Fading Attraction As The World Changes, So Will Tourists Sights…Some May Even Disappear

Been putting off that trip to British Hong Kong? You’d better hurry. It will become Chinese Hong Kong in a matter of months.

And it’s not the only sight whose time may be running out. Accelerating forces, including political shifts, environmental pressures, development, and disasters are changing the world rapidly, and destinations will not be immune.

So consider heading for these sights - they might not be around when you retire.

1. British Hong Kong

British order and Chinese entrepreneurial drive created this stunning city around a harbor in southern China. Now, after more than 150 years under the British flag, Hong Kong will return to Chinese control.

This will not be the catastrophe that it would have been 30 years ago, for China has moved rapidly toward the free market in the last two decades, and has pledged to leave Hong Kong’s economic and social system in place. The changes brought on by July 1, 1997 will probably be more subtle.

The British veneer will begin to fall away with the departure of the British community. Hong Kong’s vibrant diversity will suffer, as other non-Chinese groups leave. The colony’s distinct Cantonese culture may erode as it reintegrates with the mainland. English may be supplanted by Mandar in Chinese.

There are darker possibilities. Corruption and political interference could disrupt the economic life that makes Hong Kong a neon-lit shoppers’ paradise. Job-seeking migrants from the mainland could flood the city-state. Crime could spiral out of control. At worst, conflict in an unstable China could spill across into the territory.

Whatever Hong Kong’s future, the time to say good-bye to the Anglo-Cantonese city of legend is now.

2. Lenin’s Tomb

After seven decades on display in his mausoleum in Moscow, the founder of the Soviet state is in danger of being swept away by shifting ideological tides. With the Soviet Union already dead for half a decade, there is increasing talk of putting its father to rest, as well. If you wish to view a titan of 20th century history, you might want to get to Red Square soon, while Vladimir Ilyich remains under glass.

3. Prince Edward Island

No Atlantis-like cataclysm is going to sink this idyllic island off eastern Canada beneath the waves. But if you want to experience Prince Edward Island while it retains the special spirit of an island, you have until spring of 1997, when the new bridge from the mainland opens.

It will still be a scenic bit of rolling green farms and pretty villages off Nova Scotia, but it will be tethered to the continent. Even if its idyllic stillness survives, for island lovers something will be lost.

4. Mountain gorillas

Brought to the attention of the world by the movie “Gorillas in the Mist,” these apes have the misfortune to live in one of the most unstable and poverty-stricken corners of the planet.

Making their home in the mountains of East Africa, the gorillas have suffered from forest destruction and poaching. Their are now only about 600 left in Rwanda, their primary home, and fewer in Zaire and Uganda. None of these countries have the resources to protect them. Zaire is near anarchy, Rwanda may have only an interlude of peace before the Hutu-Tutsi conflict resumes, and Uganda’s stability is of uncertain duration.

If you want to see them in the wild, the opportunity may not persist much longer.

5. The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The famed leaning campanile of Pisa, Italy, is as precarious as it looks. The tower began to lean soon after construction began in 1174, and over the decades builders attempted to compensate by adjusting the higher floors, to no avail. The tilt continued to increase, until the tower’s top was 14 feet off vertical.

Beginning in 1990, growing alarm triggered plans to stabilize the tower. Over 750 tons of lead were placed along the base opposite the tilt, and its increasingly stressed pillars were reinforced with steel cables. In preparation for excavations, the surrounding ground was frozen with super cooled liquid. But all these measures are temporary, and experimenters are proceeding gingerly in a search for a lasting solution.

Visitors used to be able to climb the tower’s 294 steps, but this was forbidden in 1990 as too dangerous.

6. Macao

If you miss out on Hong Kong, there’s always Macao. A tiny Portuguese colony just west of Hong Kong, Macao will be the last European colony in Asia, until it too reverts to China on December 20, 1999.

Portuguese control began in 1557, so the territory includes colonial architecture of the 16th through 19th centuries, including beautiful baroque churches. They share the space with everything from ancient Chinese temples to luxury resorts and high-rises.

7. Hanoi

A mixture of ancient Vietnamese and French colonial architecture has made Hanoi one of the most beautiful cities of Southeast Asia. Both were preserved by the doldrums of communism, leaving the Vietnamese capital with tile-roofed traditional neighborhoods, crumbling temples and French villas.

Now Vietnam has joined the Southeast Asian dash toward development, and Hanoi and other Vietnamese cities are becoming vast construction sites.

8. Skipjacks

In the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, the days of sail are not quite over. Skipjacks, elegant sloop-rigged boats whose curving sails look almost Middle Eastern, still dredge for oysters along the Eastern Shore.

But their days may be numbered. There were 80 skipjacks in the 1950s; now there are 12. They have been hard-hit by the decline of Chesapeake Bay oysters.

9. The Three Gorges, China

The Yangtze River is as central to the soul of China as the Mississippi is to the United States. Its scenery has been celebrated by poets and painters for centuries: The misty, craggy landscapes of Chinese art are often based on the landscapes of the Yangtze.

Foremost among these landscapes are the Three Gorges, Qutang, Wu, and Xiling along the middle Yangtze in central China. The goddess Yao Ji, legend has it, carved these chasms herself, leaving narrow canyons though which the river cascades.

Soon, the Three Gorges will be changed beyond recognition. Construction has already begun on an immense power and flood control dam that will submerge the middle Yangtze under six hundred of feet of water.

Thousands of historical and archaeological sites will be inundated, along with 1,500 towns and villages. Already, hundreds of thousands of people are being removed from their homes to make room for the coming reservoir; the relocated will eventually number a million.

Animals endangered by the dam include freshwater finless dolphins, the Yangtze alligator, the Siberian white crane and the cloud leopard.

10. Coral reefs

Among the world’s richest and most beautiful ecosystems, coral reefs are threatened across the globe. A study found they were being destroyed or damaged in 93 of 109 significant locations. One expert estimates that 70 percent of reefs could be lost in the next 40 years, taking with them about 200,000 species.

Many will go more quickly. The appetite for live reef fish among Chinese and Taiwanese is driving rapid destruction of the reefs of the South China Sea and the Western Pacific.

Fishermen are using dynamite and cyanide to maximize their catch, clearing reefs of fish and destroying the coral. The Philippines’ reefs are being devastated and it is expected that Indonesia’s will soon follow.

11. Giant pandas

Though these charismatic white and black bears are universally adored, their habitat is under continuous pressure in the mountains of western China, and they are highly vulnerable to changes in the bamboo forests that nourish them. Only about 800 survive outside captivity and they continue to be hunted illegally.

12. African wildlife

Mountain gorillas are in particular danger, but all of sub-Saharan Africa’s wildlife could be headed toward peril. Poverty, weak government and ballooning populations are threatening ecosystems across the continent, from the rain forests to the savannahs.

The population problem is especially acute: the region’s population is expected to grow from about 597 million people now to more than 1.25 billion by 2025.

This will mean more hunting and poaching, and more loss of natural lands to agriculture and wood gathering. Already scarce governmental resources will be stretched further, impeding conservation and protection efforts.

Decline can be shockingly sudden. Kenya has lost 60 percent of its wildlife in the last 10 years. One antelope, the hirola, numbered 14,000 in 1976, but is now at the edge of extinction.

13. Mexico’s Popocatepetl Volcano region

Popocatepetl, the immense volcano that looms southeast of Mexico City, has been stirring in recent years and could erupt disastrously. Prehistoric eruptions from the volcano have shrouded wide areas in deep ash falls and it is conceivable that even Mexico City could be blanketed.

San Francisco Acatepec and Santa Maria Tonantzintla, both near Cholula, have unique, fantastically ornate colonial churches. Heavy ash fall could destroy them.

Cholula hosts the ruins of a vast Toltec and Aztec religious site centered around the Tepanapa Pyramid, one of the largest in the Americas.

14. Orangutans

Orangutans, the only great apes living outside of Africa, make their home in the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra, in Southeast Asia. The long-haired orange apes spend most of their time alone in the trees and are intelligent enough to understand symbols and use tools.

There are only perhaps 30,000 of them left, and researchers think they may be nearing a critical point at which they could begin the spiral down toward extinction.

Slow reproduction - they only give birth once every seven or eight years - makes them vulnerable.

15. Medieval Cairo

The minarets, domes, mosques and towers of the Medieval Quarter of Cairo make it the most important collection of Islamic architecture in the world. In streets unchanged for centuries, shopkeepers and artisans still practice trades of equal antiquity.

Though some of these buildings have survived nearly a millennium, they are now in peril. Egyptian poverty has ended virtually all upkeep of the fragile buildings, and neglect and corruption deprive the sites of governmental protection.

16. Madagascar

Southeast of Africa, Madagascar is a Texas-sized island full of extraordinary plants and animals that have been called “fascinatingly weird.”

Eighty percent of them are found nowhere else because Madagascar is probably the oldest island on the planet. It has been perhaps 100 million years since Africa and India separated from the red-soiled island, transforming it into a vast laboratory for evolution.

As a result, the island has 160,000 unique species, including half the island’s birds, 8,000 species of flowering plants, 800 kinds of butterflies, and all the island’s reptiles and mammals. Madagascar is the sole home of most of the world’s lemurs, a primitive suborder of primates, and of 60 percent of all chameleons, including Parson’s giant chameleon, which eats birds.

Humans only arrived on the island about 1,500 years ago, but they are now threatening to erase the work of millions of years of evolution. The population is exploding and destitution forces people to clear land for farming and cut down forests for firewood.

Ninety percent of the island’s rain forests are gone and erosion is so bad that astronauts can see the red plumes from Madagascar’s rivers staining the surrounding ocean.

This ecological devastation is imperiling Madagascar’s animals and plants. Among the thousands of endangered animals are half of the 32 species of lemur, including one of the largest, the dramatically maned diademed sifaka.

17. Coral islands

The highest point in the Maldives, an island nation southwest of India, is 10 feet. Though global warming may raise sea level only a few feet, many tropical island countries have very little room to spare. Every foot the oceans rise threatens them with more erosion and makes life on low islands more perilous.

Adding to the menace, global warming may also breed stronger hurricanes, while reef destruction will make islands more vulnerable.