Tourism

World Travel Watch is a monthly report designed to help you make informed judgments about travel throughout the world. Because conditions can change overnight, always make your own inquiries before you leave home. In the United States contact the nearest passport agency office; abroad, check in with the nearest American embassy . Asia --Bhutan: Either through an accident of history, geography or simply good planning, Bhutan has preserved its rich Buddhist culture and peaceful, agrarian way of life.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who often speaks of his love for California, has promoted the state with his wife Maria Shriver in television commercials over the last five years. And as they invited viewers to visit, California's first couple got paid. Schwarzenegger and Shriver have received more than $235,000 since 2005 for appearing in commercials for the California Travel and Tourism Commission. The governor's aides said Schwarzenegger and his wife did not know about the income until The Times inquired about it this week, and they mailed the tourism commission a check to repay it on Thursday.

Gov. Linda Lingle called for the state's top tourism executive to resign after it was revealed that he had sent racist and sexist material from his government computer. Hawaii Tourism Authority Chief Executive Rex Johnson forwarded jokes about Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton to friends, as well as pornographic e-mails whose existence had been disclosed earlier.

From the outside, they looked like other recently built San Gabriel townhouses ? two stories, Spanish style, with roofs of red tile. Inside they were maternity centers for Chinese women willing to pay handsomely to travel here to give birth to American citizens. Southern California has become a hub of so-called birthing tourism. Operators of such centers tend to try to blend in, attracting as little attention as possible. But on quiet, residential Palm Avenue, neighbors had noticed an unusual number of pregnant women going in and out, and some complained about noise.

Five million people will lose their jobs this year in the worldwide tourism industry because of the SARS epidemic and the economic slump, with Asia by far the hardest hit region, the United Nations said in a report. The industry, which employs about 80 million people, has lost 11.5 million jobs since late 2001, according to the UN.

Only weeks ago, Leila Voight was trying to persuade hesitant tourists to visit her secluded cabanas south of Cancun. Now, they are begging her for rooms. Her e-mail is clogged with as many as 30 messages a day from New Yorkers who live near ground zero and others who want to trade nightly news reports on war and terrorism for pina coladas and strolls on the beach. Hotel owners and government officials across Mexico say tourism has largely returned to normal after dropping 12% after the Sept.

Tourism to Cuba increased 8% this year compared with 2003, despite new U.S. restrictions on visits by Americans, state media reported. More than 2 million tourists visited the Caribbean island nation this year, the largest number ever, Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero said. Last year about 1.9 million foreigners visited Cuba. Canadians top the list of tourists, followed by Europeans, primarily from Italy, France, Germany and Spain.

Thailand officials are hoping that a clutch of Hollywood movies and TV documentaries on the Asian tsunami that are scheduled to be shot in the country might actually help bring back tourists to its devastated beaches. CBS is eyeing locations on the tourist island of Phuket, one of six Thai provinces hit by the giant waves last year, for a four-part series on the tsunami, they said. And Warner Bros.

It is indeed appalling that in this day and age the Los Angeles Times would stoop to cheap sensational news items which function to promote American tourism in the land of the racist South African apartheid regime. It is indeed also appalling that The Times even prints any articles coming from South Africa since the South African apartheid regime has booted our much cherished "freedom of the press" into the mud. We at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., have taken note of the space The Times devoted to promoting tourism in South Africa and the name of your staff writer who wrote the story at a time when the South African regime is responsible not only for the horrors of apartheid within its own borders, but for the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of apartheid and its repercussions in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zambia.

A company that has sent paying tourists to the international space station said Tuesday it was scouting locations for a spaceport to send travelers on suborbital flights. Sites in Australia, the Bahamas, Florida, Japan, Malaysia, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Singapore and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates are under consideration, the Arlington, Va.-based firm Space Adventures said in a statement.