Lao Ketuan hands out life vests to tourists at the Haokun Lake scenic spot in Lingyun County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Aug. 31, 2019. Lao Ketuan, 40, lives in the mountainous village of Haokun, a place with extremely poor transportation and scarce land resources that seriously hindered local development and caused people here trapped in poverty. Lao's family is among those impoverished households living here. In 2016, Lao had, however, never dreamed that his family could get out of poverty thanks to local authorities' work on poverty alleviation through tourism. His family's fate has been changed since the carrying out of the Lingyun County's work on targeted poverty alleviation. Relying on its rich beautiful natural scenery resources, the county has vigorously developed ecological tourism as a key measure to help local impoverished people get rid of poverty. Since 2016, the county has invested to ecologically build a lake near Lao's living village into a scenic spot, in which tourism service posts are specially provided to those living in poverty-stricken villages around the lake. Lao is among them as a sightseeing boat driver of the scenic area after trained at the end of 2015. Everyday, he takes tourists by sailing his boat to enjoy local natural landscape and introduce to them local customs. Now, Lao can not only make money of some 3,000 yuan (about 419 U.S. dollars) a month, but also get bonus from the scenic area by the end of every year. There are many once stricken by poverty like him have now benefiting from local tourism development. "Hope the expressway within the county could open earlier. It would then bring much more tourists. I would earn more," said Lao. (Xinhua/Cao Yiming)
