The Taiwanese public has been lukewarm about travel to Central America, despite a variety of attractive packages, including ones featuring a so-called Mayan prophecy that predicts the end of the world on Dec. 21 this year, travel agents said yesterday.
It remains hard to sell any Central or South America tour packages due to local people’s unfamiliarity with the region, which is a relatively expensive travel destination, said Lion Travel Service Co, which was attending the ongoing 2012 Taipei International Travel Fair.
“Our ‘Mayan doomsday package’ was canceled because we did not have enough people to form a group,” said Lion Travel’s Mark Yen, who is responsible for developing the company’s markets for the region.
It seems the tour packages, which cost over US$10,000, are too expensive for most people, and senior citizens who are able to afford such holidays are less likely to be “doomsday buffs,” a manager surnamed Hsieh (謝) of Perfect Travel Agency said.
“Concerning cultural travel, Taiwanese people will not usually bother to travel half-way around the world when Angkor Wat in Cambodia is good enough,” he said.
Nonetheless, foreign travel companies still tried hard to tout Mayan tours at the Oct. 26-29 travel fair, which has attracted participation from 60 countries this year.
Luz Maria Martinez Rojas, a tourism representative from the Mexico Tourism Board, said now is the best time to visit Mexico to celebrate the beginning of a “new era” on Dec. 21, based on the Mayan calendar system that claims the world begins a new period every 5,125 years.
“We will hold mega-concerts and group weddings around the winter solstice,” she said, adding that as of last month, Mexico had received more than 60 million visitors.
She said the number of Taiwanese tourists who visited Mexico in the first five months of the year grew by 7 percent year-on-year.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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