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Five exciting African museums to add to your travel wish list
Nompumelelo Maringa, University of the Witwatersrand Museums don’t often feature on vacation itineraries. That’s probably because people think of these spaces as dull houses of antiquities. But there are few better ways to learn about a country’s history, its people and their cultures than by visiting a museum. Maybe I’m biased: as an archaeozoologist – an archaeologist who studies animal fossils (mostly rodents) – I like digging in the past. And I’ve worked as a museum tour guide, at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. So I love museums, because they archive, preserve and display objects of significant importance. They allow you to delve…
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From Abidjan to Jakarta, how the city is reinventing what we eat
From Abidjan to Jakarta, how the city is reinventing what we eat Anthony Bourdain and Barack Obama in a canteen in Hanoi, Vietnam (May 23, 2016). Pete Souza/Wikimedia, CC BY Audrey Soula, Université de Montpellier; Nicolas Bricas, Cirad, and Olivier Lepiller, Cirad From junk food to McDonaldization of society, the most derogatory remarks about what we eat are often linked with the urban space. For better or worse, cities are seen as the ultimate crossroads of food, nutritional and epidemiological transitions. Be it in the global north or global south, the ultra-processed products and empty calories found in many diets can for trigger obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension and diet-related…
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Vaccines may soon make travel possible again. But how quickly will it return — and will it be forever changed?
Vaccines may soon make travel possible again. But how quickly will it return — and will it be forever changed? RUNGROJ YONGRIT/EPA Joseph M. Cheer, Wakayama University; Colin Michael Hall, University of Canterbury, and Jarkko Saarinen, University of Oulu The COVID-19 pandemic brought the global tourism industry to a screeching halt in 2020. With vaccines starting to be rolled out, there is hope international travel can resume soon, but exactly when — and how — is the million-dollar question. Before COVID-19, there was much concern about whether tourism had grown too big for our planet. There were calls to scale back tourism, make it more environmentally sustainable and help over-touristed…
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Fewer tourists meant less money for wildlife during the pandemic – but there’s an alternative
Fewer tourists meant less money for wildlife during the pandemic – but there’s an alternative Joseph Hamm, University of Leeds “Nature is healing” read social media posts at the outset of the pandemic, as birdsong replaced the drone of traffic during lockdown. But for wildlife conservation in Africa, the reality was very different. Anti-poaching operations in protected areas were paused or restricted to limit the spread of the virus, leaving populations of threatened species like the African lion vulnerable. Now these areas are confronting COVID-19’s economic fallout, and research suggests that illegal hunting, mining, deforestation, and bushmeat consumption all tend to increase during downturns. Safari tours and other forms of…
