Guardian Writer ‘Absolutely Terrified’ of South Africa

Photo by coda via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Today in not-so-good news for a tourism board somewhere in the world, a sports writer for the Guardian has written a blog post called Why Going to South Africa for the World Cup Terrifies Me. In it, Louise Taylor lays out the reasons why she would “definitely balk” at a trip to Cape Town for next year’s FIFA event, and even suggests that the World Cup should have been hosted by Egypt instead.

Consider me unimpressed.

After all, as Taylor herself writes, “Such fears are often as much about perception as statistics.” Too true. And those scary government travel advisories she quotes at length? Taylor again: “I know this [government travel advice] can sometimes seem unnecessarily alarmist.” Took the words right out of my mouth, Louise. Let’s not even get into the parts where she refers to the “looming dangers” of HIV infection, or to the country as potentially “more dangerous than Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I suspect that the majority of the nine million foreign tourists who visited South Africa in 2007 would beg to differ.

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