Tourism - Is this all We Can do?

Over the last 15 years, I have been fortunate enough to go to countries that I used to consider luxurious and expensive, those that would be every traveler’s dream and those that will make most people speculate on the intentions of that person that has been there.  Like one of my friends asked  “what the hell took you to Turkey?”  In some cases I have ended up in these countries on official business but in many cases it was out of my love for travelling.  The more I travel, the more I love.  I have now set myself a challenge.  The number of countries I have visited must be equal to my age.  That means that in the next few years, I have to do a lot of travelling to catch up with my age and it is only then that I will slow down to a manageable rate of one country a year.

My story goes back to my first long haul travel to Turkey in 1996 (before that the farthest I had been was Lamu, an island off the Kenyan Coast) where for the first time I came face to face with the realities of this world. While visiting the slummed areas of Istanbul I found for the first time, that there are children as old as 12 years who had never seen a black person.   You should have seen their faces as they gleaned and apprehensively touched and rubbed my skin to ensure that the ‘black powder’ I had covered myself falls off.  For a few minutes, all the attention - I must admit it was mainly that of kids - was focused on me, leaving other visiting members of the team of architects and urban planners enough space and time to ask adult residents of this informal settlement about their life in this place.  I had instantly become a celebrity or an attraction depending on which way you look at it, though I would prefer to be the former.  From then on, I knew that no matter who you are and where you are, there will always be something totally new and interesting to you especially if you manage to break out of the confines of your birth and nurturing.

Over the years, I have travelled to beguiling places and those that were plain pathetic in terms of what they had to offer to a traveler.  Yet, there are those countries that just know how to market themselves that even when what they have to offer is palpably crap, a diffident traveler will want to go there.  Growing up in East Africa, I had heard so much about the island of Zanzibar and it was no surprise that when I eventually grew and got married, it was the location on top of my mind as a honeymoon destination.   I must say that Zanzibar was horrifically disappointing.  The so-called Spice Tour which had been so lavishly commended as a highlight and for which we had to part with US$25 each, was such a let down.   It was full of plants and spices that I regularly use and grow back home in Uganda, yet this had been packaged and promoted as one of the selling points of the visit to Zanzibar – I wonder how many people from East Africa end up being as disappointed as I was.  On the other hand, I have to give it to Zanzibari authorities for having done so well at marketing their destination - such is its reputation that even I could not resist going there. 

In 2008, I visited the island of Sentosa in Singapore.  It was similar to some of the islands that make up Uganda’s Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria in many ways and yet none of them had been exploited to the same level.  Granted the amount of money used to develop Sentosa Island is not within our reach as Uganda but surely there is something that can be done with humbleness that will be acceptable to most travelers.   After all, this is Africa! No one expects the pomp and glamour that is exhibited at Sentosa to be in our midst.

Finally, most African countries have a reach history of traditions, how come we have the most miserable museums in the world.  I have been to museums in Lagos, Kumasi and Kampala and I am always shocked at how little there is to see.  On the other hand museums elsewhere are full of documented history, artifacts and regalia representing those societies through the times.   I recently spoke to an official from the Ministry in-charge of tourism and suggested that we could make a lot of money as a country if we opened an ‘Idi Amin Museum’……….his response was very disappointing but also goes to show the level of thinking from our leaders.  Apparently, they are people amongst our leaders who think that Amin is so evil that we cannot glamorize him by opening a museum about his life – it would amount to sanitizing his actions.  I can hear a resident of an island that I was once lived on scream ‘what a load of bollocks’ and I wouldn’t agree more.