Mon, 10 Sep 2007

Solar eclipse presents tourism challenge for Mongolia

ULAN BATOR (NNA) – The next total eclipse of the sun which will be clearly visible from land will occur on 1 August of next year and south-western Mongolia will be a particularly good place from which to view it. Various travel organisers have already started preparations to cater for the anticipated influx of tourists which will pose considerable problems for a country which has so far barely been able to cope with the growth in ordinary tourism of recent years. NNA correspondent Walter Siegfried Hahn, who is currently in Mongolia with a group preparing for the eclipse, sent the following report.

The moon’s shadow will pass across central Siberia near Novosibirsk, cross the Altai mountains in western Mongolia and leave the earth again in the Chinese part of the Gobi desert. There is widespread agreement that the best place to observe this phenomenon will be the south western part of Mongolia, where between the 4000-metre-high peaks of the Altai the vast planes of the northern part of the Gobi desert will provide an unrestricted view.

The problem is that Mongolia is already unable to cope with the tourist boom which began in recent years, a lack of infrastructure being one of the key issues. This applies all the more to the western part of the country where there is not a single western-standard hotel or, indeed one of the yurt camps so popular with tourists.

For this reason the Mongolian tourism ministry recently invited all travel agents in the country to a solar eclipse conference which was attended by 39 of the 200 registered businesses. The purpose of the conference was to provide some basic information. “Apart from three people, no one knew what a solar eclipse actually is and why visitors would want to come to our country to see one,” E. Tuul from “Nature Tours” commented.

But the authorities also wanted to see to what extent enquiries from abroad would be handled in a reasonable manner. As Tseren A. from Tseren Tours pointed out, there are a lot of offers on the Internet which include domestic flights, but the Mongolian airline only has a limited number of aircraft – a Fokker 100 and two Fokker 50s – which are already fully utilised with their normal schedules.

The ministry is now considering allowing aircraft from neighbouring Russia to fly within Mongolia or to open Hovd airport, which has an asphalt runway, to aircraft from Kazakhstan or Russia.

The issue of accommodation, by contrast, is considered less of a problem: “July and August are the rainy season here but the weather is still dryer and warmer than summer in central Europe,” Bertsetseg T. from the tourism ministry said.

As a result, tourists coming to see the solar eclipse will be accommodated in two-person tents and experience something of that “camping feeling” which is part of any trip to Mongolia extending further than a day’s drive from the capital.

“Of course people will have to adjust to maybe not seeing any water for washing for a couple of days,” was one description of the expeditionary character of such a trip.

For these reasons, the preparatory group, which has been preparing a trip with anthroposophically-based lectures about the solar eclipse, and which includes the cultural commentator Joachim Daniel and astronomer Wolfgang Held, has spent more than a year on the detailed planning of the trip together with its Mongolian partners – something that has evidently not been done before in this way in the Mongolian tourism industry.

As a result, although the participants will still have to cope with the facts of life in Mongolia such as extremes of temperature and dirt tracks instead of roads, they can hope for a certain standard as regards subsistence and safety, the preparatory group said.

End/nna/wsh/ung/cva

Link: www.sofi-mongolei.com

Item: 070910-01EN Date: 10. September 2007

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