by Anni Lam in Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan

After visiting the Jiuzhaigou national park in Sichuan, Joao Manuel Costa Antunes, director of the Macau Government Office (MGTO) yesterday said that the Macau government would utilise the functions of their tourism liaison office overseas to promote Sichuan's tourism.
Mr Antunes continued that the Bureau would initially promote Sichuan tourism to Macau residents, adding that the promotional compaigns would then be launched overseas.
“We will strategically utilise our liaison offices overseas to promote Sichuan tourism to Asian countries such as Korea, Japan and Taiwan within the year, and South Asian countries' promotion will be launched next year,” he added.
Meanwhile he added that the government also hoped to have a co-ordinated promotional campaign, which could jointly boost the tourism industy in Sichuan as well as Macau.
Since Macau obtained flight services agreements with countries such as Taiwan, Japan and Korea, therefore Antunes said that the government would like to use Macau's aviation network to promote Sichuan to those countries as well.
Also he added that the Bureau would simultaneously implement three measures to promote Sichuan's tourism.
Firstly, the Bureau will invite the tourism representatives and members from the travel industry sectors overseas to promote Sichuan; secondly the Bureau is also intending to use other similar channels to pomote Sichuan tourism overseas and finally the Bureau will use the international exhibitions in Macau to promote Sichuan as well.
Meanwhile Antunes added that the government would see the result of today's conference between  the travel industry sectors in Sichuan and Macau to decide more concrete tourism-assisting measures to Sichuan.
On the other hand, accordng to Wang Qiang, director for the marketing department at Jiuzhaigou National Park adminstration, the number of tourists visiting the national park used to be approximately 10,000 per day but this had recently dwindled down seventy percent, to be around 2,000 to 3,000 per day.
He said that the Eastern and Western lanes of ZhaoWan Lane in Jiuzhaigou had yet to be resumed, therefore taking the flight to the national park would be recommended.
According to Mr Wang,  the number of tourists that visited the national park on May 12 were around 8,000 and even though no injuries had been recorded, the park adminstration had undertaken a safety inspection the day after the earthquake.
“The rejuvenation of the national park has commenced and the most important thing is to boost tourists' confidence in the park's safety,” Wang said, adding that they were now encouraging media and tourism bureaux in exposure to fulfil this task.
There were several delegations of media and tourism bureaux from Japan that have inspected the safety situation of the sites over the past two days, according to the director, saying that a travel industry delegation from Taiwan had also visited the park on Wednesday.
He continued that most of the visitors were either taking individual travel or a study delegation to Jiuzhaigou these days.
The promotional campaigning had also started on August 6 nationally and overseas as well, but the Olympics had drawn visitors' attention to Beijing and there had still not seen any significance in the number of tourists.
Asked what would the exact time the tourism businesses could be comprehensively rejuvenated, Mr Wang said that they might still have to wait at least until 2010 as most of the traffic infrastructures had been destroyed during the earthquake.
“The national government have set up measures to reconstruct traffic in Sichuan, and three more highways will then be reactivated with traffic in Jiuzhaigou,” he went on.
When asking whether the ticket price of the national park would be decreased, he said that visitor safety would be their first' consideration rather than price, so there have not had the need so far.