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Don't Wait! Go Now - Before It's Too Late.

"The number-one threat to tourist treasures, paradoxically, is tourism itself. The challenge is how to keep the world's most esteemed monuments from being loved to death. "Tourism carries a tremendous potential that must be acknowledged as essential for the future of world heritage'," says Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund (WMF). "But without proper management we can easily get out of control." For all Hurricane Wilma's wrath, patching Cancún back together will be easy compared with taming the monster that the tourist economy has unleashed. The 7 million visitors a year who descend on this megaresort and surrounding patches of the Mexican Caribbean coast already represent a conservation nightmare, straining water supply, sewers, and marine life. And it's not just Mexico. Conservation International reckons that "unsustainable tourism" poses the main threat to half the cultural heritage sites in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to one in five sites in Asia and the Pacific. Cambodia's once-remote Angkor temples now receive a million visitors a year; the Taj Mahal is subject to 7 million. Rising prosperity in the developing world, more and more elderly on the move, and cheap flights to anywhere will only hasten the human flood. China alone reported a staggering 1.1 billion domestic tourists in 2004".

Newsweek this week carries a feature article on the dangers confronting the world's 7 major tourist sites. The numbers criss-crossing the globe visiting this or that are staggering - but we are all loving those favourite sites to death in one way or another.

Read the complete article here - and head off to book a ticket before it might be to late to see the Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, etc. etc.

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