Published:  22:32 Sunday - January 27, 2013

A sea tourism route connecting the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang with Cambodia’s Sihanoukville and Thailand will be launched this year, heard a meeting of representatives of the province and Thailand’s Trat and Chanthaburi provinces in Kien Giang on Monday.

Phu Quoc Island.

Le Minh Hoang, director of the provincial Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports, said Kien Giang and Thailand had agreed on opening the sea route to Cambodia. Therefore, the meeting was only attended by representatives of Thailand and Vietnam on Monday.

The sea route when in place will be attractive to international visitors, especially European travelers. Vietnam will also benefit from the route as many foreign visitors traveling to Thailand and Cambodia want to go to Phu Quoc Island offshore Kien Giang Province by the route.

“This afternoon we agreed to make surveys of tourist sites from Ha Tien, Rach Gia and Phu Quoc to Sihanoukville, Trat and Chanthaburi and the route will be opened after that,” Hoang told the Daily right after the meeting.

The new tourism route will help tourists shorten traveling time to attractive destinations in the three nations. It will take visitors about two and a half hours to go to Sihanoukville by boat from Phu Quoc and two more hours to go to Trat.

However, all the three provinces are lacking qualified tourism boats for the route. The side preparing enough ships will be allowed to be operational first as per the agreement.

“In Kien Giang, only the Duong Dong ship is qualified for this route, so we will encourage local companies to build more ships with capacity of 250-300 tourists to serve travelers,” he noted.

Hoang said Kien Giang, Trat and Chanthaburi provinces will set up more rest stops on islands so that visitors can stop by there.

There were nearly 5.6 million local and foreign visitors to Kien Giang in 2012, a year-on-year growth of 10.1%, the local tourism department reports. The number of visitors to the province is estimated at more than 5.88 million people this year.

Source:SGT