I learned some fascinating facts about Durban yesterday. 

For instance, Mahatma Gandhi, a lawyer from India, started his passive resistance campaign when he landed in Durban harbour.  Actually, he didn’t start it in the harbour, but when he arrived in South Africa he arrived in the harbour, if you know what I mean.  He started it in the train when he bought a first-class ticket from the train station, which is now the Tourist Junction, and then he got thrown off in Pietermaritzburg because Indians weren’t allowed to travel first class. Durban has Victorian buildings.  But fashions change, you know, like dresses and shoes, and buildings become more funky.  So Durban introduced Art Deco. The famous Cato Manor riots in 1959 happened because women were angry about not being able to brew beer any more, so men dressed up like women and burned down the beer hall in Cato Manor. Durban’s City Hall was made to look like the one in Belfast in Ireland.  Francis Farewell Square has the most statues.  The Moses Mabhida stadium was named after Moses Mabhida.  He was a big man in the ANC and was around when Cosatu was started.  He lived in Pietermaritzburg and was friendly with Oliver Tambo.  The stadium is so big that, when the World Cup is over, it can be used for major cultural events like the Olympics…. These gems of information were given to us, a group of travel journalists, during a tour of Durban to promote South African Tourism’s Sho’t Left campaign.  If I was puzzled, as a Durban resident, by this colourful remodelling of some bits of Durban’s history, you can imagine the impressions carried off by the visiting journalists who don’t know the place. Our morning bus tour was supposed to showcase the attractions of Durban to encourage local visitors to travel in their own country.  If these journalists managed to cobble together a story out of the confused mish-mash of half-truths they were given, it would be more of a miracle than Gandhi’s telescoped Satyagraha campaigns.  Our tour ended at a viewing spot overlooking Durban’s Bay, where a large concrete cube had been decorated by local graffiti artists.  It was here, over a splendiferous picnic lunch and a marvellously short speech by Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, that I tried to piece together exactly what South African Tourism had been trying to achieve. The Sho’t Left campaign started five years ago to encourage South Africans to holiday in their own country.  It incentivises the local travel trade to offer value-for-money packages through joint marketing agreements.  It highlights and promotes local tourist attractions to people who would not otherwise consider going to these places on holiday. This is all well and good, and I am delighted to report that the campaign appears to show some success.  The statistics are a bit confusing, but anything that compels South Africans to explore the treasures in their own backyard is to be applauded.  But I am left with a large amount of disquiet.  The trumpeted number of 9,5 million foreign arrivals is a controversial figure, with a large percentage made up of regular shoppers from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland.  The figure of 14 million South Africans traveling domestically is very encouraging, if it is true and not made up of salesmen and commuters.  The fact that KZN and the Eastern Cape soak up the bulk of these is not surprising, probably because these two provinces are traditional destinations for all South Africans. No, what really got me thinking was the cost of yesterday’s function and what was achieved by it.  South African Tourism flew in seven journalists from various publications in different cities in South Africa; put them up in the Elangeni Hotel, parked them on a very expensive bus for a tour of Durban, travelled around aimlessly for a few hours, imparted some astoundingly irrelevant bits of information, and then decanted them at a gorgeous beauty spot for a nice lunch and a look at a decorated concrete cube. If the idea was that the journalists should return to their newspapers and put together a story about why South Africans should travel to Durban, it was a hopeless waste of time and money.  I might be eccentric in this respect, but I would not travel to a city solely because some famous man stepped off some ship, where a political activist had a stadium named after him, where builders indulged in some architectural oddities, and where a few local artists decorated a concrete block.  If yesterday’s trip had told me about the opportunities available to the South African holiday-maker, the trips they could do, the facilities they could enjoy, the places they could stay, the things they could see – why, then I would be quite enthusiastic about this campaign.  As it is, the tour left me cold and rather annoyed – Durban has a lot more to it than this tour indicated. And if you think I am being unkind – I haven’t even complained about the disorganisation that accompanied this tour. That would take another whole article.  QED.