum products. Then there were the hotels along the beach so that people simply got up and moved to the beach. Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and St Lucia made excellent use of the beaches.
Guyana must have noticed this because the former President, Bharrat Jagdeo, opted to make great use of the Georgetown foreshore by erecting a branch of the Marriott there. When questioned, he said that Guyana had no proper place for visitors to stay, so if the country should have a five-star hotel then the tourists would come.
Immediately, I said that this was putting the cart before the horse, because we have so many locations where people could stay. If these prove to be inadequate the people would complain and we would see the reports. We would then move to correct the deficiency. When construction work started on the Marriott, I found out that we were not reacting to any criticism of the facilities we have in place.
We were acting out of spite. Some people wanted to buy the Pegasus, but when they failed, the idea to build a hotel to blow the Pegasus out of existence was born. Then the government said that the Asian tsunami was coming this way by way of tourists from China.
These new tourists have targeted the Caribbean because of the publicity the region gets and because of the recording stars, the most popular being Bob Marley. In addition, there are no visa problems. Guyana is hoping to cash in on this influx. The Guyana Tourism Authority believes that it has the goods to attract these people.
But I cannot see us impressing the Chinese to walk in the bush (indeed they have cut down most of theirs) and to swim on the Georgetown foreshore. We boast about the size of the rivers but we can’t take that boast to China.
We have the best Chinese cuisine in the region—largely Cantonese—but when people come to a country they want local cuisine. And to show that we are really targeting the Chinese, we are offering a course in Mandarin.
Perhaps the thinking is that the Chinese will come in their numbers because the major hotel involves Chinese skills, but that is left to be seen.
We are cleaning up the city, but we are tearing down the kind of architecture that visitors once found to be so exciting; we are trying to become like anywhere else. That will not attract people.
When the World Cup was on in Brazil, the view was that many people would take the opportunity to visit Guyana, with the country being so close to Brazil, but this was not to be. People went to Trinidad instead.
But we are a persevering people. We are also spending money to extend our major airport because we want to attract people from China and Africa. If airports do attract people, then Guyana may be on the right track. New York spent billions of dollars on its John F Kennedy airport, not because it wanted to attract people, but because it wanted to cope with the increasing hordes.
If Guyana is spending money to change the figures, those expenditures had better bear fruit, or we would be saddled with some glowing white elephants. We would be like the woman who hired a personal trainer for physical fitness to get the perfect body and a top flight dentist to fix her teeth. In the end she spent tons of money. But there was the mortgage and it fell behind, so she ended up as a homeless woman with a fantastic smile and perfect body.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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