Is there a hint of a new maturity among the travel trade these days? Whereas before tourism was either seen as the destroyer of culture and environment or the sole panacea of poor countries with nothing to sell but their exoticism, a middle-path attitude was recently being sounded about the industry's merits and its faults.
For one, at the PATA conference in Kathmandu in February on adventure travel, the buzzwords were conservation, the environment's carrying capacity, and cultural sensitivity, even though what followed were three days of business among South Asian sellers and overseas buyers.
As usual, the subject of controls on the number of tourist arrivals as well as that of tourism's impact on the environment were touched. Keynote speaker, Toni Hagen, often credited with opening Nepal to the world, for example, criticised HMG/Nepal's target of hosting 1 million tourists by the year 2000 as "dangerous for Nepal." Instead, seek "quality tourists," Hagen urged; that is, trade numbers for better-paying tourists.
A call to close the Annapurna Sanctuary and the Everest regions in Nepal for a few years "to give them a chance to revive" was made by Capt. M.S. Kohli, president of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation. Kohli, an Everest summiter, is also chairman of the recently formed Himalayan Adventure Trust, which will work to protect the Himalaya, and has already drawn up a code of conduct and ethics for tour operators and visitors.