How will new roads improve the tourism industry in this small town? How will it affect the bigger regional cities like Guilin and Liuzhou? Things are changing in this region, and I have been thinking the past few days about the affects it will have on the cities and town around here.
A few days ago on the post about advertising in our small town here in China, a reader asked about the amount of tourist traffic here in Sanjiang County (a very typical, small-scale tourist town for Southwest China) and about the new road under construction which will cut the, now, five to seven hour Guilin-Sanjiang trip down to two or three hours.
Here is a collection of the best information I can get my hands on as to the numbers of tourists that come through Sanjiang County in particular. The government touts a whopping 220,000 "tourist visits" per year! Ok, I will just take them at their word, because I have no evidence to suggest any more or less.
What number of foreign tourists come? One travel agent—there are four agencies in town—said each agency could expect three or four tour groups per month of foreign visitors, with each tour group averaging about twenty people. So, 20 people, multiplied times three tours per month (in peak season), multiplied times four travel agencies, gives us 240 foreign tourist visits per month going through the travel agencies. On top of that, you have a large number of individual travellers that come through. And nobody seems to have any idea how many people that is.
Most of these travellers make it out here from Guilin. And if you were brave enough to try to make the Guilin-Sanjiang trip right now, you would spend at least seven hours slogging through what is called a "road". Most folks come via Liuzhou at present. That means, for more than double the kilometers travelled, you have two hours to Liuzhou and three and a half hours to Sanjiang from there, for a total of about six hours travelling.
What I wonder is how much tourist traffic Liuzhou gets out of all this? Liuzhou is not exactly known for its scenic beauty...not to say that it should not be, but simply that its close proximity to Guilin assures it will never shine as a tourist destination with such close-by "wonders". Though some of us [eh-hem] are not big fans of Guilin.
Basically, where I am going with this is that once the road between Guilin and Sanjiang is completed and "high speed", any through traffic Liuzhou did have under the current situation will be gone. I do not know how much that will affect Liuzhou's tourist industry, though I would guess that "Liuzhou's tourist industry" is mainly defined by its capacity for transportation to other places around the country. I guess that is why I have always liked Liuzhou, though: it is not some candy-coated tourist mecca. It is just an average Chinese city.
The new road will undoubtedly positively affect this little town and all of them on the ethno-tourism travel trail up into Guizhou Province: Longsheng, Sanjiang, all of Southeast Guizhou. There is already a decent flow of foreign tourism through Sanjiang, but when that is made so much easier with the new road from Guilin, I imagine many more will be able to escape Guilin and its trappings for a more rural setting.
