For the last two weeks, despite any appearance of activity on this blog, I have been on a blissful holiday in Zanzibar. There, I’ve said it – NGO wonks take holidays, sometimes quite nice ones. Feels as if I’m breaking some kind of taboo, like admitting that we get paid. And climate change just adds to the guilt (in case you’re wondering, I offset the flights, on the basis that while offsetting may be a largely futile exercise in assuaging guilt – see here for great spoof – not offsetting has to be worse). Am now waiting for some kind of lightning bolt to strike me down. But holidays for a development wonk have to be chosen with particular care. In addition to the normal criteria, there are a few extras. Normal criteria: Hot and nice when the UK is grey, cold and miserable (i.e. most of the year); Decent wildlife Good food Some degree of common communication (to avoid the utter helplessness experienced as a tourist in places like Indonesia or Beijing) Able to fix your own programme (no packages please, both because they’re rubbish and because enclave tourism doesn’t do as much for the local economy) Rich politics, culture, architecture etc And some wonk-specific ones No Oxfam programme (so I don’t feel guilty about not saying hello/ feel like I’m working by saying hello) Very limited internet access to prevent temptation ‘just to check my emails’ Not too expensive (NGO wages and all that) Sufficiently used to mzungu/gringo visitors for you not to feel like a freak show every time you leave the hotel Zanzibar rates highly against most of these (I won’t make you jealous by spelling out just how highly). Most failings were down to Englishness – mine or other people’s. The Indian crows introduced by the English seem to have eaten all the local birdlife, I actually missed the cold, and the most stressful downside was, of course bargaining. I’ll leave it to Monty Python to explain how it works. Any suggestions for other top wonk holiday destinations (if I manage to save up enough ever to do this again)? And with that, I must now turn off my ‘out of office’ message and plunge into the backlog of a couple of thousand unread emails. Wonder what would happen if I just deleted the lot?]]>