If you’ve planned a trip the first half of next year, should you buy your airline tickets now?
The answer’s easy if you’re traveling economy class: buy now. It’s a more difficult decision if you’re traveling in upper class.
Read more
Just look at the ads. Do you have travel plans? Or a budget? It’s happened and it’s big news.
Travel is a leading indicator of the economy. Maybe the most predictive of any. And the data is in, folks. By the end of this year we will either be entering a deep recession or the Fed will have rescued the world for the first time in economic history. This data isn’t just the CPI, but specifically what I know best: my industry is imploding.
Read more
We weren’t going to tip over, at least I didn’t think so. But when our “guide” clonked out and bounced onto the rubber floor our raft of four plus him started twirling in the fizzy white water like an alka seltzer dissolving in a glass.
This was my first time on Nepal’s Rapti river and my rafting experience was very limited, although fortunately on a few rivers in Alaska that seemed as cold and wild as this one. But I was no paddle captain. Thank goodness that the other two rafts – both behind us – seemed OK. Until we saw in the distance what we had been looking for, but what was now suddenly a mortal threat:
Read more
Now few believe in the power of language that I do, and Manvar Singh’s excellent time line of the word “indigenous” developing from the 16th Century into various versions including Maasai anagrams is almost fascinating. But what does it really have to do with the Maasai being kicked out of Loliondo?
Singh’s New Yorker epistemology of “indigenous peoples” and the resulting evisceration of same peoples’ aspirations is terribly incomplete and as useless as he tries to portray those aspirations.
Read more
I’m currently in Nairobi where yesterday there was a major protest against the Chinese. It seems to have brought together almost all the bickering factions trying to assess blame for inflation.
Read more
Tired but infuriated I watched the House Havoc to its end. Then just as my brain sensed a wee bit of insight a client sent me the Times’ article castigating tourists who drive too close to cheetah.
Alas that sliver of insight from the Speaker’s brawl wasn’t, in fact, drown in the rage provoked with the Times’ story. Good insight like a piece of petrified wood gleams even brighter in the white water of rage:
Half-truths, cherry-picked truths, like the bits and pieces of glass on the kitchen floor can’t possibly tell you what’s just shattered or how it fell in the first place or what to do to prevent it happening, again. Rather, the shattered glass is a sensational, reportable event, just like too many cars lining up to watch too few cheetah.
But where did all those cars come from? Who’s in them? Who’s driving them, washing them, fixing them, financing them? The Times doesn’t care about that, but that’s the crux of the story.
Read more
I don’t like crowds… of people, that is. I take my rovers into tens of thousands of wildebeest, sometimes hundreds of thousands. My cars are often the only ones in view.
It’s selfish and egotistical, perhaps pridefully arrogant. We handful of guides with the skills and experience to find the calving fields represent an extremely small group of tourists. It’s hard to get there, not without risk since there’s no roads or tracks and sometimes, in fact, we don’t find them.
Rather, what the mass of tourists usually sees was truthfully documented in last night’s PBS premiere of this season’s ‘Nature,’ Running with the Beest.
Read more
Out there in the milky skies of a not-so-distant horizon I see the first sparkles of a mammoth explosion rising up from the yet slimy volcanoes just below ground: the travel bubble bursting.
Oh in this dismal world might also a Ukrainian nuclear plant or the world’s oldest democracies shatter like a CGI commercial for relieving your psoriasis, but truly you adventuresome soul, your airline ticket and safari price might soon be crumbling to pieces. Don’t blame me if I’m wrong. It’s happened before.
Read more
If you’re planning to take an airplane sometime in the next month or two… well, consider driving… or swimming … or just using your xBox. I didn’t mention trains, because in London anyway, they’re on strike.
I’m not talking about traveling to safaris, either – that’s another story. Safaris are not rebounding as expected. The turmoil in air travel is all in the U.S. and Europe.
Read more
I think the world’s economic and social systems are collapsing. That probably doesn’t surprise you as an off-the-cuff remark, sarcasm probably cast out not too seriously.
But two specific things happening in Africa make the casual seem apocalyptic.
Read more
Things aren’t going well for tourism. It’s best in America where local travel has doubled over last year and is only about 15-20% below pre-pandemic levels. Europe is a close second. It’s really bad in Africa and the Middle East where current tourism is still only a third pre-pandemic levels. And the worst of all, of course, is Asia where China is learning the hard way that you can’t wipe out the virus like the Uyghurs.
Soon I return to Africa with 9 travelers, and as disappointed as I felt with the less than full safari my guys on the ground are ecstatic. At least I’m coming! Tourism in Africa isn’t anywhere near the level that was predicted, and this is leading to some very interesting stuff.
Read more
It’s left me scratching my head. What distinguishes these two individuals from the hundreds of thousands pounding on our southern border with similar motivations and urgencies?
Read more
I was supposed to be in Paris with my wife celebrating our 50th anniversary. I’m in Dublin where I’ll be writing more about this interesting, unexpected journey due to Covid in later days. But today I just gotta write about Marriott!
Marriott is pleased as puddin pie that it’s opening a luxury camp in Kenya’s Mara. “The location and surrounding landscape will … create harmony with the natural world … drawing inspiration from the elements: earth, wind, fire and water.” Not sure about the fire.
Read more
Six dollar-a-gallon is less painful than radiation burns. Devil in the details, of course, so celebration of America’s “ban of Russian oil” should be suspended until all the details are known. But my African friends think my ardent support for this is hypocritical. One of my favorite commentators, Joy Reid of MSNBC, last night echoed that sentiment. They’re all wrong.
As this (hopefully last) phase of the pandemic ends the tourism that’s left standing in the fields of Africa is fit for a king. In fact only kings. A safari post-pandemic will cost you twice what it was pre-pandemic.
EWT’s informal survey of 2022 safari prices in sub-Saharan Africa shows a dramatic price increase from 2020. Highest in Tanzania, lowest in South Africa but unbelievable everywhere. What’s going on and is this going to last or should you roll back on your heels and wait for sanity?
Read more