My daughter watched a plane fly into a twin tower on 9/11 from her apartment roof in New York. I heard the bombing of the Kenyan embassy and ten minutes later from the garden of my nearby hotel pieces of eyeglasses, jangling key chains and fabric fell out of the sky at my feet. Both of us later saw horrible pain and destruction.
“August seventh” was as big to Kenya as nine-eleven was to America. The relative number of people killed and maimed, the heroism of rescuers, the damage to politics, economy and society – it was all comparable. Even the perpetrators’ beliefs, religion and motivations for suicide were the same. What was different?
Read more
Real surprise, yesterday. Here’s what happened.
According to Kenya’s
The first week of August is the most important week in my business. I’m usually home from safari, I settle down in front of tons of reports, access to my meticulous notes of more than twenty years, screens of internet and I survey the African political landscape.
For my African friends. Well… all my friends, and especially for those who live near Galena, Illinois.
An entire industry has now arisen to recover funds for travelers who have lost deposits because of the pandemic. Like timeshares, ambulance chasers, J.G. Wentworth and scores of others, the more well-off who are pissed as hell that some of their vacation money might be forfeited, are now themselves preyed on by dubious advocates.
It will probably be three to four years before the effects of the virus stop impacting travelers to distant lands. Efficacy of the vaccines, mayhem in airline schedules, widely differing and radical airport rules for transfers and most importantly, the hugely damaged vendor communities are all just now being recognized as the travelers’ principle hurdles.
At the halfway mark we can predict better what it’s all going to look like when we’re vaccinated at the beginning of next year. I do this specially wondering what my own industry, distant travel, will look like. Frankly it shouldn’t be much different for anyone in any endeavor.
Could a virus like Covid-19 be killing Botswana’s elephants?
Is your cable bill paid up? Are you ready to confront 
Americans need to take off the blinders that they will get the vaccine, first. This notion is dangerous and woven inextricably into the November election. “It’s risky [to Americans]… and not ethically right,” WHO’s chief