Splashy ideas that don’t hold water

THERE’S this strange place in India where thousands go every day – the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan. It’s a temple dedicated to, of all things, rats.

There are some 20,000 rats in the temple, and visitors and worshippers walk barefoot around them, gingerly stepping over the scurrying rodents and their droppings.

The temple was built to honour Karni Mata, said to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga. Legend has it that when Karni Mata’s stepson Laxman drowned, Karni Mata went to Yama, the god of death, to bring her stepson back to life.

When Yama refused, Karni Mata reincarnated Laxman and his 4,000 descendants as rats. These rats are believed to be the earthly manifestations of her family, and they are worshipped as such.

Strangely enough, the rats are healthy and there have been no reports of rat-borne infections among the temple’s visitors.

If that is weird, there is also the Bubblegum Alley in California. The attraction here? Chewed up sticks of bubble gum, thousands and thousands of them, stuck to the two walls by the side of the alley.

Yes, it is literally a place where people cough out the gum after they are done with it, and stick it to the wall. It has been called unsanitary and disgusting, and the authorities have moved to clean the 70ft long, 15ft high walls twice.

And after both clean-ups, people were back sticking used gum on the walls. The authorities gave up and made it a tourist attraction instead. The alley attracts tourists to downtown San Luis Obispo in such large numbers that there used to be a local radio station disc jockey who led people on tours of the alley.

What they see in spit-riddled, used – and useless – chewing gum stuck on walls is anybody’s guess. But there is really no accounting for taste, even if it is tasteless, used chewing gum.

You can’t fathom the thoughts of some of our politicians, either. One PAS politician thinks that there are people who would rush to visit flooded areas; it would literally be a wet dream for them. So, Datuk Kamarudin Md Nor from Kelantan suggested that the state’s annual floods be turned into a tourist attraction.

Kamarudin, who chairs the state tourism, culture, arts and heritage committee, even wants to introduce surfing on floodwaters. Who knows, he may even introduce kayaking and whitewater rafting when Sungai Kelantan starts to rage.

Of course, his suggestion ran into a storm of protest. Many saner heads poured cold water on it.

We want tourists to visit safely, enjoy the sights, the people and the food – and go home. We don’t want to be sending home bodies of drowning victims.

And let’s not forget the problems that the floods bring. Unlike the rats in the Karni Mata temple, the floods do bring diseases.

In just about a week since the rains started, more than 10,000 people fell ill in six states. It was everything from conjunctivitis to chicken pox and E. coli poisoning to hand, foot and mouth disease.

Imagine if tourists started wading into the floods and joining the list of patients in our already-stretched hospitals. Our politicians would then be calling it “medical tourism” while insurance companies would probably have a field day raising their premiums even further.

Sometimes, the people cannot be faulted for thinking our politicians are all suffering from “foot-in-mouth” disease. Kamaruddin, after all, was not the first to fish in such troubled waters.

Umno’s Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz said pretty much the same thing two years ago.

Nazri, who is now Malaysia’s ambassador to the United States, said the country should seek opportunities by promoting “voluntourism”, or volunteer tourism.

“Maybe we can have voluntary tourism where people come to the country to help us with the floods, and it is not about them coming here just to enjoy but for them to also learn,” he reportedly said.

Learn? About what? How not to handle the rainy season?

The former tourism, arts and culture minister said the country could also handle economic challenges by attracting tourists to join volunteer programmes during natural disasters.

“The flood is like a festival. Every monsoon, we have a flood festival, and people will come.

“The Singaporeans will come because they spend only one-third of their salary. To them, our five or six-star hotels are just so cheap.”

For one thing, five-star hotels are not usually found in flood-prone areas. He was right about things being cheap for Singaporeans, but I don’t think they would want to come to wallow in our floods.

They have their own. The prestigious Orchard Road has been flooded at times and even the MRT has seen its share of watery rides.

They may not mind a Bubblegum Alley here, though, since chewing gum is a no-no in the republic. We have lots of alleys that could be turned into such attractions. At least, it would keep the drug addicts, gum-sniffers and snatch thieves, who now frequent these alleys, away.

One wonders whether our politicians even think before opening their mouths.

To be fair, both Kamarudin and Nazri, who want to turn the floods into a public spectacle, do have one point – there ARE people who think floods are something to visit and gawk at.

In Perak, for instance, there were people entering a flooded area merely to take photographs.

“The roads are muddy and can be slippery, posing a danger to them,” said Perak Crisis Relief Squad of MCA (CRSM) operations chief Ricky Soong.

Like I said, you can never tell what turns people on.

Malaysia has so many wonders, from the natural flora and fauna and mountains to the many different kinds of food and the various cultures and religions.

Tourists will come for all these. We do not need artificial islands, high-rise buildings or tragedies to woo them. When Visit Malaysia Year begins in 2026, I hope floods will not be on the tourism itinerary.