Green Shoots: To be tourists in our own county

April is always great for taking longer breaks. The Easter weekend combined well this year with Freedom Day and Workers Day, and I was one of those who took advantage of the timing to use very few leave days for a longer holiday. I was fortunate to spend time visiting family and friends in Cape Town and Hermanus, and I was amazed at the beauty of our country. It was my first time visiting the area south of the big city. The Indian Ocean has probably spent billions of years trying to erode the dramatic Kleinrivier Mountains behind the town of Hermanus, founded apparently by a Dutch sailor called Hermanus Pieters. Hermanuspietersfontein was too long for the postal service, hence the abbreviation.

Of course, this quaint origins story doesn’t have a role for the actual original people who would have been hunter-gatherers along the coast long before the Dutch landed. But I digress. We’re talking about tourism, and I thoroughly enjoyed being a tourist in my own country. The beauty of the landscape is rivalled by the incredible people we encountered in our travels. A friend who returned from Spain recently was saddened by the blatant racism she encountered, no doubt a reflection of the polarisation that is increasingly defining the world. Not so in Hermanus and surrounds.

There was warmth and humour and genuine interest in making us Gautengers feel welcome. We visited quite a few wine farms, and in Cape Town enjoyed a festival that celebrated our world renowned vintners. We really make good wine here. I know that there is still much to be done to get the industry to fully recognise the rights of workers, especially women. For the last two weeks, I celebrated our skill and sampled (a lot) the products of that creativity. And walking around the really badly named Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, I encountered people speaking many of our South African languages, and they were happy local tourists like me.

This tourism thing seems to be quite a money spinner. I imagine that being a service provider to people from all over the globe must be quite an interesting line of work to be in, especially for young people. So I checked out what the figures say, and found some interesting information.

I did not know that our bean counters (Stats SA) make a distinction between a traveller and a tourist. They say: ‘A traveller is anyone who moves from one place to another, whether for work, leisure, family visits, or other reasons. A tourist, however, is a traveller who stays at least one night at their destination in a hotel or other accommodation, usually for sightseeing or vacation, and not for work. In short, all tourists are travellers, but not all travellers are tourists.’

In 2024, around 30,8 million travellers were recorded as having entered South Africa. 11,8 million were tourists. Apparently it’s a 5% increase from the previous year, and marks a big step to recovery from the devastation that the Covid pandemic caused.

What surprised me is that 76% of those tourists are from SADC and the rest of Africa. Ghana gets special mention, and their increased travel to our shores is attributed to easing visa requirements. We welcomed 370K tourist visitors from the United States of America, 350K from the United Kingdom, 255K Germans, and 132K French visitors. Asian and Latin American countries number in the tens of thousands. Whichever way you cut it, that represents a lot of foreign money being spent in our economy. We really should be paying more attention to tourism. It’s a creator of jobs. It brings in foreign currency. It contributes to economic development in a number of ways.

And it’s a celebration of our heritage as South Africans. We should be celebrating that heritage by becoming tourists in our own country. Lets find a place or event that we always talk about and make a commitment to go there. I know many

of us might be checking if we have relatives in the area for free accommodation. Don’t let that stop you, and help the local guest house stay in business. And let’s be good people and express our appreciation of the service providers when we get there. It’s a lot of fun.