SHANGHAI - Bernard Weber, president and founder of New7Wonders, visited the national pavilions of Bangladesh and Palestine on Monday as part of his project to promote a global campaign to name the world's seven greatest natural treasures.
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The official results will be revealed on Nov 11, 2011.
Palestine is nominating the Dead Sea, to which it lays partial claim along with Israel and Jordan.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, is home to the Sundarbans, which is the world's single largest mangrove forest, and also a UNESCO world heritage site. Some 40 percent of this forest lies within India's borders in West Bengal, where UNESCO classifies it separately as a national park.
"We sincerely believe this treasure of nature belongs to the whole world and should not be limited by geographical barriers," Golam Sundani, director of the Bangladesh section of the Asia Joint Pavilion, told China Daily. "It's our sacred duty to let people all over the world know about this wonderful creation of nature."
Weber, who is on an eight-day visit to Shanghai, began his journey around the Expo on Friday by visiting the pavilions of Israel and the Maldives, which boasts one of the world's undisturbed archipelagoes, despite the onset there of luxury tourism.
Saturday saw Weber at the Canadian and Polish pavilions. Canada is plugging its Bay of Fundy, which lays a contested claim to the world's highest tides. Poland, on the other hand, hopes to see its Masurian Lake District, a network of over 2,000 lakes, on the winner's list.
Among the other 28 finalists are Taiwan's Yushan mountain range; Vietnam's Halong Bay; the Amazon rainforest of Brazil; Mount Kilimanjaro in northeastern Tanzania; the Galapagos Islands west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean and Azerbaijan's Mud Volcanoes.
According to the campaign's official website, support for the Indonesian National Park of Komodo has grown by the highest percentage over the last four weeks, followed by new votes for the Dead Sea and the Amazon.
Komodo was established in 1980 to protect the Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard. Its assortment of 29 islands are also fringed by coral reefs which are home to the elusive whale shark.
South Korea's subtropical Jeju Island is another of the finalists. Korean-American Super Bowl star Hines Ward and popular Korean actress Park Eun-Hye were recently christened as ambassadors for the island, which serves as a magnet for Korean honeymooners and Japanese tourists alike. Among its myriad charms is a road where objects appear to defy gravity by rolling uphill due to a natural optical illusion.
The list now being compiled is one of many that have sprung up over the years cataloging the achievements of man and Mother Nature over the course of history.
Others include the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, penned by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus who recommended the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
Competing versions of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World typically include two of China's national treasures, the Great Wall and the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, as well as England's Stonehenge and Egypt's Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa.
The New 7 Wonders of Nature is aimed at ending years of speculation surrounding what mankind now considers the pick of its world's natural heritage sites.
Democratic exercise
It is also, according to Weber, a former filmmaker who launched the project in 2007, "a global democratic exercise" made possible by the Internet.
He described the project as "excitingly different" from his first campaign to elect the new seven man-made wonders of the world.
"So many breathtakingly beautiful, natural places are still quite unknown to many," he wrote on his website, new7wonders.com.
"From waterfalls to fjords, rainforests to mountain peaks, freshwater lakes to volcanoes," he added, "we are discovering together the incredible beauty and diversity of our planet." The site includes a telephone number that voters can call to nominate their choices by punching in corresponding four-digit codes.
A previous poll by CNN came up with the following unofficial list: The Grand Canyon (US); the Great Barrier Reef (Australia); the Bay of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); Qomolangma (China/Nepal); the Aurora Borealis (also known as the Northern Lights, Canada); Paricutin volcano (Mexico) and Victoria Falls (between Livingstone, Zambia, and Zimbabwe).
Say it in Shanghai-Lesson Six
