Welcome to SA: The country is back in business for global tourism
Daily Maverick - 03 July 2022
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Mass tourism is not a good thing: ask Venice and Amsterdam. Air BnB has pushed locals out of central Paris. Villages in southwest England are overrun in summer and dead in winter. Holiday flats that stand empty for most of the year do not add much to the local economy, but they do push up house prices. The tsunami that killed thousands was so deadly partly because protectice mangrove forests had been destroyed to create resorts for tourists. All tnose tourists to Thailand and yet most people are quite poor: so not a clear correlation at all.
Something to ponder in the context of promoting the use of “tourist” facilities.
We live in the winelands. Yesterday my wife, son and I tried to access Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town. Because we intended walking on the mountain in addition to visiting the gardens we were not carrying anything of value. As we did not have our South African IDs we were told that we would have to pay the ridiculous sum of R210 each, as foreigners, rather than the (still expensive) R90 charged to locals. There was no way that I was paying R630 to walk in Kirstenbosch so we went elsewhere for coffee and cake after our intended (but failed) walk.
Consider that anyone wishing to visit the eateries in the gardens must pay these ridiculous entry prices in addition to the high and recently increased cost of their food. What a great pity that the people making these decisions cannot see the destructive effects of their thinking.
Needless to say, the less well off members of our community are effectively barred from using a public space that should be reasonably accessible to all. The gardens are not the “property” of some exclusive group and the City should be speaking up
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