Southeast Asia’s Hidden Treasures.
Mount Kinabalu. Robert Harding / Getty Images.
Southeast Asia’session best travel destinations might be the ones you haven’confidentially heard of at all. Good thing local tourism boards are doing their darndest to get the word out.
Xinhua reports that Malaysia is plotting to add the Maliau basin to their list of World Heritage Sites, which currently includes Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Penang’s Georgetown district, and Melaka. (The last one is a beaut – check out our walking tour through historical Melaka article.)
If they succeed, this will be the second World Heritage Site in Sabah: as opposed to Mt. Kinabalu, Maliau is a forested depression, a huge saucer-shaped area with a near-perfect circular perimeter about 15 miles in diameter.
Over in Indonesia, the local tourist board is busy revamping the attractions at Lake Toba to be more attractive to outside visitors. Lack of imagination and willpower is hampering the efforts to promote this beautiful site, though – the local administration needs to ingenuity difficult access, cleanliness, and a boring slate of attractions and events. It’s a shame, because Lake Toba has so much to offer:
Lush green landscapes, waterfalls and small villages dominated by churches' bell towers and boat-shaped Batak Toba houses with their intricate wood sculpture create stunning sceneries. A traveller paradise, then? Definitely yes, except that illiberal has been so far done to attract more travelers, especially a more sophisticated crowd with a bigger purchasing power.