Playing teeter totter on the wind-bowed palm trees.

Reading my name in the sand.

Crabs crawling over each other in a light green bucket.

These are my memories of Mombasa, Kenya’s key coastal city. We went there often and the very name of the place makes me smile.

In an effort to give Kenya’s tourism industry an edge over its competitors, the Kenyan government has been looking for an investor to fund a $30 million, fully-fledged cruise ship terminal at the Port of Mombasa.

However, these plans were recently shelved. The government failed to find a strategic partner to invest in the facility, as many pulled their support after realizing that the project was not viable.

“The response was not good at all,” said Transport Permanent Secretary Gerishon Ikiara. “The investors could not fathom such a huge investment, saying it did not guarantee returns because the terminal would just act as a gate allowing cruise ships in to dock.”

Plan B s to improve the existing terminal being used by cruise ships. This new strategy, with an estimated price tag of $3 million, will include refurbishing the landing facilities and upgrading the road from the port to the town.

“What we have come to realise,” said Ikiara, “is that the cruise business will thrive in this country if there is a good road network integrated with the landing facilities at the port.”

“Cruise tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world,” said Auni Kanji, the managing director of Abercrombie and Kent, the ground handler for cruise ships in Kenya. “What the government needs to do is to improve the facilities without going for major investments, because the port is the first impression that the tourists get of the country.”

One Christmas, when I was about three years old, we went to Hunter’s Lodge in Tsavo National Park. I had been a particularly bad little girl and my parents told me that they weren’t sure that Santa was even going to come that year.

When it came time to go to bed, we discovered that we had forgotten the stocking. Horrors! Not that! Now Santa definitely wasn’t going to come.

Dad came to the rescue and offered up one of his socks. I went to sleep incredulous but hopeful.

Christmas morning came and … Santa had come! All I remember about what he brought was a miniature refrigerator, complete with miniature eggs. Dad would swallow one and miraculously find it behind my ear.

So, why am I reminiscing about an event that happened more than 30 years ago?

In part, to wish those of you who celebrate Christmas a wonderful and merry holiday.

But mostly, because I read this story in eTN: “Uganda welcomes tourism boom over Christmas.”

Apparently, Uganda experienced a 30 percent increase in visitors compared to 2005, according to a published report from Uganda Travel Guide. “The record number of tourists traveling into Uganda this Christmas season is overwhelmingly high,” reported Uganda Travel Guide (UTG), “evidenced by the fully booked flights and sold out hotel rooms in Uganda.”

Mweya and Paraa safari lodges sold out almost a month ago, according to Madhvani group tourism director Mani Khan. He told UTG that this is a peak season compared to last year because the bookings were made in advance. The majority of these tourists, unlike previous years, are from the UK, US, Netherlands and Germany.

“An increase in tourist arrivals is attributed to a combination of factors,” said UTG, “including the improved hotel facilities/services, improved security, efforts to boost Uganda’s image abroad, engagement of public relations agencies, as well as the committed and qualified staff in the hospitality sector.”

Tourism Minister Serapio Rukundo credits the prevailing political stability for the increase. “Our cities are much safer compared to Kenya and South Africa,” he told reporters.

The 4th International Institute of Peace through Tourism (IIPT) African Conference Coming to Uganda in May

Kampala, Uganda, will host the fourth International Institute of Peace through Tourism (IIPT) African Conference May 20-25, 2007.

“We anticipate that this will be our most important and successful African conference to date,” said Louis D’Amore, IIPT Founder and President. “We have spent the past year fostering relationships in support of the conference with the aim of not only debating its theme and goals – but to building partnerships that will act on them.”

The theme of the conference is “Building Strategic Alliances for Sustainable Tourism Development, Peace and Reconciliation on the African Continent.” Among the many goals of the conference is increasing public and government awareness of the role tourism plays in preserving the biodiversity of the African Continent.

According to the IIPT newsletter, the Conference will bring together senior African executives from both the public and private sectors of tourism, as well as NGOs, donor agencies, educators, policy makers, leading practitioners, entrepreneurs, future leaders of the industry, and senior representatives of related sectors including environment, culture and economic development.

The conference will include plenary sessions, workshops, an Educators Forum, a Youth Leadership Forum and a Traditional Leaders Forum, as well as pre-conference training workshops on selected topics.

For more information about the conference, visit iipt.org.

The land of Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park and Usangu Game Reserve are going to be combined into one National Park.

“One of the aims of the government in annexing Usangu to Ruaha is in part to save the biodiversity of that area, as well as to increase tourism to the region,” said Gerald Bigurube, Director General, Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA). “This can best be accomplished if the area is administered and marketed by TANAPA”.

“Tanzania’s tourism strategy is to encourage high quality, low volume tourism,” said Peter Mwenguo, Managing Director, Tanzania Tourist Board. “By increasing the number of national parks, we are able to create more diversity in the safari circuits and avoid mass tourism.”

Ruaha has the largest population of elephants of any East African national park — about 10,000 animals. Other creatures calling Ruaha home include impala, waterbuck and other antelopes, lions, cheetahs and more than 450 bird species. The park is bounded the East by the Great Ruaha River. The natural water reservoir for the river is the Ihefu Wetland, which is located in the Usangu Game Reserve.

“Tanzania is constantly working on upgrading its game reserves to National Parks,” said Bigurube. “In a National Park there is no consumptive use of resources and this allows for the multiplicity of species, increasing the wildlife in the parks.”

For more information about Ruaha National Park, visit www.tanzaniaparks.com/ruaha.htm.

“Expanded budgets and antipoaching patrols since the mid-1980s have significantly reduced poaching and allowed populations of buffalo, elephants and rhinoceros to rebuild,” states the authors of a paper published in today’s issue of Science.

This technique has been used since the 1930s to estimate the abundance of fish. Now, a recent study has proved for the first time that enforcement patrols are effective at reducing poaching of elephants, African buffaloes and black rhinos in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

“Wildlife within protected areas is under increasing threat from the bushmeat and illegal trophy trades,” says Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and lead author of a paper, “and many argue that enforcement within protected areas is not sufficient to protect wildlife. Some say the $2 million spent annually in the Serengeti on patrols would be better spent on other preventive activities.”

However, his research proves otherwise. “The animals are ‘telling’ us poaching is down now that there are 10 to 20 patrols a day compared to the mid-1980s when there might be 60 or fewer patrols a year.” Hilborn says.

Previously, estimates of poaching have been difficult to verify. Therefore, Hilborn and his co-authors used the decades-old technique of catch-per-unit-of-effort, which has been to estimate fish abundance and set fishing limits.

The Serengeti has a 50-year-record of arrests and patrols. To estimate the amount of poaching, the paper’s authors divided the number of poachers arrested by the number of patrols a day, assuming that arrests per patrol were representative of poaching intensity.

“We show that a precipitous decline in enforcement in 1977 resulted in a large increase in poaching and decline of many species,” Hilborn and his co-authors wrote.

A press release announcing these findings stated:

The work marks the first time anyone has been able to reconstruct a history of poaching going back as far as 50 years, says Tom Hobbs, professor of ecology at Colorado State University and who is not affiliated with the work being published in Science.”The Hilborn team has shown that protection of wildlife by active enforcement of laws and regulations remains an essential tool for conserving biological diversity,” Hobbs says. “This sounds so simple, but it has been controversial.”

The National Science Foundation funded, at least in part, the research.