Tourists at a park in Tanzania. The Hotels Association of Tanzania said
business is down 30 to 40 per cent on the year and advanced bookings,
mostly for 2015, are 50 per cent lower. PHOTO | FILE
By EDITH HONAN
In Summary
- In Tanzania and Kenya, tour operators say tented camps and luxury lodges where lions and elephants saunter past are surviving on visitors who have not yet written off the whole continent because of an outbreak that struck 5,000 km away.
- Problems for Kenya and Tanzania have knock-on effects on nearby Uganda and Rwanda, which are also part of the East African Community bloc.
East Africa's Serengeti and Maasai Mara safari
parks are as far if not further from the Ebola outbreak in the west of
the continent than much of Europe which supplies the tourists, but you'd
hardly guess that from the slump in bookings.
In Tanzania and Kenya, tour operators say tented
camps and luxury lodges where lions and elephants saunter past are
surviving on visitors who have not yet written off the whole continent
because of an outbreak that struck 5,000 km away.
"The probability of dying from a tree falling on
your head is probably higher than going on a safari in the Serengeti and
catching Ebola," said John Corse of Nomad Tanzania, one of whose camps
overlooks plains where wildebeest make the annual Great Migration, often
described as a natural Wonder of the World.
Tanzania - which relies heavily on tourist dollars
from visits to game reserves, Mount Kilimanjaro or Indian Ocean beaches
- was aiming for a record year to top the more than 1 million visitors
who came in 2013. That now looks a pipedream.
The Hotels Association of Tanzania, representing
195 sites nationwide, said business is down 30 to 40 per cent on the
year and advanced bookings, mostly for 2015, are 50 per cent lower.
Next door Kenya has been hurt too. Its tourism
industry was already reeling from a spate of attacks by Islamists,
including last year's attack on the upscale Westgate mall and more
recent incidents on the coast. Ebola has added to the pain, making
dollars more scarce in the foreign exchange market and weakening the
shilling.
Safaris are vital to both nations, whose other
main exports are agricultural produce, because they tend to draw
wealthier visitors, ready to splash out on luxuries, like sun downers
after a game drive at sites kilometres from the next settlement.
"A safari holiday behaves like a form of luxury
goods: people consume more of it when they're feeling safe and wealthy,"
said Corse, whose packages combining a week or so in the bush followed
by a few days on Zanzibar's beaches cost $8,000 to $15,000 a person.
Ebola free
Particularly galling to some is that neither Kenya
nor Tanzania, nor indeed any other east African nation, has had a
single case of the Ebola virus, which has killed about 5,000 people, the
vast majority in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea on the opposite side
of the continent.
The United States and Spain, meanwhile, have had
cases of infection on their soil and also deaths from the disease.
Madrid stands less than 4,000 km from Liberia's capital Monrovia, a
shorter distance than the game reserves of Kenya and Tanzania.
Several east African nations have imposed restrictions on travellers coming from afflicted areas.
Kenya Airways halted flights in August to Monrovia
and Freetown after Kenya was declared a "high-risk" zone because
Nairobi is one of Africa's transport hubs. Some European airlines still
fly to afflicted nations of West Africa.
When nine Kenyans returned to Nairobi from Liberia
this week, they were isolated for hours and tested before being allowed
to go home, even though they showed no fever or other Ebola symptoms.
"Our problems started with insecurity long before
Ebola became an issue, but Ebola of course has worsened it," said Sam
Ikwaye of the Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers, referring
to last year's deadly attack by Islamist gunmen on a Nairobi shopping
mall followed by other assaults elsewhere.
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