[QUOTE]Originally posted by Roman:
[B]Richard,
local guides making a big difference to the safety of desert travel.....
Point well taken and you may well be right, although local guides haven't helped in the routine robberies in Niger and there haven't been similar situations in recent years in Algeria with which to test whether local guides would have helped the fate of the 31.
I suspect that the point being made about local guides by the tourist agencies has more to do with a marketing opportunity on their part than anything else. As such, my feeling is that the moment they chose to make this point was ill-judged on their part.
The priority is to sort out a mess that clearly hasn't come about through someone using GPS or holding a map upside-down or, incredibly, a sand storm that seems to have gone on for 2 months! Such comments in the media just derail other well intentioned efforts and have now irritated me enough to write the earlier comments!
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