Questions:

5) What are the advantages and disadvantages to countries thatpromote frontier tourism?

6) Discuss how nations can create a competitive advantage inattracting tourists.

Roughing It: Tourists Are Boldly Going Into African TroubleSpots

A conservationist in oil-rich Gabon leads the way in promotingtiny nation’s sur ing hippopotamuses and other natural attractions,as part of a regional push for tourism amid instability

By Alexandra Wexler

Oct. 19, 2018 5 30 a.m. ET

WONGA WONGUE, Gabon—For the past decade, an energeticconservationist has been building the foundations for a tourismindustry in Gabon, where rare forest elephants stroll down thebeach, hippopotamuses surf in the ocean waves and blue-facedmandrills march by the thousands through the jungle.

The challenges for Gabon’s national parks authority and itshead, Lee White, include transporting clients to remote camps in acountry with little infrastructure, recruiting pygmy trackers fromdeep within the jungle and training antipoaching units who have tobattle armed hunters and illegal gold miners in one of the world’smost pristine stretches of wilderness.

Over the past decade, with the support of government andoverseas philanthropists, Mr. White has transformed Gabon’s parksauthority from a group with just 100 staff with a budget of$500,000 to a $30 million operation with 800 employees, 175 cars,35 boats and a number of aircraft, including a helicopter. Touristshave begun to arrive, with visitors up by a third this year throughJuly compared with the average over the same period in 2017 at thecountry’s most-popular national park for internationaltourists.

Mr. White’s Gabonese gambit is at the leading edge of a trendattracting a growing list of African economies: frontier-tourismproducts in places that visitors often more-closely associate withconflict or instability.

In recent years, a small but swelling segment of the tourismmarket has been drawn to places like Chad, the Democratic Republicof Congo’s Virunga National Park, which was recently closed aftertwo British tourists were kidnapped and their ranger killed, andwar-torn Central African Republic. Tour operator Thomas Cook GroupPLC recently sent a delegation to Sierra Leone, which has struggledwith civil war and more recently an Ebola epidemic, to discussoffering package tours.

“There is a trend recently of interest in ‘unexplored’ places,”said André Rodrigues Aquino, a senior natural-resources managementspecialist at the World Bank, who advises African

governments on their tourism sector. “It’s very linked tonature, places that have pristine unspoiled nature.”

The numbers are small compared with sub-Saharan Africa’s broadertourism market of $43.7 billion in 2017, according to the WorldTravel & Tourism Council. But countries with the strongestgrowth in international arrivals in 2016 compared with a yearearlier were Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Eritrea and Togo, according tothe African Development Bank.

“A lot of people who have traveled previously, particularly inAfrica, are looking for different experiences in different places,”said Peter Fearnhead, chief executive of African Parks, anongovernmental organization that manages 15 national parks inpartnership with governments across Africa. “The fact that [theseplaces are] so edgy, we’re finding that there’s an increasinginterest.”

The niche but expanding market for frontier tourism in fractioussecurity environments has governments and companies seeking tobalance revenue potential against the investments and know-howneeded to ensure safety.

Oil-rich Gabon, a sparsely-populated country the size ofColorado on Africa’s Atlantic seaboard, has one of the highestper-capita incomes in sub-Saharan Africa and is one of the morestable countries in the continent’s central region. But when Mr.White took the reins of the country’s newly created national-parksagency in 2009, the vast nature reserves that cover about 20% ofthe country existed essentially only on paper.

= “The first priority when I was appointed was to manage theparks and when necessary, defend them,” Mr. White said. He createdantipoaching units and armed rapid-response teams to push, withmuch success, ivory poachers out of the parks.

There are exceptions. Parks officers have had two gunbattleswith illegal gold miners in a park called Birougou in the past sixmonths, Mr. White said.

At Zakouma, a national park in the desert nation of Chad,poachers had massacred about 90% of the park’s elephants by thetime African Parks took over its management in 2010. Since then,the group has transformed the region into a haven for one ofAfrica’s largest single herds, now about 560 elephants strong. Byestablishing flights to link the park with Chad’s capital city— andjoining with a group of private guides as part of the marketingstrategy—the park’s revenue is expected to be just under a $1million this year, up from about $50,000 in 2015.

The mobile-tented safari experience that African Parks offers isbooked about 18 months in advance, but it takes a maximum of justeight guests at a time and is limited to the dry season.

“It’s not a sustainable solution for the park,” said StuartSlabbert, head of conservation-led economic development for AfricanParks.

Experts say national parks across the continent will struggle toexpand their tourism revenue without a cooperative and supportivegovernment.

In Gabon, Mr. White’s plans have been aided by his closerelationship with current President Ali Bongo Ondimba, establishedwhile his father, Omar Bongo Ondimba, was still in power. ThoughGabon is

theoretically a democracy, the elder Mr. Bongo ruled for 42years and the current president, who took over when he died in2009, won close, tense elections in 2016 marred by accusations offraud that ignited countrywide rioting.

This year, Mr. White began actively marketing safari-type tripsto the parks for the first time. Possible sightings include seaturtles hatching on the country’s beaches, humpback whalesbreaching in the surf and Western lowland gorillas lazing whiletheir babies climb and swing around trees: a literal junglegym.

“It’s not savanna tourism. You have to work to see this stuff,“said Michael Nichols, a photographer who took a picture of Gabon’ssurfing hippos that Time magazine calls one of the 100 mostinfluential images of all time. “That doesn’t preclude that it’sfrigging unbelievable. It could be like the Amazon.”