Month: February 2010

World Tourism & World Cup

World Tourism & World Cup

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

[email protected] asks:

Q. Are toursits coming from USA to TZ increasing after world economy crisis? Is world cup is going to affect tourism in East Africa?
Thanks.

A. The only numbers we have of Americans traveling to Tanzania is provided by the TTB (Tanzania Tourist Board), and we’ve always been skeptical about them; they come out so long after the fact. So the question whether tourism is increasing is a very hard statistical question… My gut feeling is that yes, it is increasing, but very, very slowly.

Unlike the TTB, the South African Tourism board reports numbers accurately and often, and they are quite discouraged by the lack of interest from the United States for the World Cup. The numbers they expected from Europe are proving true, and June and July should be boon years for South African tourism as a result, but ironically, it seems that some Americans who would have been traveling in South Africa are avoiding it because they suspect crowds and other logjams. “Soccer” as we call it at home, just isn’t a big sport, here. So if anything, there could be a boost to East African tourism as a result of Americans diverting from South Africa.

How dirty is Dar?

How dirty is Dar?

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Uncollected garbage outside a "fashion center" in downtown Dar.
Uncollected garbage outside a fashion center in downtown Dar.
Photo by Tanzania's ThisDay.
Africa was agog today with reports that Dar-es-Salaam was the 8th dirtiest city in the world. But are these reports accurate?

No! No! Let me come to the needed rescue of Dar: It is NOT the world’s 8th dirtiest city; it is, in fact, the world’s 12th dirtiest city!

Mercer Health & Sanitation’s Index rated Dar at 40.4. Only three other cities in Africa were rated worse than Dar: Ndjemna (Chad) at #11, Brazzaville (Congo) at #10, and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) at #6.

No other East African cities came in the top 25, although Nairobi fell into the top 35.

(Multiple African news reports cited a “NYC Consulting Firm” rating of #8 for Dar, but there doesn’t seem to exist an “NYC Consulting Firm.” That list of the world’s dirtiest cities is close to the real Mercer ratings, but not exact.)

Dar is not denying the criticism.

“It is true and I accept that the city of Dar es Salaam is dirty,” Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner William Lukuvi told This Day an on-line Tanzanian news source. And that’s good, of course.

Dar is the fastest growing city in East Africa. No one is sure about its size, and it’s probably not as big as Nairobi, but closing the gap quickly. It also lacks Nairobi’s sprawling slums, which in an unusual way contributes to the lower Mercer rating.

Nairobi slums have been around for a long time and many NGOs have worked at them, as has the central government. Sewage, bad water, and the diseases that spread as a result, are the main reasons for Mercer’s list of the worst cities. And ironically, the decade and longer attention to the Nairobi slums has actually mitigated what would otherwise be an uncontrollable catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong. The Nairobi slums are terrible, but the makeshift gullies cut by NGOs and the government does drain human sewage, the main cause of cholera. Last year there was more cholera in Dar than Nairobi.

Dar’s problem is that it is far behind Nairobi in sewage treatment and waste disposal. This is probably because Dar is on the ocean, and it has been common practice to just dump waste into the sea. The practice is now haunting the city, because unlike Nairobi, it has no well-organized sewage disposal.

Dar’s other problem is corruption. Dar’s three municipalities each contract private companies for garbage disposal, but don’t pay them. Instead, they allow the private companies to collect levies however they wish, a completely haphazard and terribly corrupt system.

To his credit, Lukuvi knows this.

“The present system is messed up. You can’t have a contracted company collect garbage and levies at the same time. The municipalities will henceforth be responsible for collecting the levies and paying the companies that are contracted to collect the garbage,” Lukuvi told This Day.

The annual Mercer ratings are important. They corroborate the United Nation’s warning that the greatest threat to the developed world is the lack of clean water.

Of Mercer’s 25 worst cities, 20 are because of a lack of clean water. Only 5 are because of air pollution.

Is Kenya Safe?

Is Kenya Safe?

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Safer to be in than Tanzania or Uganda, according to the UN.

The U.N.’s announcement this week that Kenya is now safer for its employees than Tanzania or Uganda sheds new light on how travelers should view government travel warnings.

Not much has changed in the last year in world governments’ advice to their citizens heading on safari. The U.S. and Britain retain a travel warning against Kenya, Canada doesn’t, and Canada and Britain retain a travel warning on Uganda, and the U.S. does not.

The U.S.’ lack of warning on Uganda is political. Ever since Bill Clinton invested so much time and money in Uganda, and more recently when so many U.S. politicians got mired in Uganda’s sticky politics, the U.S. has misrepresented that country’s safety for travelers.

I think Uganda is safe to visit, if you know what you’re doing. As I do for Kenya and Tanzania. But traveling to East Africa for a safari is not as safe as traveling to Branson, Missouri, for a music festival, or to the Loire Valley for wine tasting, and it’s perfectly right of governments to try to explain these distinctions.

After years of trying to figure out these admonitions from a variety of western governments, after years of parsing which are political and which are truly advisory, I think at last there may be a better guide for potential travelers than any government’s specific recommendations.

The United Nations has tens of thousands of employees stationed all over the world. The level of pay – like our own military and foreign service – is determined to a certain extent by how dangerous the UN believes these postings are.

But the UN goes beyond analyzing simple threats to personal safety. It analyzes how easy communication is, what diseases are locally threatening, how likely power interruptions occur, how smoothly complaints and infractions of local law are handled by local authorities, how complete public services are… it even analyzes how enjoyable are local cinemas and theaters, how well stocked is the local grocery store, and how the climate might effect foreigners not used to it. And much more.

It goes on and on, because what the UN realizes is that the “safety” of a foreigner in a foreign place is a “well-being” issue that extends far beyond whether or not al-Qaeda is trying to get you.

And so the UN puts all the countries in the world into 5 categories: A, B, C, D or E.

Get a posting to a country with an “E” rating and you’re going to be paid a lot to maybe get killed. Get a posting to a country with an “A” rating and you’re going to be paid a lot less but will live to spend it all.

Better yet, the UN may divide a country’s rating depending upon what city you’re visiting.

Last week the UN moved Nairobi and Mombasa (Kenya) up from C to B. It kept Arusha and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and Kampala (Uganda) at C.

That’s exactly how I feel.

C is OK, if you know what you’re doing and how to do it. B takes a little bit less care.

Of the 141 countries in the world that the UN has a permanent presence:
49 are A,
37 are B,
27 are C,
21 are D,
and 7 are E.

Of those 46 are in sub-Sahara Africa:
6 are A,
9 are B,
14 are C,
13 are D,
and 4 are E.

As I’ve said time and again, nobody going on vacation wants to research the safety of where they’re headed. But also as I’ve repeatedly explained, a safari isn’t a “vacation.”

There’s little R&R on safari. A safari traveler is a student, and that’s a wonderful thing. She’s an explorer, lusting for the new and unknown. He doesn’t want a quiet beach in the Carolinas.

So there’s a risk in this, however slight. It takes some guts to want to become smarter, to educate yourself about parts of the world that are foreign to you.

But that doesn’t mean you put yourself in danger. So how best to determine this threshold?

Go first to the UN list. Don’t go if it’s a D or E. If it’s C, then read the detailed travel advisories from your country and others to help you determine if you consider it safe. If Britain, Canada and the U.S. all agree, I think you can take that as a pretty unbiased analysis.

But if they don’t agree, as they don’t in East Africa, it gets a bit tougher. You have to figure out why they don’t agree, and decide who is better to trust.

(Important qualifier: my simple list above is for only the capitals of those countries. Kenya, for instance, gets an “E” for the town of Garissa, which is near the Somali border. So you also need to research your travel by city, beyond the simple capital references given above.)

And finally, I’ll leave you with this travel admonition recently given to travelers from abroad who are considering visiting the United States:

“There is a general threat from terrorism in the United States. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travelers. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has designated the terror alert status of “orange”, or high, for all international and domestic flights in the USA.”

The above admonition comes from Her Majesty’s government of Great Britain.

Giant Pouched Rat Day

Giant Pouched Rat Day

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

The African Giant Pouched Rat<br>has no shadow to see.
The African Giant Pouched Rat
has no shadow to see.
The closest African relative to the groundhog never appears.

Well, fact-check first. The truly closest relative to the groundhog is the giant forest squirrel (Protoxerus stangeri mayensis) but it may be extinct. I’ve never seen it, no one seems to care very much about it, and the only picture I could find was of a specimen collected in 1842 that is in a drawer of the Field Museum in Chicago.

But the giant pouched rat (Cricetomys gambianus Waterhouse) definitely exists, because I’ve eaten it.

I didn’t roast it, but our guide roasted it on a skewer to attract the pygmies along the Lobe River in the Cameroun that would then trade the skewered roasted giant pouched rat, to guide us to see lowland gorillas. But we, too, needed dinner.

It tasted just as good as the Guinea Pig I ate in Cuzco.

The main difference between an African groundhog-like animal (the Giant Pouched Rat) and an American groundhog-like animal (the Groundhog) is that the African groundhog-like animal does not appear on Oprah.

Nor does the African variety pretend to forecast weather. There is no movie named “Giant Pouched Rat Day” and in fact no movie made by Africans that is that incessantly trivial. African Giant Pouched Rats do not appear on 7 o’clock local television shows during the weatherman section and they do not appear to have a single day of being loved with 364 days trying to escape the landscape exterminator.

The Groundhog’s better common name is Woodchuck. The African Giant Pouched Rat’s better common name is Big Rat.

However, only the Groundhog is capable of reflecting the stir crazy mentality of someone living in the depths of an endless winter.

Bonobos as Peace Makers

Bonobos as Peace Makers

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Can this creature bring peace to Africa?
Can this creature bring peace to Africa?
In this so troubled time for East Africa there are some exciting glimmers of hope for societies and conservation.

Stand on any of East Africa’s high mountains and look east to some terrifying developments. Al-Qaeda militia are gathering on Kenya’s borders. The drought in Tsavo decimated the hippo population and spurned the bushmeat trade.

But look west and it’s a different universe. In the Congo, once one of the most turbulent spots on earth, there is a smell of peace, and long-time conservationists have smiles on their faces.

Recently an old friend, John Lukas, General Director of the White Oak Conservation Center, asked me if we might consider restarting tourism to the Congo.

John has maintained an oasis of conservation in that troubled region for nearly 30 years, the Epulu Research Station. His first interest was the rare okapi, found only in the Ituri, but since then his center has expanded and supported a wide array of other research.

Terese and John Hart, probably Africa’s most professional, dedicated long-term field scientists, worked even further away from Epulu’s oasis, among the Congolese pygmies and besieged communities decimated by decades of war.

The Harts raised a family while they researched in the “Heart of Darkness”. They were sometimes out of touch for weeks. In the worst of times, sane conservationists wondered what the hell they thought they could do in a part of Africa that Joseph Conrad had clearly labeled “out of reach”.

Well, they unearthed remarkable science about bonobos and newly discovered primates, and conducted the only good social science of the pygmies bushmeat trade, among so much more. And now, Terese has established promising beginnings to creating what would be Africa’s largest single conservation area, named for the time being as “TL2″.

This oblique, geographical reference to one of the most wondrous, colorful if not magical places on earth is typical of the Hart’s low-key but ever-steady science.

In an email to me over the weekend Terese remarked, “I believe that the situation has been improving for the last several years and with the right engagement tourism is definitely possible.”

Incredible. The last time I took tourists into the Congo was in 1979.

The southern Sudan, where impressed child soldiers created what was called with primitive burlesque, the Lords Resistance Army, there really now is peace after a generation, and a new and massive national park has been created.

I hope to write much more in the coming days about the Sudan’s Boma National Park, and about “TL2″. These incredible areas hold promise not just for the conservation of bongo and bonobo, as well as other extraordinarily rare animals and plants, but the promise of peace to their society.

Rwanda’s gorilla project has proved that the revenue tourists provide can exceed almost any other exploitation of natural wilderness, and if managed properly can lead to increased social development.

It’s not a stand-alone model, but it is remarkable that through the many troubles Rwanda suffered after the gorilla project was started, the health of Parcs de volcans continued to improve, including the size of the mountain gorilla population. Without tourism, this wouldn’t have been possible.

And the health of that single albeit most important conservation project in Rwanda is arguably one of the reasons Rwanda is now stable and prosperous.

Keep your fingers crossed! I’ll be writing more about these exciting areas in the weeks to come.