African Business Travel Writing

The African travel writing series (tag 'Kenya Domestic Tourist' is one that is about a couple of months old now. It’s origin was a conversation with a banker friend who had worked in Nigeria, and talked of people flying with ‘delicious’ Brookside milk from Nairobi to a land where every food item was imported and there was little in the way of a local health scene.

These, and other fantastic bar tales, may have been exaggerated, but it was an interesting led to query to inquire & get the feedback of ordinary Africans (not professional travel writers) who were visiting other African countries and get them to write about their travels, business climate and observations of life there.

So we have posts from Botswana, Cameroon, Eritrea (not a failed state), Ethiopia, Egypt & Tunisia (after popular uprisings in 2011), Zambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, and others in the works like Zimbabwe (described like visiting a relative who used to have money) and Senegal. A few more posts have fallen by the wayside but they may be completed one day...sometimes you have to persuade people to chat over a round of drinks, instead of an omelette breakfast.

By no means are the rules of observations absolute, as they are the varied experiences from people making unique trips. They have encountered situations like amazing courteous service, hostility for saying the wrong thing, unexpected airport taxes, varied ease of changing currencies & making phone calls home, free seating on some West African flights (no boarding passes issued), and seen beautiful & historic sights. They have also proved quite useful going by comments received (& most recently for me as a crucial last minute reminder to carry a yellow fever card to Addis).

Thanks to the various contributors to the series so far including @CarolMusyoka, @Coldtusker, @G33kmate, @Kahenya, @KKaaria @MarvinTumbo, @ZackMukewa (the latest one is from Indonesia which is not in Africa, but is an interesting popular tourist destination to benchmark against) and a couple of other contributors. These are all interesting, hardworking people (do follow them on @twitter) involved in other business endeavors and hopefully they will share more travel tales until trips to capitals of all African countries are covered.