Dear Editor,
With reference to ‘Holland visitors to Suriname – a potential niche market for local tourism sector’ SN October 17, I get the impression that the tourism industry is now hanging on to a hope and a prayer.
First they must identify the target audience, then create the tourist trap. The current arrangement will attract local and foreign visitors at best, but not the boat and planeloads of tourists required to fill all those hotels.
Hotels with swimming pools are not tourist attractions;
are tourist accommodation. Since we do not have the benefit of white sandy beaches with blue water, we need some other attraction.
I heard we have some tree canopy settings in the interior, which will attract a few tree huggers, and we also have the Kaieteur Falls, but that is not enough. Therefore we need to create the rest, along with a theme.
Here are a few ideas to start with:
1. Georgetown, the colonial garden city. Theme: Horse and carriage rides through the colonial buildings and courtyards still remaining. Workers and ground-keepers milling about in colonial period dress.
2. Reconstruct an Afro-Guyanese and an Indo-Guyanese village, complete with animal farms, which doubles as petting farms and a patch of rice field- don’t forget the comfa drums and the tassa drums. Theme: Horseback rides to a typical rural, Caribbean village.
3. Make replicas of the Dutch forts and all the other colonial remnants of ages past, including a Koker. Also set up an open air animal zoo, where visitors can see a wide range of our wildlife including the manatee.
4. We are still cooking in little kitchens, hidden away at the back. We need to bring the cooking out into the open, and waft the air with all those exotic flavours. Theme:A Caribbean cooking experience.
5. Find a precarious cliff overhang, and promote cliff-diving at one’s own risk.
6. Find a spot and promote the game fish in the area, eg, Lukanani, Haimara, etc.
The hotels in Guyana are beautiful; the down side of the hotel business is that every day a room remains unfilled money is lost forever. The owners may seriously have to look into the possibility of selling the rooms as condos.
As I have said before, we need to create the tourist trap. In Penslavania USA, there are the Amish, who have shunned a modern life-style, yet they conduct extensive farming with horse-drawn tillers; they ride only in horse-drawn buggies; and they use no electricity. Millions of tourists visit their area to see their life-style.
Walt Disney created Disneyland, a tourist mecca. When Roy Akaoi opened his first restaurant, business was slow, his father visited him from Japan, and suggested he create a cooking show. Benny Hanna is now the restaurant where you see the Japanese chef come out with a dozen ginsu knives stuck in his waist, and then perform a samurai chopfest on your meat and vegetables. The rest is success history. I see our success story in our rural villages. We keep talking about going green, protecting our forests, yet our villages are an ecological disaster.
Albert Einstein gave the world an elegant formula. E= MC2. Energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. In layman’s terms, energy is the same as matter and vice versa. In Guyana, it is all around us and it is free; we are not using it efficiently.
We need to redesign those villages to be self-sustainable, meaning that they produce their own livestock, fish, fruit and vegetables in an organised garden kind of community; we need horse-drawn buggies in the village. All of the resources are right there, we are not using any of them efficiently. Let’s start by showing every man woman and child how to build a fence, wall, house out of readily available earth. We can make it rustic or a smooth as sheet rock. Then let’s dress it up with gardens, livestock and bamboo trees galore.
I can guarantee you that no unemployed village youth will stand by idly, while all that activity is going on in the village. Then let’s bring in the tourists, to see not rural villages, but green eco-village gardens, where the people live in harmony with nature.
All that is doable, all we need, is to put E=MC2 to work for us.
Yours faithfully,
Joe Coxall
(Comment taken from SN website)
