Editor,

RE: "Lessons learnt from a year of travelling around the region” (The New Times, January 4).

This is an enlightened article. The conclusion is exactly right. Marketing EAC (East African Community) as a single tourist destination is attractive to time-strapped tourists who want to fit in as much as possible in a limited time-frame.

Pam Connell

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This is a very nice article. I do have one remark though: I do travel to Kenya with tourists from Belgium to introduce them to the country that I love.

Few of them travel there alone now, because they fell in love with the place, others still come with me every year. Last November, I had someone with me who said, "I have traveled a lot and I have been to South Africa where I went to Kruger for a safari.

"The safari in Kenya is much more genuine and a real experience. The roads are dusty, the beautiful red sand. Every turn in the road can bring you another surprise. In Kruger, the roads were too smooth to feel like safari”.

So the part where the writer observed that "infrastructure has to improve, for tourism to thrive, more efforts have to go into improving infrastructure, from international airports to domestic ones, to the roads that lead to the parks and inside the parks. Tourists need to enjoy a certain level of comfort whether they are local or international” isn’t true for everyone.

The conclusion is very right, but the writer forgot to mention one very important thing: Get rid of all the plastic bags that are destroying every part of nature at the moment; ban plastic bags completely; follow in the footsteps of Rwanda.

Rinique Koli