Developing tourism products from sand, salt and rubbish, thus diversifying the current poor sea tourism products in Vietnam is the latest idea initiated by the scientists of the Scientific Union for Sustainable Tourism Development STDe.
Rubbish and salt could also be the tourism products
Sand, salt and rubbish, according to the scientific union, could be seen as the natural resources which can bring long term benefits to the sea tourism development. They can help create high quality and attractive tourism products while they do not do harm to other natural resources. However, it is a pity that Vietnam still does not consider these as tourism resources to exploit in a reasonable way.
Vietnam has a long coastline of 3200 kilometers, many beautiful beaches with yellow sand, especially in the central region. However, for the last many years, sea tourism products remain poor, monotonous. Travelers can only have bathing, expose themselves to the sun, play sand sports, or build “sand castles.”
Recently, sand has become an element of tourism products, when people make souvenir paintings from natural sand. In fact, sand can be used more popularly in tourism products. It, for example, can be used to treat diseases, especially the muscle and skin-related diseases at resorts.
For the last many decades, salt has been a profuse natural resource of Vietnam. However, salt workers cannot live on his job, because salt is too cheap. In the eyes of Vietnamese people, salt is just a kind of spice, no more or less.
However, according to STDe, salt and the products made of salt can be exploited as original tourism products which have high value. There are many salt resorts in the world which have been developed effectively, such as efficiently exploit the salt matrix, caves, salt skiing, salt museums and festivals, or salt food products. There are also salt hotels, salt villas and Zen salt gardens.
Rubbish on the sea, which is always a headache to management agencies because it causes environment pollution and spoils the tourism landscapes. However, STDe has said even rubbish could be used to make recycle products to serve the tourism development. STDe’s scientists have pointed out the high value of rubbish with the recycled products made of waste, construction materials, and even recycled park on the sea.
Investors needed
Prior to that, STDe also stirred up the public when raising the idea of developing disaster tourism, with which natural disasters, especially the heavy rains, typhoons and floods in the central region could be the tourism products to be served to the travelers who want to witness natural disasters with their eyes.
To date, local authorities of Thua Thien-Hue province, Da Nang City and Hoi An ancient town in Quang Nam province have expressed their support to the idea, wishing to cooperate with STDe to develop this kind of tourism.
However, a lot of things will need to be done to turn the ideas into realistic. In most of cases, scientists draw up plans on paper, and the ideas later fall into oblivion. Meanwhile, businessmen only work on natural resources, or they buy ideas from foreign countries instead of making investment in domestically initiated ideas. This is really a big waste of the “grey matter” and the natural resources in Vietnam.
STDe has affirmed that the ideas of developing tourism products from sand and salt are really feasible, because this will not require overly high investment and advanced technologies.
Meanwhile, a rubbish park or a recycled park on the sea proves to be an unfamiliar and interesting idea. These would be the parks on the beaches built from rubbish.