Posted Tuesday, February 27, 2007, 2:43 PM by Lonely Planet
Final Day: The Wheelers finish the Plymouth to Banjul rally and send their trusty Mitsubishi to auction.
Sunday 25 February
Even after we've finished in Banjul there's a finale to our England to Gambia cruise: selling our trusty Mitsubishi. Buy the car in England, drive it to Gambia and give it away is the Plymouth to Banjul Challenge's aim - the cars that make it are auctioned with the proceeds going to African charities. Back on 29 January I'd paid £350 (about US$700) for our 1989 car. Today, along with 21 other PBC finishers, it was going on the block outside the Independence Stadium.
Lot number 12 was called, I drove the last 100m in the blue Mitsu, the bidding started at 5000 dalasi and three minutes later it had been 'knocked down to the man in green' for 36,000 dalasi, £720 (about US$1450). After 7000km it had doubled in value. Check out the picture, the new owner Dehba Fofana is directly behind the car.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Monday, February 26, 2007, 9:19 PM by Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet author Vesna Maric hears a rumour about a certain martial artist making an appearance in the town of Mostar.
Did you ever think that you'd be hearing the words 'Bosnia-Hercegovina' and 'Bruce Lee' in the same sentence? No? Well, you're not alone.
Be that as it may, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bruce Lee forged a bizarre and unforgettable bond when a shiny, bronze monument to the great Lee was erected in Mostar in 2005. A pair of young men, disillusioned with the political and economic corruption in the country, thought that the Kung Fu fighter symbolised their values and ideals more than any dead or living person from the region.
Veselin Gatalo, who organized the monument explains: "We saw this guy one day wearing an army uniform, looking all cocky. My friend Nino said to me: 'This guy represents all the macho nationalists around. Who represents us?'. And I joked: 'Bruce Lee. We should build a monument to him.' We looked at each other and thought: 'Actually, this could be a serious idea'."
So struck were Veselin and Nino by the idea of Bruce Lee - who in their opinion stands up for what's right, and avoids categorisation as Serb, Croat or Bosniak - that they managed to find a spot for him in the City Park, in the centre of town. They unveiled the statue on what would have been Lee's 65th birthday: 27 November, 2005. Busloads of students and supporters arrived, together with the Chinese and German ambassadors. Mrs Lee was also invited, but wasn't able to be there on the day.
A media furor ensued along the lines of 'Why Lee, why not Santic (a 20th century Mostar poet) or Blaz Sliskovic (a once-renowned Mostar footballer)?' and there was plenty of verbal ping pong between the supporters and those in opposition to the idea.
But there was trouble in store for Bruce. The bronze fighter saw his first Mostar sunrise with eyes sprayed with black aerosol, his weapons broken and a foot detached from its base. Lee was taken down less than a couple of days after the opening ceremony. It remains to be seen when and if he'll take his honorary position in Mostar's park again.
Coming soon - Vesna battles Bosnian bureaucracy and armed guards to find out where Bruce has been hiding.
Labels: Europe, Travelsnitch
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Frances Linzee Gordon has just completed an unprecedented research assignment in Saudi Arabia for Lonely Planet's forthcoming guide to the Arabian Peninsula. As the first person ever to be granted a visa to visit the Kingdom as an independent tourist, she kept a diary of her adventures. In the third of eight blog posts, Frances finds out what's beyond the checkpoints...
'Are you her husband?' the policeman enquired.
'No, I am her driver' Abdullah replied.
'But there is no sponsor. Who is her sponsor?' the policeman asked with irritation as he peered perplexed at the visa.
'She came... independently' Abdullah ventured.
'Independently? What do you mean independently?' the policeman asked, baffled.
'She came on her own. She doesn't have a sponsor.'
'She came on her own? She can't come on her own - it's impossible to come on her own!'
The procedure was familiar now, like a ritual. Abdullah duly lowered his window and handed over the fat file of permits.
Though holding the file upside down, the policeman fingered it, feigning examination of the papers. After a minute, he withdrew to show it to his superiors. They then proceeded to refer my case to their superiors via radio. It seemed something of a Saudi speciality: a disinclination to take responsibility.
There were checkpoints everywhere. Though the blank entry in my visa continued to cause consternation, the precious permission file seemed to do the trick. With an air of exasperation, my passport and papers were usually stuffed back through the window, and we were waved on.
After the bureaucracy of the capital and the officiousness on the road, it was a relief to turn in at last to the new Red Sea resort at Al-Lith.
With the longest coastline of any country on the eastern seaboard of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia has huge diving potential. The very few who know it rank it among the best diving in the world. This obscurity is also its greatest advantage: the reefs are almost deserted of divers and boats.
As soon as we hit the water, we came face to face with two of the largest whitetip sharks I had ever seen; they were quite unruffled by our presence. Above our heads, just below the surface, was a shimmering shoal of some of the most curious creatures I have ever encountered: large, bumphead parrot fish, turquoise-green and with a prominent protrusion from their head. The corals - hard and soft - were magnificent. Towards the end of the dive, a huge leatherback turtle, startled by our presence, dived deeply below us.
Knowing that I came to the Kingdom without a sponsor, and that I am qualified as a divemaster, Abdullah is now convinced I am a spy.
Labels: Frances Linzee Gordon in Saudi Arabia, Middle East
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Posted Thursday, February 22, 2007, 3:48 PM by Lonely Planet
Days 16-19: The Wheelers take the ferry to Barra on their way to crossing the Gambian border on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.
Sunday 18 to Wednesday 21 February
We hang out at the Zebrabar campsite for three days, travelling the 18km to the colourful town of St Louis by boat. Other teams come and go and on Tuesday we set off with Dan and Ian in their Renault 4 for the last leg to Gambia. We stop at Touba, about halfway, to have a look at the country's biggest mosque and carry on to Toubakouta for the night. Another team in a Ford Sierra join us there; the Ford has undergone major surgery at Zebrabar when the front bodywork started to collapse.
The next morning we're up bright and early for the final short drive to the Gambian border at Karang and on to the ferry at Barra. It's the trip's final hassle, the ferry is notoriously slow, unreliable and crowded and the 'bumpsters', Gambia's famous tourist hustlers, are said to be out in force. In fact we don't suffer any real bumpster problems and only have to wait three hours (while we fry in the sun) for a ferry. Trucks were waiting for days.
An hour later we're across the 5km wide river and it's just 15km to the final checkpoint, the Safari Garden Hotel. We've covered 7206km from when we picked our trusty little Mitsubishi up from the village outside Exeter. As the crow flies (or the GPS indicates) we're 4274km from our first night of the trip, on the south coast of England in Torquay. Along the way, apart from putting fuel in the tank, we've had to spend precisely 10 dirham, about US$2, to fix a puncture in Agadir. Other than that it has not skipped a beat. Tomorrow morning I'll press out the dents we put in the front wings (fenders for Americans) when we were pushing the poor little thing out of a sand dune in Mauritania.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Monday, February 19, 2007, 5:03 PM by Lonely Planet
Frances Linzee Gordon has just completed an unprecedented research assignment in Saudi Arabia for Lonely Planet's forthcoming guide to the Arabian Peninsula. As the first person ever to be granted a visa to visit the country as an independent tourist, she kept a diary of her adventures. In the second of eight blog posts, Frances gets her first real taste of the Kingdom.
I listened for my cue. It came:
'Ladies and gentleman, we will shortly be commencing our descent. Local time in Riyadh is 9.45pm.'
I raised myself from my seat and marched purposefully towards the toilets. Two and a half minutes later, I re-emerged. As I walked back down the aisle, I became aware of heads turned towards me: my transformation was complete.
As the airplane door opened, I was seized by that sharp sense of anticipation upon first setting foot in a foreign land. Pulling my niqab (headscarf) further over my face, I lifted the skirts of my abeyya (the name given to the full-length black robe worn by women here) and shimmied off into the warm Saudi night.
But if my arrival had met expectations, what followed did not. Contrary to the embassy's briefing, there was nobody at the airport to meet me. Had a diplomatic friend not turned up to see my safe passage, I would have been detained at once by the airport authorities.
Nor did things materialise much later: for several days I found myself beached by blinding Saudi bureaucracy. While the Ministry of Information (normally appointed to the Press) and the Ministry of Tourism (in whose remit I resided) wrangled over responsibility for me, there were permits of every kind to obtain: photographic permits, site permits, place permits, and reservations to make of every type. At my hotel one evening, I had to sign even for a blanket.
In pursuit of one permission, I found myself waiting one warm afternoon to see an official. Ushered eventually into an enormous office, I started to explain my purpose. Half an hour later, I discovered that the somber, expressionless civil servant across the room from me was in fact the secretary. He had not understood a word I had uttered. Shoed next into an even bigger bureau furnished with the largest plasma TV I had ever seen, I began again. A total of three hours and ten minutes later, we emerged with the precious permission.
'You are lucky', my guide announced. 'Engineer Ahmed has been very kind.'
Furnished with a file overflowing with permissions and permits, we began our journey at last. Though days had dissolved into the mind-boggling abyss of Saudi bureaucracy, I was soon more grateful than I could have imagined for persevering with those precious permits...
Read Frances' first blog post here
Labels: Frances Linzee Gordon in Saudi Arabia, Middle East
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Posted Sunday, February 18, 2007, 7:04 PM by Lonely Planet
Days 10-15: The Wheelers make their way through Mauritania reaching the Senegalese border on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.
Monday 12 to Saturday 17 February
We've not really been out of touch right through Mauritania, but we never hung around long enough to work things out at local internet cafes (there were quite a few of them). At Dakhla, our final stop in Morocco (in what used to be the old colonial era Spanish Sahara) we met up with most of the other crews. Unhappily, the American team's big yellow school bus (we'd joked about hitching a ride with them if our trusty Mitsubishi broke down) is towed in and it appears the bus is dead.
From Dakhla we crossed into Mauritania without problems and teamed up with three other cars (a beautiful little Renault 4 steered by two clockmakers, a gaudy yellow Nissan Sunny coupe and a militarily precise - the crew are both ex-RAF - Volvo station wagon) to cross the desert. In fact, you can take the new road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott, but that's wimping out, we go for the real deal, across the sandy wastes and down the beach with incoming waves lapping at our wheels.
It's a buzz although the first day I'm the champion at getting stuck in the sand. Fortunately I redeem myself on day two when I'm the champion at not getting stuck in the sand. I've mastered the Mitsu sand technique: run into deep sand flat out, with the poor little car's little 1.3 litre 18-year-old, 225,000km engine running at maximum revs and with luck you sail out the other side. Towards the end of the beach we have to round a rocky promontory by actually driving into the sea and skittering out the other side of the rocks with everything still going. The Mitsu even manages that OK.
An overnight pause in Nouakchott and then it's down to the Senegalese border, an experience which puts a bad taste in everybody's mouth. First we skip the Rosso border (hassles, bribe demands, delays) by driving 100km down a dirt road to a smaller border. Even there we have to go through nine different checkpoints in about 200m, emerging US$200 poorer having paid off (usually in bribes) customs officials, police officials, border officials and on and on both exiting Mauritania and arriving in Senegal.
Fortunately we evade the police roadblocks between the border and our campsite at Zebrabar, nearly every other car is stopped and fined for various made-up offences. One car gets gonged for US$25 for not signalling as they pulled in when the police stopped them to check if they really had two reflective triangles on board. Most cars in Senegal don't have an indicator to their name, let alone a reflective triangle.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007, 10:45 PM by Lonely Planet
At the Halle St-Pierre - 'the best gallery of its kind' in Paris's artistic Montmartre arrondisement is an Australian exhibition that you probably haven't heard about, of an art movement you may not be familiar with, but which warrants and rewards a closer inspection until 11 March 2007.
Outsider Art, or Art Brut (Raw Art) generally applies to the artistic creations of people at the fringes of art production - the institutionalised, the sometimes-psychotic, the marginalised and the self-taught - those who usually receive scant attention from the artistic establishment. This exhibition is the most significant grouping of Australian Outsider Art in almost two decades.
The show started life at the Orange Regional Gallery in regional New South Wales and travelled straight to Paris, bypassing Sydney spaces such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, probably because of the difficulty in getting Outsider Art acknowledged by mainstream art institutions.
It's tempting to get caught up in the act of trying to capture what this art is with labels, but it's more important to experience it for yourself - you'll know it when you see it, as thousands of Parisians and visitors to the city have discovered when they venture off the more typical museum trail in this most art-loving European cultural capital.
According to Philip Hammial, one of the original curators of the ORG show, the difference between Art Brut and 'art therapy'' (which it is often confused with) is that with Art Brut, the artists 'aren't doped to the eyeballs, and therefore the Art Brut is more intense'.
The artists include Janine Hilder, Claire Saint-Claire, Travis Mitchell, Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Mannix and Stavroula Feleggakis and works range from elaborately detailed illustrations on paper to Javier Lara-Gomez's dollhouse-like creations of buildings in a variety of materials. Of the 20 artists whose works are displayed at the show, six have had offers to show at other Parisian galleries.
Packed, protected and freighted without any funding from the Australia Council, the show is a testament to creative drive and artistic energy without interference. To get there, alight from metro station Anvers and walk straight up rue de Steinkerque to place St-Pierre.
- Sally O'Brien
Labels: Europe, Festivals and events
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Posted Tuesday, February 13, 2007, 6:38 PM by Lonely Planet
Frances Linzee Gordon has just completed an unprecedented research assignment in Saudi Arabia for Lonely Planet's forthcoming guide to the Arabian Peninsula. As the first person ever to be granted a visa to visit the Kingdom as an independent tourist, she kept a diary of her adventures. In the first of eight blog posts, Frances reveals the secret of visa success.
Saudi Arabia. The world's last great forbidden country. The toughest territory in the world for women to travel in...
As I sat before my suitcase pondering my packing, my mind began to replay at random some of the things I had heard about this mysterious realm.
A kingdom closed to outsiders. Penetrable in the past only to the bravest and the boldest such as Burton, Thesiger and Lawrence, who risked life and limb to travel there.
Could I bring my CDs, and DVDs? And the books I had bought on the Kingdom - were they all banned?
For centuries the holy cities of Islam were forbidden to Christians on pain of death. Even today, the country's an emblem of everything inexplicable to the West: the Middle East, Islam, oil and terror...
My jewellery - did I have any crosses? I'd have to leave them behind. And where could I buy an abeyya? Would I face arrest if I arrived uncovered and without?
I sat back: it was impossible to imagine myself there. Impossible even to believe that I had in hand at last the notoriously elusive visa, so famously difficult to get. How had I got it anyway?
'No chance', the ambassador's secretary had said with a smirk when I asked her to rate my chances. 'Not a hope in hell!'
I had set foot inside the Saudi embassy so many times that the security guards now knew me and greeted me, grinning, as 'First Secretary'. I had sent legions of letters, had had dozens of meetings, and countless telephone conversations. Accompanying my application were work references, personal references, character references, even moral references.
Then, early one cold winter's day, I decided it was time to change tack and to set in motion Plan D. Nearly four months had passed since first darkening the doorway of the embassy and I seemed no nearer my goal. Reaching for my address book, I sat down to send an email.
Six and a half hours later, the telephone rang. It was the ambassador's secretary: 'We are ringing to inform you, Ms Frances, that your visa is now ready for collection.'
Waasita. I had just learnt my first - and possibly most important - Saudi word and lesson. Contacts.
Labels: Frances Linzee Gordon in Saudi Arabia, Middle East
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Posted Monday, February 12, 2007, 3:06 PM by Lonely Planet
Days 9 & 10: The Wheelers continue their push through to Mauritania on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.
Saturday-Sunday 10-11 February
Our first vehicle malfunction in Agadir, a puncture fixed for 10 dirham, about US$1.50. Then it's two long days down the bleak desert coast, overnighting in Laâyoune and finally arriving in Dakhla. In between we've seen lots of sand, lots of camels, quite a few other Plymouth-Banjul competitors and an amazing number of French campervans, all of them white and congregating in groups. Everybody is supposed to arrive in Dakhla by tomorrow night and get ready for the push into Mauritania tomorrow.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Days 7 & 8: The Atlas Mountains provide a head-spinning pit stop for the Wheelers.
Thursday-Friday 8-9 February
Thursday was a rest day in Marrakesh, we spent part of the day with a German TV crew making a documentary about the hippy trail era of the 1960s and '70s.
On Friday we drove through the Atlas Mountains on a spectacularly winding road through Taroudant and down to Agadir on the coast. At a roadside cafe at 2100 metres we met other Plymouth-Banjul teams who had stopped for excellent saffron-flavoured omelettes, a Berber speciality.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Thursday, February 08, 2007, 4:01 PM by Lonely Planet
Day 6: The Wheelers finally arrive in Africa.
Wednesday 7 February
From Rabat we cruised along a modern toll road autoroute via Casablanca to Marrakech for the first two thirds of the trip, the final 150km on a rather older road. In Marrakech we dived into the medina to stay at Riad Edward. Converting traditional old Moroccan courtyard houses known as riads into hotels is a current trend and this one is a fine example of the type. The problem with riads is finding them, the medina is amazingly convoluted and the riads are usually completely anonymous, from the outside.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Day 5: Delays are part of the game in any overland rally - the Wheelers kill some time.
Tuesday 6 February
Europe to Africa by ferry may only take 45 minutes, but you then kill two hours waiting for the Moroccan customs to get around to performing five minutes of paperwork. Finally we roll out of the dock compound, pull dirhams out of an ATM and spend €50-worth buying 10-days' car insurance. Then it's out onto the autoroute and south to Rabat, with a steady procession of oncoming drivers flashing their headlights to warn of a quite amazing number of radar speed traps.
- Tony WheelerTrack progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Tuesday, February 06, 2007, 9:46 PM by Lonely Planet
Days 3 & 4: The Wheelers waylaid by a wayward ATM on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.
Sunday-Monday 4-5 February
Who are these people turning up for a pre-dawn breakfast at our hotel in Vitoria? The two German-speaking punk-looking guys turn out to be bus drivers for the Leipzig Opera. Our intention to leave 'early' doesn't work that well (I waste a quarter of an hour looking for a working ATM), although we still get away by 8.30am. And then we drive-drive-drive via Madrid, Granada and Malaga to arrive at Tarifa, just beyond Gibraltar and 1077km from our morning starting point. We've sat most of the day with the speedo needle at a steady 120kph, which left us in the slow lane with everything else whistling past us.
Lots of cars, some of them worse looking than ours, some of them much better, are already assembled and the entrants are already sinking cold cervezas. I like the French blue Renault 4 and the bright yellow American school bus. The next day we spend shopping and meeting our fellow travellers. Africa is a stone's throw away across the Straits of Gibraltar and a ferry company rep comes round to the hotel at 6pm to sell tickets.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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It's a funny time to be travel-mad in the UK. On one-hand, we've never had it so good. More budget airlines, flying further and cheaper than ever before; speedier rail links to the continent opening later this year and most of us have 132 lovely days to do with as we please. That's leave, weekends and bank holidays.
So why are so many people apologising for travelling, cutting down on flights and coughing up sting taxes levied on flying at short notice with barely a whimper of complaint? The answer is that flying itself continues to be under the spotlight from environmental groups and a media grappling with the explosion of concern about climate change. What were once nice white vapour trails in a deep blue sky are now harbingers of accelerated global warming, with carbon-belching jet engines accounting for 5.5% (and climbing) total carbon emissions with no fix in sight.
Not that this is stopping the majority of people flying - growth predictions remain strong. But the government had fired the first shot in a war that is sure to see travel get more expensive by doubling air passenger duty putting £5 on the price of a short-haul ticket and up to £40 on a longer trip. Not enough, say environmentalists. Too much, shout the airlines, pointing out that the tax is doing nothing to ease the effects of air travel and in some cases getting staff dressed up as bowler-hatted tax collectors to claw back the revenue from travellers who booked before the tax rise came into effect.
If you're like me, this gives great pause for thought. I love travel and I'm a passionate believer in the benefits it brings, both to host communities and to individuals who get out and experience the world. I feel this outweighs the potential harmful impact of my journey - especially as I offset my travels and seek alternatives where necessary. But this is one issue that isn't going away, and that's going to give us all pause for thought in the near future. What do you think about this one?
Tom Hall, Lonely Planet London
Labels: Europe, Politics, Sustainable and responsible tourism
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Posted Monday, February 05, 2007, 10:15 PM by Lonely Planet
Day 2: Tony and Maureen Wheeler make their way to Vitoria in Spain - Banjul still seems a long way away.
Saturday 3 February
Eventually drag ourselves out of bed (it's dark outside), grab some breakfast, jump in the 'trusty' Mitsubishi and head south. For the whole day. By which time we've covered 700km and crossed the border into Spain. At which time the usual travel mysteries kick in. Why do our route notes (downloaded from the RAC UK website) not seem to match up with reality? And when we finally cruise into Vitoria, after dark, why is there not a single hotel anywhere to be found?
We circle around, trying to find the city centre, trying to find anything, nearly get sideswiped by a local making a beeline for a vacant parking spot, nearly having a head-on with another local when we turn into a one way street only to find it's two way, and then suddenly chance upon a hotel with a car park. And a bar. And a very reasonably priced restaurant, where a bottle of very nice red is thrown in with dinner at no extra cost. What's not to like?
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Posted Sunday, February 04, 2007, 5:25 PM by Lonely Planet
Day 1: Tony and Maureen Wheeler get their Mitsu on the road for the Plymouth to Banjul rally.
Friday 2 February
Our 'trusty' (I'm going to keep saying that) Mitsubishi sat by a wall in the Dorset village. I'd handed over the £350 (yes, we'd paid more than the target £100), it was ours. The trouble was we couldn't see it in the dark, but we get in, I turn the key, it starts, so we drive away. The next morning, in daylight, it looks OK, apart from the flat tyre. But even if there had been air in the spare it would have done us no good if we'd had a puncture, there was no jack.
Next day we drive back to London and circle around various car places to find a jack and a few other vital necessities. Friday 2 February we leave central London and head south, passing so many African hairdressers, African restaurants and African phone card shops it scarcely seems necessary to drive to Africa. At Folkestone we drive on to the Eurotunnel train, no time wasted, we get on standby on the first train going, and 35 minutes later drive away in Calais.
By 6pm we are 400km from London and it's dark, drizzling with rain and the wipers don't seem to work. Make it to Alençon for the night where we stay in what feels like a cheap rural American motel (costs €44) and 'enjoy' a meal that proves even the French can do dull food when they put their minds to it.
- Tony Wheeler
Track progress and view a map of the route here.
Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007
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Sarah Andrews considers golf courses in the Canary Islands...
Uke is not what you could call soft-spoken. As he leads a dozen hikers huffing and puffing along the 19-kilometre
Ruta de los Volcanes (Volcano Route), he entertains us with a seamless stream of commentary about the Canary island of
La Palma. "These pine trees can survive lava flows," he tells us. "The island's last eruption was in 1971... lush vegetation earned La Palma the nickname 'the pretty island'..." But what Uke seems most interested in are the big changes coming to this small Spanish island.
We should enjoy La Palma while we can, he warns. It is still relatively untouched by mass tourism, but if local politicians have their way, huge new hotel complexes could replace the banana plantations that currently drive 80 percent of the local economy.
Mass tourism would strain the island's fragile water supply and increase prices, sending even more people to other islands or the mainland for jobs. And it would alter the natural beauty that is La Palma's main attraction; in fact, part of the trail we're hiking on would be covered by one of five proposed golf courses (there are currently no golf courses on the island's 1800 square kilometres).
The conflict on La Palma is the problem facing many rural areas: preservation versus prosperity. The one thing everyone agrees on is encouraging development while protecting natural resources. But how?
In any case, the island is bracing for change. The airport will triple its capacity to more than 3 million by 2010. New hotels are being built as I type. And politicians and islanders alike are debating a far-reaching tourism development plan that would allow the construction of ports, golf courses and hotel complexes, some in supposedly protected natural areas. Green groups, like
Ecologistas en Acción, say the plan would "irreversibly alter the values and beauty that makes La Palma a unique tourist destination."
Asemblea Ecologista is
collecting signatures against the plan. Both groups claim mass tourism only benefits land speculators and hotel chains.
But politicians say development will bring new jobs and higher incomes. Islanders are divided. Some, like Manuel Lorenzo, president of the
Canary Banana Growers' Association, thinks the tourism growth "is good for the island and can exist alongside banana crops." Only time will tell.
Labels: Europe, Sustainable and responsible tourism
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