Uganda hotels to charge less for locals

Uganda’s hotels are facing tough times. Despite their country having top attractions such as Nile rafting trips, the Great Rift Valley, and safaris in the many national parks filled with wildlife, the average hotel is running at only 50 percent capacity. Adding to this problem is that wealthy Ugandans don’t go for internal tourism, preferring to jet off to more exotic destinations like Europe. Well, exotic to the Ugandans anyway.

Hoteliers in Uganda have decided to change that by offering a 40 percent discount to Ugandan citizens at certain times of the year. So if you decide to head on over to East Africa to see Lake Victoria, elephants, mountain gorillas, and all the other sights Uganda has to offer, you’ll have a chance to meet more locals than ever. Travelers to Africa tell me the capital Kampala is a lush town full of energy and interest, and it even made it into the list of 15 green cities. Uganda has a lot to offer, and they deserve a healthy tourism industry after they thumbed their collective noses at the terrorists.

[Photo courtesy K. Stefanova via Wikimedia Commons]

The Devil’s Highway – Journey Along the U.S. Mexico Border

Walking the Arizona desert in 100 degree heat is no joke. I’ve done it before. During my travels I wasn’t out there alone and I had plenty of water to get me to my final stop. I was beyond well-prepared for the occasion, but it didn’t take away from the brutal heat, sun exposure and vast silent nothingness the desert so often revealed. On the flip side there are secrets only the wind carries, the skull of animal or worse – a human and border patrol know. My 20-mile stretch nothing in comparison to the journey made by hundreds of thousands Mexican migrants each day.

National Geographic Adventure Magazine has a spectacular story and photo gallery on the plight of the illegal migrant. Photographer John Annerino and contributing editor Tim Cahill spent nine days in the Sonora Desert borderlands of southwestern Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge discovering what goes down in one of America’s most troubled wilderness areas. One word – chaos. Imagine migrant groups battling it out with border bandits, vigilantes, Mexican coyotes and dehydration. If that isn’t enough already throw drug smugglers and the U.S. border patrol and what we have is a very ugly reality of one of the hardest types of travel known to man. The hunt for opportunity and better living in the land of the free could very well be in the hands of many migrants so long as they can make it in, through and well-out of the Devil’s Highway.

The story is truly phenomenal and the gallery just the same. If you’ve got the time I suggest you head over for a read. Makes you think.