It took only six days and five nights for a 16-member delegation of tour operators and destination managers from Ghana to discover the hidden treasures of eco-tourism in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa.
Given their profession, the experiences got them aroused and resolved to push authorities in charge of tourism in Ghana to turn around swiftly and repair the country’s ailing and epileptic tourism industry.
For the delegation, the bane is not that Ghana does not have the sites and wonders of nature to attract tourists; the ‘wahala’ is that the sites lack development and value addition that will give the visitor a veritable unforgettable experience that will translate into repeat visits which account for an average of 85 per cent of some of Kenya’s tourist destinations.
The repeat visits magic is true for Sarova Hotels, with its flagship Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort & Spa, which still keeps its glamour although started in the 1930s.
The management of the hospitality facility understands the essence of service quality and customer experience on tourism.
“This hotel was built in the 1930s and we keep improving based on feedback from our clients and trends we see. We’re also flexible and we try to adjust to the budget of the holidaymaker. This has accounted for about 85 per cent of our clients being repeat guests,” the Sales Manager of Sarova Whitesands, one of the sponsors of the familiarisation trip, Ms Josephine Mwuanzi, told the Ghanaian team.
The hotel, like other players in Kenya’s tourism value chain, including carvers, sculptors, artists and their marketers, understand their role in making sense out of the tourism jigsaw.
Phinney’s touch
This understanding will inform the hotel’s decision to release its sales manager to be with the Ghana delegation to tour some sites that the hotel itself manages; and Ms Mwuanzi moved to a quick good start, leaving no stones unturned for no issue to become an afterthought. The hotel has an itinerary for the familiarisation tour and the manager has planned how she will shepherd the delegation so that each member is not only comfortable, but carries away a memory that will invoke a personal decision in them to schedule a trip back to Kenya. If she can get them this convinced, the members of the team, many of them IATA-certified agents, can convince their clients to take a package to Mombasa or any part of Kenya, using RwandAir, which connects Kenya’s port city from its base in Kigali. RwandAir currently flies to 24 destinations in Africa, Europe, Middle East and Asia.
The delegation included Edem Baeta of Expert Travel and his wife Nana, Mrs Serwaah B. Gbene of Adansi Travel; Mr Isaac Fidelis Nyarko of Stellar Travel; popular radio presenter Mr Gilbert Abeiku Aggrey, aka Abeiku Santana, who also runs Kaya Tours; Mr Godfrey Edem Ometha of Sunseekers Tours and Mrs Beatrice Akosua Boahene of Corporate Travel.
The rest being Mr Emmanuel Akpatsu of Satguru Travel; Mrs Beatrice Akosua Boahene of Corporate Travel, Mrs Sarah Abban of Quantum Travel; Mr John Yaw Abugbila of Starline Travel and Tours; Ms Elorm Ayikoe Atakyi of Doscar Travel and Tours; Ms Mardaline Sowah of Wakanow; Ms Bernice Opoku Frimpong of Kesben Travel, the team was also embedded with a blogger, Ameyaw Kissi Debrah, and led by a Marketing Executive at RwandAir Ghana office, Ms Millicent Narh.
Having gone round to ask each member of the delegation of their well-being and travel experience, which took almost 24 hours to arrive in Mombasa, Ms Mwuanzi presented members with ‘convenience packs’ containing food, drinks and refreshment to give the delegation respite and the knack for the next leg of the journey to the countryside where a whole maze of tourist familiarity beckoned.
Six days
The exercise began with a bus ride from the Moi International Airport in Mombasa to the Mombasa Train Terminus, the terminal for a newly inaugurated diesel-powered 1,000-seater train that connects the port city to the capital Nairobi.
The team got off at Voi, a small village which has a beautiful terminal that serves as the gateway to some of Kenya’s animal sanctuaries and eco-tourism sites, including the Taita Hills and Saltlick game sanctuaries.
To convince you that Kenya means business when it comes to tourism, roads and other access infrastructure are well developed.
Even though Taita Hills Game Lodge and Saltlick Game Lodge, two of Sarova Hotels’ facilities, are tucked away on a 28,000-acre sanctuary in the Taita Taveta County of Kenya, just about a few kilometres on the border with Tanzania, the sanctuary is connected with a first-class road and rail system with dedicated power transmission, making access hustle-free and the stay comfortable.
Besides the wildlife experience that brings nature alive, the hotel architecture and structure hold a whole rich heritage inspired by the World War I, whose relics and sandbags left on the battlefields located two and four kilometres away from the sanctuary were retrieved and used to build both facilities in the 1970s.
An all-female troop that welcomed the delegation with traditional drumming and singing added colour and signalled an inevitable wildlife experience that would imprint unmistakable memories on the minds of each member of the delegation (who by now are fast networking and bonding with one another).
A lion in search
After check-ins and freshening up, the team headed straight for a game drive on portions of the 28,000-acre wildlife sanctuary, and here the adventure with nature began. It was a first-time brush for more than half of the team with many of the things they saw – zebras, buffalos, grand gazelles, deers, warthogs and what have you.
The Ghanaian hospitality is well known, but the Kenyans are good conversationalists. They interact so easily and never forget to let the visitor carry with him/her a word or two in Swahili, the common language in East Africa.
For the game drive, the words were ‘simama’ and ‘duende’. The driver stops at each shout of simama to allow the visitor to take photographs or have a closer look at a game specie. He drives on when a member of the team shouts duende!
For close to 40 minutes, the team’s expectation of seeing the king of the jungle had not been met. But the drivers know where they prey and play. The first stop in search of the lions was at the Lion Mountain, where they normally relax. Having hit a snag, the driver took a detour and headed for a plain grassland. Under one of the trees, about 150 metres from one of the driveways in the sanctuary, lay a pride of lions, taking a nap to relax their muscles and conserve energy for a hunting expedition in the night. Lions hunt at night.
It was a beautiful sight with the world’s biggest cat and most dangerous carnivore in its natural habitat. It pushes one to believe you are still watching National Geographic (Nat Geo Wild). But the shouts, screams, jeers among teammates and vain bravados by some to go shake hands with the clever and dangerous big cats leave you with the reality that the fields are now the screens. It is happening live!
The find spontaneously draws other tourists in different custom-made safari cars to converge on the spot to take photos of the untamed big cats whose habitat is in the savannas.
With this excitement in their ‘paws’, the team returned to the nearby Saltlick Game Lodge built on large columns of stilts, each of which carries conically shaped storey buildings of two rooms; but that does not mark the end of the spectacle. The architecture of the property itself is a marvel. The walls are made of sandbags recovered from war sites and re-bagged in smaller units, the sizes of five-inch bricks.
Then the spectacle continued well into the night. Just after dinner around 8 p.m. marked the arrival of the giants of the forest – the elephants. After a long day of fending for the family, they return to Sarova Saltlick Lodge to drink water and cool themselves in ponds just beneath the hotel’s terrace.
This only signals the end of our first day in search of real adventure in the savannas. The rest of the days are even more enthralling and you don’t want to miss the thrills in the next episode.
Source: graphic.com.gh
