South Africa provides an excellent platform to explain why so many American tourists make bad decisions about their African touring.

Probably most tourists to Africa travel on referral from friends or family. It’s a very small percentage that buy strictly off the internet without vetting what they’ve found with people they know and trust. That’s all well and good but where it goes wrong is when these referrals are from friends or family who have very limited experience.

And the fact is that a single trip, or even two trips to some area, is very limited experience. So you’ve got to guard against personal referrals being …well, too personal.

South Africa is an excellent example of how past travelers get it wrong.

The first is that the best time to go is during America’s summer.

The second is the enormous perception particularly in America that Johannesburg and surroundings are unsafe to visit, and even if they were safe, uninteresting.

The third is that you should avoid the “touristy” places to stay, like the Waterfront in Cape Town or Sandton City north of Johannesburg.

These three entrenched notions are essentially 180 degrees wrong.

I’m currently guiding a small, private group through South African into Botswana and Victoria Falls. We started in Cape Town, they took Rovos Rail and we are now in Johannesburg. It’s South Africa’s summer, and I just checked that the temperature at my home is 2F with a winter storm on its way.

I think before any other information is known, the best time to visit virtually any place outside of the equatorial regions or great deserts is their summer.

The flowers and trees are in bloom, the golf courses are beautiful; surfing, swimming, diving, sailing and everything to do with waters and oceans is at its peak (including some of the finest seafood in the world), outdoor concerts and flea markets are in their hay day, and … it’s comfortable!

South Africa’s winter doesn’t begin to compare to Chicago’s, but it is quite similar to much of the upper south in the United States, like northern Georgia and Tennessee. All the trees lose their leaves. Daylight is diminished. Grass is brown and it’s usually dismal and chilly or cold. Now does that sound like a fun place to be?

And while it’s true that moving north into our safari tomorrow in Botswana increases the temperatures, today’s better camps are so brilliantly constructed – some with air conditioning – that it really isn’t so uncomfortable, now. And this is the time for the best animal viewing!

Two: Time and again you hear so-called “experienced travelers” warning new comers away from places they feel are dangerous, like Lima or St. Petersburg, or … Johannesburg. This is balderdash.

To begin with every city is huge and there are safe parts and unsafe parts, so to lump everything together reveals immediately the silliness of the statement. We are staying in the posh suburb of Sandton. We leave our luggage two floors below reception on the curb to be attended by the porters, we leave our purses in the tour vehicles, we dangle bracelets and necklaces when we go out for a nice dinner.

It’s perfectly safe. And also time-and-again these same naysayers will claim that the “unsafe” city has nothing to offer, anyway.

Like the Apartheid Museum? One of the greatest museums on earth. Or the Cradle of Humankind, which is an exceptional – probably the best – museum complex on earth describing what we know about early man? Or the Sandton museum of the country’s 4 Nobel Laureates? Or absolutely some of the best restaurants and certainly the best shopping complexes anywhere in Africa?

Or jazz and cabaret cafes, theaters, symphonies, multiple festivals at any given time, sports events out the wazoo … in a nutshell, an urban setting difficult to match anywhere on earth.

Three. Avoid the “touristy places.”

Why, exactly? Aren’t you a tourist? Do you not go to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty or Ground Zero or Disneyland or Hollywood boulevard, or the Miracle Mile, or on and on? That’s what these things are for! This isn’t skid row for the leisure class!

Cape Town’s best hotels are at the Waterfront, a complex not so dissimilar to my Chicago’s Navy Pier. The old hotels in the city and outlying areas like the Mt. Nelson are musty and away from all the good action. The best restaurants, the best shops, the best information centers, the best galleries and some of the best museums – they are in the “tourist areas.”

And this is true I suppose anywhere in the world. No matter how you try, if you aren’t committed to actually living somewhere for a good period of time, the best experience you can have of that place is to for at least part of the time join the crowds.

Tomorrow we head into the bush. It’s remarkable to think our last week has been in anything but. It’s hard for me, an East African freak, to really believe our incredible week is only a few hours airplane ride away from the wilds.

So tune in, again, and I’ll let you know if it was just all a fantasy!

by Conor Godfrey
Africa needs more intra-regional transport links..

Africa needs more improved water sources.

If only Africa had enough eight-cent vaccines, free elections, power plants, kids toys or TOMS shoes then it would all fall together. Sigh.

How often have you heard these quasi-truisms?

(Quick note: Can’t mention the 6% continental growth rate enough, and TOMS Shoes is one of the worst charity ideas since Scrooge recommended putting poor people in debtor’s prisons in A Christmas Carol.)

I have undoubtedly used such intellectually lazy reasoning myself in moments of confusion or frustration.

Believing that A+B would equal C if only those poor, unfortunate wretches could get their act together defers the substantial effort that would be required to understand more difficult questions, and strokes our sub-conscious bias telling us that we would do better in someone else’s shoes.

The dirty little secret of self-help books, aid industries, and all manner of 12-step plans to success is that everyone already knows 95% of the right answers.

Distributional politics—not misinformation—scuttles good ideas in favor of bad ones. Permit me a few examples.

Why are there so few roads linking secondary cities to each other in Africa, or roads between markets across borders?

Mainly because second tier cities are usually opposition strongholds, and linking them by road or rail would increase the likelihood of an alliance against the group in power.

Why do wealthy African countries consistently fail to meet the demand for electricity?

I doubt anyone believes that leaders don’t understand the relationship between power and economic growth. Of course they do. The problem revolves around who gets what! Who gets the contract, who pays which price for electricity, and which neighborhood/city will have access?

There are dozens of similar examples in the United States.

The most famous example is U.S. government research and academic funding: investing more in a few large projects would yield more break-throughs, but instead, the government spreads ineffectually small amounts to hundreds of organizations to appease political and/or state-based interests.

These political or distributional problems are even more salient in weaker states where sub-sate actors are more powerful.

The best articulation of why politics torpedoes policies that all actors agree would increase aggregate welfare concerns the difference between relative and absolute gains.

(I here begin stealing liberally from the Realist school of thought in international politics, led in its modern incarnation by Kenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau.)

Actors care less about large increases in absolute welfare than about gaining small advantages over strategic rivals or adversaries.

After all, if a given policy makes an entire country richer, but makes a competing ethno-regional grouping slightly wealthier than your in-group, then that competing group might use their newfound power to snuff you out. This security-dilemma often forces all actors to pursue sub-optimal policies.

These dynamics, however, do not lend themselves to easy solutions, and therefore we mostly prefer to pretend that African leaders don’t understand how important roads are, or that LSE trained African Foreign Ministers just don’t get how high tariffs distort trade.

If you ever get tired of hearing about the next big thing in development, read through some of the case studies at the Institute For Successful Societies. These are the stories of battle hardened reformers trying to implement the small or large changes that everyone knows their country or community needs.

Nicholas Kristof’s white “transition” characters not included.