Health knowledge made personal
 Ly Nha Ky campaigns for Halong Bay vote But the State Bank of Vietnam was not warning them to boost their balance sheets or clean up their risky loan books. Elderly cyclists on the National Highway to Ha Long. After four years of short-listing, voting in a global competition to name seven natural wonders of the world will finally close on Friday. The Prime Minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Tan Dung, voted for Halong Bay Halong Bay, a vast lagoon dotted with thousands of limestone peaks, faces stiff competition from 27 other finalists including the likes of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Grand Canyon and Uluru (Ayers Rock) as well as lesser-known natural wonders such as Azerbaijan’s Mud Volcanoes and the Masurian lake district in Poland. While leaders in one-party, Communist-ruled Vietnam are not usually that keen on promoting competitive voting, they have thrown themselves into this particular ballot with rare vigour. Senior officials from the culture minister to a deputy prime minister have told Gaggles of giggling Communist youth volunteers have been cycling around the streets of Hanoi waving banners in support of the Halong Bay campaign. And banks, who in the past have often taken central bank guidance with a pinch of salt, have set their staff quotas of text messages to send (600 SMSs per employee at one state-owned bank) and vowed to reimburse the costs. Officials from other competing countries such as Australia and Israel have also encouraged their people to vote for their respective natural wonders. Yet Vietnamese officials, perhaps mindful of the growing importance of tourism to the economy, While they accept that a victory would provide a publicity boost, some tourism executives reckon that the obsession with this competition is wrong-headed, particularly given that Halong Bay is already acknowledged as a UNESCO world heritage site. The money and time, they say, would be better spent cleaning up the worsening pollution in Halong Bay, Unlike India, Malaysia and Thailand, The visa requirements for most Western visitors are also a major turn-off, according to tourism executives. Although Vietnam received a record 5m visitors last year, a 35 percent increase on crisis-hit 2009, it still attracted fewer tourists than Bulgaria, Syria and Ukraine. If only, one Vietnamese observer notes, the Communist leadership could muster the same enthusiasm for public participation and policy implementation when it comes to more serious matters of state, the country’s future would look much brighter. Additional reporting by Nguyen Phuong Linh Via Financial Times: Vietnam: the natural wonders of voting |
Write a comment:
|
