Word: tourist
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...That's not to say that they aren't enjoyable. Wu Zhen's two-color poster series, I Love Guangzhou, would never earn the local tourist board's tick of approval, but it has a streetwise, hand-drawn roughness that is far closer to the actual character of the city than official depictions are. Jon Fong's white paper-cut rendition of the infamous couplet "A hundred flowers blossoming/ A hundred viewpoints contending" is wonderfully funereal, referencing the use of the motto in Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, during which hundreds of thousands of rightists were imprisoned, tortured or killed...
Tibet and Nepal, the long-standing darlings of the Himalayan tourist trade, have not been the most welcoming countries for visitors over the past few months. Foreign tourists have been barred from Tibet since March's anti-Chinese protests. Political troubles in Nepal, where recent elections were marred by bombings, have deterred many holidaymakers. Understandably, some travelers are now beginning to look across these borders to the Indian Himalayas, where the state of Uttarakhand - until recently known as Uttaranchal - has quietly been building its own tourist trade. It offers drop-dead gorgeous trekking - the same as you would find...
There aren't any," says the hotelier with an embarrassed laugh when I ask about the best tourist attractions in Burma's new capital. That's no surprise, really. Naypyidaw--the name translates as "Abode of Kings"--was built from scratch just three years ago on orders from the ruling junta. The vast swath of former scrubland didn't even exist when the latest Lonely Planet Burma travel guide was written, and there's not much tourist charm in a dusty bunker town whose sole purpose is the wish fulfillment of paranoid generals...
...city's only potential tourist attraction is a replica of Rangoon's famous Shwedagon pagoda. It's still under construction. At the building site, child laborers--some appearing no older than 6--lug piles of rocks on woven stretchers. Burma's junta has long been considered one of the world's worst human-rights abusers. But the generals don't have to see these tiny laborers build a golden temple for their Abode of Kings. That's because the top brass is bunkered in another, faraway part of the city, an isolation that could help explain the junta's underwhelming...
...city's only attempt at a tourist attraction is a replica of Rangoon's famous Shwedagon pagoda. The Naypyidaw version, though, remains unfinished. At the building site, groups of child laborers - some appearing no older than six - lug heavy rocks on woven stretchers and swing pickaxes into the hard earth. Burma's junta has long been considered one of the world's worst human-rights abusers. But the country's generals don't have to see these tiny laborers build a golden temple for their Abode of Kings. That's because the generals are bunkered in another, faraway part...