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Asians Count on Tourism Plan for Tsunami Recovery
Asian tourism officials flew into a Malaysian island resort on Sunday to map out a post-tsunami recovery - and the island's destitute fishermen were among those counting on them to succeed.
The fisherman of Kuala Teriang, on Langkawi island, lost frail wooden homes and almost all of their boats when the wall of water rolled in at head height on Dec 26. They know that their future now depends more than ever on the tourist dollar.
"Everything depends on tourism in Langkawi," Kei-Musa bin Ku Abdullah Rahman, 65, told Reuters as he and his friends sat among the ruins of their village, a few kilometres away from luxury hotels where officials and industry executives arrived.
"We get a better price from the local hotels," a younger fishermen, Bidi Hasan, explained, adding that fish prices had plummeted since the tsunami, both because of a sharp drop in tourists and a fear among consumers that fish had feasted on corpses.
The tourist dollar goes a long way in the developing economies of Southeast Asia and South Asia, the hardest hit-areas, where visitors are reckoned to spend a total of more than $30 billion each year, providing many thousands of hotel jobs and livelihoods for countless small family-run businesses.
But the tsunami filled the world's TV screens and newspapers with horrific images of death and misery over the past month, prompting cancellations, even at destinations nowhere near the disaster zones, and leaving the region's tourism industry worried foreigners will avoid their shores for some time.
The World Tourism Organisation, a U.N. agency, has said the impact on world tourism will be slight, given that few major tourist spots were hit hard and that Asia had proven resilient to crises, such as the deadly 2003 outbreak of SARS disease.
MATTER OF TIME
The tsunami has killed as many as 225,000 people, including thousands of foreign tourists in and around Phuket island, a tourist mecca in southern Thailand.
Malaysian Tourism Minister Leo Michael Toyad said on Sunday, on the eve of meetings with Southeast Asian counterparts, there was an understandably emotional response from tourists who cancelled holidays.
"It's a matter of time," Toyad told reporters at a five-star resort where the Southeast Asian ministers, and tourism officials from China, Japan, South Korea and India are due to meet over the next three days.
"There is a feeling of grief and sadness and also some fear when you see such a big natural disaster. It's a normal human reaction," he said.
Travel agents and airline representatives are also meeting in Langkawi this week to discuss ways of making tourists aware that staying away just makes a dreadful situation worse for some survivors. They have already begun by inviting the world's travel writers to see the extent of the damage for themselves.
Regional tourism ministers are also trying to rebuild confidence among tourists by highlighting moves by Indian Ocean countries to set up a regional tsunami early-warning system like the one in operation for many years around the Pacific Ocean.
But the challenge they face in luring tourists back to the worst-affected tourist spots, such as southern Thailand, is summed up by a British tourist as he left Langkawi on Sunday after a surfing holiday.
He said his friends went ahead with their holiday after the tsunami because they knew Langkawi had not been badly hit, but would have thought twice about Thailand.
"You have people living in a developing country and while they are trying to rebuild their lives, you sit there drinking a beer," said Dave Stephenson, 23. "That's weird."
Langkawi, Malaysia 23/01/2005
