Quang Ninh's Island Marine tourism is now playing an important role, attracting a large amount of not only domestic but also foreign tourists to Quang Ninh. As estimated, around 70% of tourists to Quang Ninh making tours to sea and island areas in the province. This figure shows that island marine tourism has proved its role as one of the key marine economies with lots of advantages.
However, in order to sustainably develop marine tourism and allure an increasing number of tourists to Quang Ninh, protection of the natural landscape and marine environment should be considered as a vital factor.
Strengths are confirmed
50% of Quang Ninh's area is island and marine with over 2,000 islands, accounting for two third of the number of the islands of Vietnam; with beautiful beaches along the coastline of over 250km. These are valuable advantages for Quang Ninh to develop marine tourism.
One of the highlights of Quang Ninh's marine tourism is Ha Long city, a tourism center and the home to the Halong Bay World Natural Heritage Site. With its oustanding universal values of deology and geomorphology, Halong Bay becomes a magnet to tourists. It is reported that, Halong Bay receives annually around 3 million tourist arrivals. In the first six months of 2017, it welcomed nearly 1.9 million arrivals, up 41% compared to the same period last year.
A part from Ha Long city, Van Don and Co To island districts are great destinations of island marine tourism for tourists. In these districts, there are not only magnificient scenery but also beautiful beaches, namely Quan Lan, Minh Chau, Ngoc Vung, Van Chay, Hong Van, Thanh Lan, and little Co to,etc. Van Don and Co To are currently being invested to become hi-quality centers for marine eco-tourism in the future.
With an abundant source of delicious seafood, including shrimps, crabs, cuttle-fish,...Tourists are therefore attracted to Quang Ninh by special cuisine with a great deal of beautiful dishes.
In addition, Quang has a large number of national historical relics and traditional festivals, which features typical cultures of the locals in the province.
In parallel with these obove-mentioned strengths, Quang Ninh has seized numerous advantages in developing the cruise tourism. Many world-famous tourism cruise ships, such as Star Cruises, Costa Crociere, Nautica, Seabon, Legend of the Sea, Azmara, Aurora, Sun Princess,...brought thoudsands of passengers to Quang Ninh.
In order to effevtively tap those advantages, and to attract more tourists, Quang Ninh particularly pays much concerns to develop and diversify tourism products in Ha Long Bay, as well as in other marine tourism areas. For instance, the Ha Long Ocean Park is a tourism product that has just been opened for locals and visitors by Sun Group. With an investment capital of VND 6,000 billion, it is expected to satisfy tourists' demand in terms of entertainment.
...Challenges ahead
It is clear that marine tourism plays a significant part in Quang Ninh's economic development. However, marine tourism are facing many environmental issues, namely: degression of marine eco-systems and bio-diversity, polluted sea-water.
In fact, in recent years, Quang Ninh has made great efforts in intensifying the protection of environment in general and marine environment in particular. Accordingly, in combination with rasing the people's awareness of the sustainable marine resources protection and management, the province's functional authorities has taken a wide range of robust measures to reduce environmental pollution, such as moving fishing village on Ha Long Bay to the mainland, collecting rubbish and wast water on the Bay. As a result, the environment has been much improved
However, environment pollution is still a big problem impacting on the image of the coastal tourism areas due to the waste disposal from the restaurants, hotels and residential areas. Tourism services on the mainland have not been well controlled. Particularly, waste is not been collected and treated in a proper way,etc .
In addition, tourism is an industry that is often influenced by the change of the environment and climate. However, the way in which tourism should adapt to the climate change has not been well studied There is a fact that, all the tourism activities in Van Don, Co To island district depends much on the weather.
According to the master plan on tourism development by 2020 with a vision to 2030, island marine tourism is determined to play a vital role in Quang Ninh' strategy to develop the smokeless industry. Thus, for a sustainable marine tourism, there is a need to tailor effective measures to preserve and protect natural resources and the environment. The growth of tourism is in line with the protection of the environment.
Article by Thu Nguyen
