Though tourism to Deqin has only been allowed since 1999, unplanned, uncontrolled mass tourism is already threatening the natural and cultural resources of Deqin’s crown jewel, Meili Snow Mountain. The purpose of the study tour was to educate Meili’s village leaders about the potential impacts of tourism by visiting the more developed areas of Northwest Yunnan.

Our 3½ hour trek took us to the Wenhai Cooperative Lodge, a collectively-owned village enterprise where households buy shares and contribute annual "labor units" in hopes of receiving a dividend from the lodge’s profits. While the cooperative structure is an excellent example of community-based tourism, the lodge has only paid a dividend twice in its 7-year history and has not yet been discovered by the international tourism market.

To help the lodge become a sustainable revenue-generator for this traditional Naxi village, The Nature Conservancy is working with Wenhai to retrofit the existing lodge with alternative energy resources, implement visitor impact management mechanisms, and provide ecotourism marketing and guide training workshops. By developing ecotourism as an alternative source of income, Wenhai can become less dependent on logging and the making of charcoal that has devastated nearby forests.

In addition to the Wenhai lodge, our itinerary included the mass tourism development on the east side of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Here, a chairlift whisks you up to high alpine meadows, where local villagers offer to dress you in traditional clothes for a photo opportunity. A new golf course lets you play on the world’s highest greens. All of these new developments are designed to appeal to the burgeoning domestic Chinese tourism market.

Before the chairlift was completed, nearby villagers would take tourists to the meadow on horseback, providing much needed supplemental income to their households. Now, however, most of the tourism-driven income goes to large tour operators and the chairlift development company. A few horsemen, still eking out their small piece of the tourist trade, shared their story with our study group, providing a striking example of another way local communities can be affected by tourism development.

Back in Wenhai, as I watched our Tibetan "students" swap ideas with the cooperative members about sustainable, community-based tourism models, I realized the study tour had been a success. Our participants had seen the benefits and potential damages that uncontrolled tourism can bring to a village and its environment. And they’d learned from the best teachers available – other communities who have faced the same challenges.

Chrissy Schwinn
Ecotourism Marketing Analyst