With Ha Long Bay becoming one of Vietnam’s most popular tourist destinations, the UNESCO World Heritage Site has become difficult to manage.
To meet UNESCO standards, municipal authorities opened bids for aspects of management and maintenance of both Ha Long and Bai Tu Long bays, and Bitexco quickly threw its hat into the ring with a 50-year offer, reports DTI News.
Bitexco, a multi-industry corporation, is involved in everything from real estate to mining and looks primed to expand into tourism management with their Ha Long Bay bid.
Vu Quang Hoi, chairman of Bitexco, told Quang Ninh provincial authorities they wanted to “make Ha Long Bay into one of the top tourist destinations in East Asia and create an internationally recognized brand for Ha Long Bay.”
When it comes to natural beauty, the Bay lives up to the hype, but is becoming increasingly polluted.
"Each passenger boats discharge an average of 2,000-3,000 liters of waste every day. With 500 tourism boats, it's up to 1.5 million liters of untreated waste discharged into the bay,” Ha The Tien, an engineer working on a ship in Ha Long told Thanh Nien.
If Bitexco does nothing but halt environmental degradation of Ha Long Bay, it would be a vast improvement.
[DTI News // Photo via Nathan O'Nions]
