Kenya, Tourism and China

well, I have to say I haven't seen many Chinese tourists and businessman here yet although I have heard/read of many stories of them. But one significant difference I noticed here is - In Europe when I travelled, the local will always addressed me firstly as Japanese when failed usually tried Korean then probably Chinese. It was irritating but understandable. In Nairobi though, everyone is addressing me with "Ni hao" or "Chinese"!! So it seems that Asian are predominantly represented by Chinese here. Oh, how proud am I. Guess I will have a lot more to tell in topic of Africa and China, but later.

I have known tourism is an important money-making machine in Kenya, but not completely comprehend how crucial it is until I realized that there is always at least one page (most of the case a few) on both the top two daily newspaper here ("Nation Daily" and "Standard") every day. Current stories usually tune in to encourage domestic tourism, telling Kenyan that how cheap it is for them to visit their national park (which is not said, how ridiculously more a foreigner needs to pay though) and how wonderful their national parks are (which I'm truly bought in). In a sense, tourism is the only "business" that is mentioned daily on the news.

this blog entry has gone a bit random, but what I really want to share was a piece of news that I read a few days ago on Daily Nation which linked perfectly the two: Tourism for Kenya and China. The vice president of Kenya has visited BJ for her magnificent opening of the game with other 80 or so heads of state. In his meeting with some high officials in China (sorry I forgot which one) he enthusiastically expressed his wish, saying (in my own words) how Kenya is beautiful and more Chinese should visit this magical country. He has further detailed his expectation by saying "there should be 10 million Chinese visiting Kenya annually". I was shocked and literally stared at the number for a few seconds. 10 MILLION?! Annually?! I quickly did my simple math, we have 1,3 billion population in China so a bit over a century literally every Chinese would have visited Kenya! I googled some figure this morning, well last year the total number of Chinese visiting abroad were 40 million, more than 90% made their first trip oversea in SE Asia. Safari, mountain climbing or idling around the white sand beach are by all means luxury, even to quite some Europeans; and not to mention such a long journey require quite some days off for my fellow Chinese which is even a bigger luxury in workaholic China. How is the vice president exactly having in his mind that we can achieve this ambitious number of 10 million annually together? My big puzzle.