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{
    "id": 393865,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/393865/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 42,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "At one point, I went to visit a friend of mine in Embu County many years ago. He told me that there was a place called Doshi Lodge. It was not a great place, but it was new. Having a lodge beside the river was something mystic. This was very exciting to me and my wife. That is what we call tourism. I am sure that the Senator here from West Pokot has not been to Kit Mikai in my county and yet he knows about it. When you go to any hotel in this country, even at Outspan in Nyeri, you will find the picture of Kit Mikai . Making it possible for people to travel to these places would be great for Kenyans and we would earn a lot of money locally even before we look for foreigners. Finally, many years ago, I suggested that we build a double carriage way railway system from Mombasa to Kisumu and to Uganda, a new one, of standard gauge and turn the old one, the “lunatics express” into a tourism attraction. People would still travel on the “lunatic express”. Something else about tourism is that it is just about propaganda and publicity. Once you build a “lunatic express” and tell its story in the airline magazines that we read in the planes, people will come to see it just like the Blue Line in South Africa from Johannesburg to Cape Town. When you read about the Blue Line, you will go there, because you want to have an experience. We have a natural tourist attraction here, a railway line, which we have been trying to revive under very funny economic circumstances. This cannot work. If we used it for tourism, probably, it would work. One time when I was in the NARC Government, we tried to revive the Kisumu- Butere line. We went there with the former Vice President, Moody Awori. All of us boarded the train. We left Kisumu at about 10.00 a.m. in the morning and reached Butere at 2.00 p.m. in the afternoon just to demonstrate to people that this was a great thing to do. People were not amused and they said that they did not have five hours to travel from Kisumu to Butere. However, tourists would love it. We were to promote it at a tourism level; we were talking to people about it. We would stop at local stations and talk to people. The NARC Government was very popular at that time and that was a lot of fun. We thought that we were reviving the railway transportation, but of course, we were more of reviving a tourism attraction. This was not followed as such. We did a good thing, but for the wrong reasons. The reason was not to revive it for transport purposes. It is too slow these days and there are faster ways of doing it. One thing that Sen. Karaba has mentioned is that there are terrains like the Rift Valley, for example, on your way to Nakuru, where there is the escarpment where people sell curios. If we had a suspended cable car moving from where the curios are sold right into the Rift Valley, that would be fantastic. That would be a great tourism attraction. Many people would pay to go across the escarpment. I remember once doing that in Mexico in a place called Ecatepec. They had a suspended cable car. We would use this to go to the hotels to the mountains and we had great fun with the children. This was used more by the local people because every local person wanted to tell their story that they had gone for the trip; from Ecatepec to the Lake and to the mountains. We can do that right here, especially if we get someone to build a hanging hotel near the escarpment to the Rift Valley. It is possible to have a hanging The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}