Russian Tourism 1000 word essay 1st draft

Every year hordes of Russia tourist makers descend on the city of Dalian, in Liaoning Province, North East China, in search of their annual summer holiday.  With the rise of a new middle class in Russia and dropping of legal barriers to visiting foreign countries since the fall of the USSR, many Russians now pursue their annual summer holiday abroad.  Whilst many Russians from more the western cities are heading to Turkey making it the number 1 foreign destination for Russian tourists, those from the eastern cities such as the heavily polluted Vladivostok seek out Dalian for its close proximity, much less polluted environment, and cultural links between the two cities.

Part of the fascination for Dalian by Russian tourists lies in its history.  The Russian Empire leased the peninsular from the Qing dynasty in 1898 and laid out the city of Dalny.  The Russians lost control of the area in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 with the fall of the city of Port Arthur (now Lushun, further south on the Liaodong Peninsular and falling under the Dalian administrative district) seen as one of the major events contributing to the Russian Revolution of 1905.  Dalian remained under essentially Japanese control until the end of WWII, when the Soviets regained control and worked with the Chinese Communists to develop Dalian mainly focusing on Industrial infrastructure and the strategically important Port.  In 1950, the USSR formally handed Dalian back to the Communist Chinese government.

In the past 20 years Dalian has set about becoming an attractive city with many green parks and its many beaches provide extra weight for its tourist market.

With the rise of consumerism in China and of capitalism in Russia in the past 15 years it is interesting that the countries have still maintained close ties.

Tourism is an interesting indicator of rising middle class societies.  During the years of the USSR, tourism to foreign destinations was banned for the majority of Russians. Russians workers took their holidays as factory organised vacations and visited sanatoriums in Poland or Czechoslovakia, the rocky beaches of the Crimea or the Baltic states, whilst others would spend their summers swimming in lakes and, for those with the means, staying in country Dachas.

The economic boom in Russia since the rise to power of Vladimir Putin –largely due to soaring gas and oil prices –has led to the average wage in Russia now being at approximately 16,253 RUR/month in April 2008 (Source: Business New Europe), which is still a low £348 or US$685, but still showing an increase of 28.1% from a year ago, and sufficient for the new Middle class to afford one foreign holiday a year.

Leisure tourism owes its much of its history to the Industrialisation of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the new British middle class –the factory and machinery owners, the traders and the oligarchy started using their free time for leisure tourism.  This later spread to the working classes with the rise of the seaside resort and improvements in transport infrastructure in the UK allowing people to affordably access resorts such as Blackpool, Southend-on-sea and Weston-Super-Mare.

The rise of cheap air travel world wide in the past decade has bought the opportunities for foreign travel to even greater heights, with many locations now depending on foreign tourism as an intricate part of their economy.  This has led to a change in many locations to make room for these migratory tourists and greater and greater impact on the landscape as the built environment increases to provide leisure entertainment.

Dave Wyatt has experience of working with many environmental issues concerning the relationship between man and his environment.  This work includes working with a community of Albanians who migrated to a heavily polluted area in Albania called Porto Romano in order to seek out work in nearby Durres, work on land rights issues from the West Bank in Palestine that was exhibited at the Chobi Mela IV in Bangladesh in 2006 and work on environmental research into crop growing in desert environments being undertaken in Spain for use in Africa.  He has had work included in a variety of international exhibitions.  His work today focuses on the relationship between man and the landscape.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.