Peeing in bush and the long-term cost to tourism

Here is a typical Ugandan travel experience. You are driving upcountry, and are pressed for a pee break or worse. The vehicle stops along an isolated clearing and primitivism takes over. Most of us have been there.
Until recently, you needed to drive until Masaka, from Kampala, to find decent public toilet facilities; Mubende on Fort Portal Road; Migyera on the Gulu highway; and I don’t even know where on the eastern route. All those distances are well more than 100 kilometres from the city centre, so woe betide you with thin bladders and unfit rectal muscles.

Why don’t our roads have proper public toilets? Why must we use bushes?
I am not quite sure who is supposed to provide the answers, but I thought the Ministry of Tourism – because curating a comfortable travel and tourism experience is within their mandate – should be bothered. So I sought out the number of tourists over the last few years, to build a case against this forced do-it-everywhere-you-are practice.

I soon discovered that because there is no proper definition of a “tourist,” the numbers are unreliable. I had fronted the comfort of an elderly Nordic couple on holiday, to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary visiting one of our game parks; or a 13-year-old child, whose first travel experience is gorilla tracking in Bwindi; or even a Ugandan child travelling back for the first time to see home; or Ugandans visiting gazetted tourist sites around the country.

Turns out, because of the confusion around the definition of a ‘tourist’ by the different players in the sector, more than half of those recorded as tourists, are in fact visitors – for whatever reason – from neighbouring countries such as Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Rwanda (before you know what).
It then made sense why curating a great travel experience might be asking too much, if majority of our visitors are cut from the same low-expectation fabric as we are. Have you seen so much to suggest a superior sophistication on the part of our neighbours?

But I also found a curious trend to our tourism promotion. It is focused on the West – probably because they come bearing dollars – even if there is enough to suggest that the growth of local tourism might be what will spur an increase in international visitors.
So I thought to share, from a recent trip, the complexities of a local travel and tourism experience. I belong to a group of vociferous and indefatigable hikers known as the Mountain Slayers of Uganda. For most, the favourite pastime is putting their bodies through gruelling day-long outdoorsy walks and mountaineering. This weekend, we went hiking the Rwenzori ranges in Semuliki, Ntoroko District.

Every so often, as we stopped along the curiously bouncy tarmac of Fort Portal Road to answer the call of nature, I wondered what the foreigners thought of this experience. How do their tour guides demonstrate using the bush or a dirty pit-latrine as a safe alternative to obvious bowel discomfort? What do they tell their friends and peers back home about their experience visiting Uganda?
Eventually when we got to the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) - operated Bumaga campsite, which lies on the edge of the Semuliki National Park, there were more questions than answers. Half-cooked food, shortage of running water, dirty bathrooms and bandas with collapsing ceilings, and customer care from the gutters.

How are you to grow a sector, which in 2018, was the country’s highest foreign exchange earner, with a camp run like this? A sector, where all things considered, could be a potential job creator for thousands of young people, graduates or dropouts, currently asking ‘What Next’?
The thing that UWA must be commended for though, is the quality of their bus drivers. Probably the best trained, courteous and professional lot on our roads. Considering the traffic nuisance that Pioneer Bus drivers are notorious for, might some income be found in outsourcing the training of and management of Tondeka Metro drivers to UWA – as part of a larger tourism mandate?

It is hard to think of a more competitive sector than hospitality and tourism. The options available to intending travellers, even in the region, are innumerable. You just have to look at the number of Ugandans flocking Dubai to holiday – and because it is relatively cheaper than some of the alternatives at home.
Failing to invest in great travel and tourism experiences for locals at the expense of attracting foreign visitors seems like building on quicksand.