On February 7, 2007, 24 Chinese tourists will start their 21 day South Pole journey from Guangzhou. Each of them has to spend more than 80 thousand yuan (US$10 thousand) as their traveling expense, the highest of all kinds of journeys launched by local tourism agencies.

 

Among these 24 tourists, there will be two millionaires from Shunde, and a real estate manager from Guiyang, Guizhou Province, and the rest from a Guangzhou private club.

 

According to their traveling schedule, they will travel around the Southern Hemisphere. They will take an icebreaker in Ushuaia, the world's most southern city in Argentina, crossing Drake Passage and South Shetland Islands.

 

They will enjoy fantastic landscape there, and have a close look at penguins, seals, whales, seabirds and rare plants. They will finally land the Antarctic Continent on February 18 and celebrate the Spring Festival (the first day of the first month in Chinese lunar calendar) there. Later they will also visit Argentine and Brazilian cities, to experience exotic Latin-American lifestyles.

 

These 24 tourists have prepared for nearly two years for the journey. Moreover, the icebreaker should be booked 8 months earlier, which will make these tourists to stay on the boat for eleven days. The organizers will invite a learned South Pole expert from Hong Kong as their traveling team leader lest accidents happen. Each tourist will have to buy insurances from renowned AIU Insurance Company, with a possible compensation of 2 million yuan.

 

(chinanews.cn October 28, 2006)