As Record Heat Hits NE, Disgruntled Indian Travelers DumpTraditional Hill Town Resort Of Shillong

[hatrack]

SHILLONG, India (AlertNet) - This northeast Indian highland city, known as the Scotland of the East, has long been a pleasantly cool summer holiday destination for travelers fleeing Indian's boiling plains. But Shillong now finds its fortunes fading as record heat creeps into India's northeast highlands.

Disappointed tourists, stunned by the unexpectedly sweltering conditions, are canceling holidays. And hotel owners are rushing to install air conditioning, fans and refrigerators in an attempt to placate the few disgruntled visitors that remain. "Most of the tourists who came this year from the warmer areas in India have complained and have also said they will never come to Shillong as tourists again," lamented Abhijit Dutta, 32, who runs Travel Station, a local touring company.

Climate change is affecting a variety of livelihoods across India, from rice farmers forced to switch to new flood-tolerant crop varieties to water delivery services that find their trucks in ever-greater demand. Tourism operators, it turns out, are affected as well.

In July, Pankaj Gogoi, a 29-year-old businessman from the northeast Indian plains city of Guwahati, turned around and went home after arriving for a two-day business meeting in sweltering Shillong, where temperatures this summer for the first time passed 30 degrees Celsius. "The meeting was scheduled to start from July 24, but when I reached Shillong on July 23, I found the weather extremely hot. I started looking for an air conditioned room but all the air conditioned rooms in Shilong were occupied. So I came back on July 29 morning without attending the meeting," Gogoi said.

EDIT

http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/60167/2010/08/27-143650-1.htm

[aquart]

1. Yep. 113 in downtown San Diego yesterday.