Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tours and Tour Guides
Turkish Cypriot Department of Antiquities.
The Turkish Cypriot Tour Guides Association
(KITREB), on the other hand, is opposed to the
exclusion of Turkish Cypriot tour guides. Whilst
acknowledging that low levels of training and
language skills is a problem, KITREB is attempt-
ing to raise the professional standards of an
occupation which has been in low demand in the
north for three decades. The training require-
ment has been raised from 1-month ad hoc
courses organized by the Ministry of Tourism, to
6-month university diploma courses, and lan-
guage training in German, Swedish and Italian
is now being offered to Turkish Cypriot tour
guides, with funding from the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP). A compro-
mise with the tours from the south has been
reached, whereby unregistered Turkish Cypriot
guides accompany the tours as silent escorts. The
dilemma can again be viewed in terms of the
trade-off between the need for the immediate
economic boost of increased tourism activity,
and the longer term development of the tourism
infrastructure in the north; deeper still is the
problem of the legacy of division concerning
notions of cultural 'property', which urgently
needs to be addressed (see Scott, 2002).
Another sensitive area connected with the tran-
sit of tourists over the Green Line concerns the
role of tour guides accompanying daily coach
tours. Trips to the empty beaches of the Karpas
Peninsula and the northern towns of Kyrenia
and Famagusta, taking in famous sites such as
the mountain-top crusader castles of St Hilarion
and Kantara, the ancient ruins of Salamis, and
the monastery of Bellapais, are widely adver-
tised in southern resorts such as Ayia Napa at
prices from CY£20 upwards, and during 2005
seven tourist buses a day or more were crossing
the Green Line into the north. This was a situation
which had been envisaged under the Boutros-
Ghali 'confidence building measures', a series
of proposals by the then UN General Secretary
for cooperation in tourism and other economic
activities designed to encourage rapprochement
between the two sides in the mid-1990s (see
Chapter 16). At public meetings held in the north
to discuss the proposals at that time, much con-
cern was raised about who would accompany
and guide coach tours over the Green Line, and
the opportunities they offered for positive and
negative propaganda. The same concerns are
being raised again in the context of an arrange-
ment that does not permit Turkish Cypriot guides
to lead the tours emanating from the south.
The current situation provides an illumina-
ting example of the merging of the political and
the instrumental in relation to particular issues.
As with the licensing of Turkish Cypriot buses
and drivers, the Cyprus Tourism Organisation
recognizes only CTO-registered tour guides,
whom tour operators working in the south are
contractually obliged to use. At one level this
concerns the quality and training of tour guides,
and the protection of local jobs. At the same
time, the history of ethno-national conflict in
Cyprus makes the interpretation of the heritage
and landscape, and who has the right to repre-
sent and 'perform' it for an external audience,
politically extremely sensitive (see, for example,
Bowman, 1992).
Responses to the situation pit diverse inter-
ests against each other in the north. The daily
tours from the south have injected new life into
the shops and restaurant businesses, and have
increased visitation, and consequently, income,
to the sites administered by the cash-starved
What Kind of Tourism, What Kind
of Cyprus?
The accommodations and compromises being
reached by individuals and groups within the
tourism industry, north and south, suggest par-
tial and halting progress towards treating the
island as a single destination within the limita-
tions of the current division, and at least one
German tour operator has started offering dual
destination holiday packages in both parts of
the island. At the government level, in contrast,
policy and planning remain strictly separate, and
there is no arena for collaborating on a tourism
strategy for the island as a whole. One outstand-
ing exception to this general rule is the Nicosia
Master Plan, which, under the auspices first of
the UNHCR, and subsequently the UNDP, has
for two decades provided an umbrella for coop-
eration on the strategic planning of the divided
city and for the regeneration of the historic
walled city in which culture-based tourism is
expected to play an increasingly significant role.
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