Conclusions and challenges

The fact that rivers are among the most significant outdoor assets for tourism and recreation, coupled with their ubiquity, made it difficult to choose between them in presenting the material in this book. Nevertheless, certain rivers pick themselves: the Nile, Amazon, Rhine, Volga, Danube, Colorado, Mississippi, Ganges, Yangzi and Mekong had to be covered; and certain types of tourism associated with them are equally as obvious. Like many other water bodies, these rivers have become important locations for travel, cultural tourism, sports tourism and other water-related activities that many people travel long distances to experience, but they are particularly iconic for the reasons outlined in the chapters devoted to them. In addition, the tourism based on the rivers chosen for this book provides a descriptive concept map (Moscardo et aI., 2006) of the main elements of river tourism that can be applied to most if not all rivers