Vacationing in Africa

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Vacationing in Africa is an odd concept. The idea of a vacation is in itself a wealthy western concept. Only people with money can take vacations, much less to remote spots with no relatives to be found. Vacationing in Africa takes that theme one step farther. Only the super rich vacation, and there is no shortagem of reminders that the poor are not vacationing.

Livingstone is necessarily a wealthy African city due to the tourist business. Instead of working as a door man for a single wealthy white person, a man can work as a doorman for any number of prestigious hotels where colonialism is alive and well. There is no need for any wealthy white visitor to observe a single native outside of his required position as driver, waiter, maid or otherwise. One can visit Livingstone without ever seeing a single village made of mud huts, without ever noticing small children starving in the streets, and without ever realizing that twenty-five percent of all the people that live there are infected with HIV.

However, its also a good amount of fun. There are so many tourists that I not only felt comfortable wearing a short dress in public (generally can't wear anything that exposes more than a couple inches of calf) but even sun tanned in just a swimsuit on top of the falls.

Victoria Falls are AWESOME. You don't just go and look at a big waterfall and take pictures. Its almost a natural amusement park where you actively participate in the waterfall. Especially right now when the water levels are high, its as if you are in the most insane hurricane of your life, you can barely open your eyes much less keep the water out of your mouth. The water comes from every direction: misting off the falls and splashing up again when it hits rock.

We went canoeing as well and saw some giraffes and zebras!!! Sooo cool.

Anyways...the natural part of the area was gorgeous, the social side of things...slightly disgusting. Its hard to imagine anywhere else in the world catering to such an absurd excess of wealth in the midst of overwhelming poverty. Most of the vacationers there were spending in excess of thousands of dollars a week, taking private planes, safaris, and enjoying luxury hard to find in the USA. Its kinda hard to upload pics on such a slow internet, so I'll hopefully do more another time.

Thats all for now,
Andrea

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Comments

[pen-in-hand]

vacationing in Africa
So much gets back to public policy. Governments could be taxing the tourists and putting the tourist tax to work for the people. Absent such a tax, the socially-conscious tourist can try to "self-tax," and spend a portion of their travel monies on direct services to the poor of the countries in which they travel.