Abstract

Seeing big game in southern and east Africa, gorillas in central Africa, whale watching in the Pacific and Atlantic and tiger tracking in India are well-recognised examples of wildlife tourism focused around ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ (Newsome et al. 2005). Tourism focused around birds is also a well-recognised specialised type of wildlife and nature-based tourism, with twitching a popular activity (Connell 2009; Newsome et al. 2005). There is less recognition that charismatic plants, such as orchids, can be such a focus of tourism (Kirby 2003). We illustrate how the desire to see wild and cultivated orchids has resulted in a diversity of types of tourism products ranging from mass conference tourism through nature-based tourism to specialised volunteer tourism (Figure 18.1). This typology is similar to that developed by Fennell (2001) to describe soft- and hard-path dimensions of ecotourism with nature-based orchid tourism similar to soft-path ecotourism, whereas orchid ecotourism and specialised volunteer tourism to conserve orchids would be examples of hard-path ecotourism in Fennell’s typology (Fennell 2002).