Google has taken its Street View cars to Bhutan

Oct 23, 2014 15:01 GMT  ·  By

Google has unveiled a new location on its ever-growing Street View map – Bhutan, the remote Himalayan kingdom. As you can expect, there are plenty of extraordinary images, including monasteries, mountains and a lot of greenery.

Bhutan is known as one of the most isolated countries on Earth, but the authorities don’t necessarily want to change this. While foreign tourists must continue to pay big money for spending a day in the country, the ultimate goal behind allowing Google to drive through the country wasn’t to turn it into a tourist attraction, but rather to preserve it all.

“Most government love Street View because it promotes tourism – they are drawn to its commercial benefits. In Bhutan, the conversation was very different – essentially along the lines of ‘how can we bring Bhutan to the world without having floods of tourists turn up and erode our culture?’,” said Google’s Divon Lan, one of the Street View managers.

The project of mapping Bhutan and recording its wonderful scenery kicked off back in March 2013. A Street View car travelled across the country’s road network. Google’s Lan added that the strange car, which sports a tall device full of cameras that record more than a million photos, attracted quite a bit of audience as it moved through villages.

People would ask the driver about it and when he told them it was taking photos, they’d get excited and try to peek inside.

The secrets of Bhutan

What Google has accomplished is give people yet another glimpse of areas that they’re likely to never visit. Bhutan in particular has been a country that has decided to keep away from the fast-paced world that the rest of us live in. Its first tourists were welcomed about 40 years ago, while television was banned until 1999.

Even now, visitors are welcome, but the country doesn’t want to become just another travelers’ destination, as expressed by Damcho Rinzin, spokesperson for the national Tourism Council of Bhutan.

“Google Street View is a way of preserving our culture at a time of great change. It reminds us of what we have in Bhutan,” Rinzin said.

Just yesterday, Google shared with the world yet another amazing location via Street View, namely Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, the very same place where well-known anthropologist Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees in the ‘60s.

The company has also taken viewers to the famous Egyptian Pyramids, the Liwa desert, atop a camel, to Laos, the Galapagos and the Bermuda, to name just a few.