Natural Tourism

"Nobody had heard about us and now all the world knows.
"We can earn some dividends on that. If there'll be a massive tourist inflow, we'll build more hotels."
Chelyabinsk Gov.Mikhail Yurevich

Well, why not? It was, after all, a genuine "once in a millennium" event, an event that rivetted the world's attention, however briefly on the Russian province on the Asian edge of the Ural Mountains. A city of a million people - who know? - suddenly, without any warning, the recipient of a gift from outer space.

A gift, mind, that most residents of the city of Chelyabinsk in the province of the same name, would far have preferred to be able to avoid. Particularly those 1,400 residents who happened to be innocent and injured bystanders to a rare natural event that, had it occurred in a less populated area would have been just as spectacular and far less injurious to human health and security.

And it will be a very costly business to re-install glass in those four thousand buildings that were impacted, let alone restore roofs and any other structural damage that was accrued in the split-second instance of nature's proclivity to visit her natural phenomena into the reality of peoples' mundane lives, changing forever the manner in which they will henceforth view her arbrupt potentials.

For the people of Chelyabinsk, however, the afterthought of the event is to plan a scenario that will not waste all those eggs that were scrambled when the world seemed to fall in on this city; officials there have held a meeting to propose taking advantage of all the breakage and the aftermath by making souffles or omelettes and serving them up to a foreign public, through tourism attractions.

This was some natural event, after all; a meteor about 17 metres across, weighing over 10,000 tonnes hitting Earth's atmosphere and exploding with the force of 33 Hiroshima A-bombs; the blast the most tremendous of its type in over a century. Leaving sought-after meteorite pieces to be discovered, much of them, the largest specimens in Lake Chebarkul.

RIA Novosti

The potential is there for alluring foreign tourists to this landmark site. And the most puzzling thing to surface is that one local travel agency has already launched several tours, of Japanese groups. Japan, lest we forget, had its own spectacular blast when an catastrophic earthquake spawned an equally dreadful tsunami, causing death and destruction and one of the world's worst nuclear disasters at Fukushima last year.

And here are Japanese tourists, among the first to want to explore yet another phenomenon of nature, and isn't that just typical of notoriously famed Japanese curiosity?  The question is - would they be game to get wet in the cause of exploration, adventure and gain? Chebarkul Mayor Andrei Orlov had a really uniquely winning brainstorm of an attraction.

He plans to build a diving centre at the lake when the ice finally melts. Tourists can avail themselves of the opportunity to search for meteorites in the three metres of mud that lie 11 metres below the surface. A uniquely clever idea to exploit the opportunity that nature has afforded.