President Yoweri Museveni’s off-the-cut remark that Uganda
is a better tourism destination than Spain caused a storm and inadvertently
brought the country international media attention. It echoed the statement some
time ago, made by Spain’s president, Mariano Rajoy, that Spain is not Uganda,
which riled Ugandans who reacted strongly on the Internet. This time, Ugandans
got their revenge when international media outlets picked up on Museveni’s
statement. The UK based Gurdian Online put
up a poll for readers to vote one of the two countries.
In truth, Spain receives many more tourists than Uganda, and
so it was expected that Spain would walk away with an easy win on the Internet
battle. Surprisingly, Ugandans took to the polls to settle the score and
scooped 79% votes, flooring Spain which emerged with a miserable 21%. Over 2.5M
people worldwide voted.
Some commentators advanced good reasons to visit Uganda and beautiful
pictures of the country were featured. Hopefully, Uganda has had other
victories in tourism contests before. Early this year, the country was chosen
to host winners of the Orbitz Rewards Programs a US based online travel agency
that runs an online competition. The winners take an all-expense-paid trip to
any outstanding travel destination.
Meanwhile, the president of Uganda Tour OperatorsAssociation, Barbra Adoso noted that the world Encyclopedia of Travel has
picked on Uganda to host nine Russian travelers who will be in the country
starting December 9 to explore its attractions in 21 days.
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