Identification of Popular Areas for Hiking Tourism in Northwest Yunnan and Their Opportunities for Villagers to Increase Their Income

Promoting sustainable livelihoods for villagers is an essential strategy for rural revitalization in areas enriched with heritage sites. Northwest Yunnan, despite being one of China's poorest regions, is globally renowned for the Three Parallel Rivers and its premier hiking destinations, so exploring sustainable income-increasing opportunities for its villagers is important for its rural revitalization. By using density analysis, logical matrix construction and cluster analysis with GPS data, this study explored the spatial distribution characteristics of hiking tourism in Northwest Yunnan and identified the hiking popular areas. A revenue generation framework, informed by Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA) and customized to the unique hiking characteristics of such popular areas, was constructed to analyze income opportunities for villagers in these areas, so as to offer theoretical support for the hiking tourism development and rural revitalization in this region. The results showed that: (1) The distribution of hiking points of interest (POIs) in Northwest Yunnan was relatively centralized with three agglomeration areas from north to south, namely, the Deqin Agglomeration Area, the Lijiang-Shangri-La Agglomeration Area, and the Dali-Yangbi Agglomeration Area. (2) Northwest Yunnan mainly had three popular hiking areas and eight hiking sub-areas correspondingly. (3) The income-generating opportunities for villagers mainly included unique accommodation and food service, guide and gear transportation services, equipment supply, tourism product sales, and logistics support for hiking races. It indicated that due to the differing temporal-spatial characteristics, and themes of activities in each hiking sub-area, the approaches to revenue generation are uniquely distinctive for each sub-area. The diverse tourism-related livelihoods of villagers enrich tourists' experiences while the nature of tourist activities guides the villagers' livelihood choices. Hiking tourism serves as a vital avenue for economic growth in areas like Northwestern Yunnan, where villagers can significantly boost their income by offering a variety of tourism services.