From the snowcapped Ruwenzoris, the ‘Mountains of the Moon’ described by Ptolemy, to lush rainforest and arid desert, the Ugandan landscape offers a rich variety for the adventurous traveller. Abundant with flora and fauna, it boasts the source of the River Nile, waterfalls like the impressive Murchison Falls and two of Africa’s greatest lakes, Lake Victoria and Lake Albert… Uganda is safari country [sic] without a doubt, and all the famous wildlife of Africa is there to be seen and photographed.
Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland.
DYSTOPIA
Image Source: Jonas Skorpil. This picture speaks everything of yearning, searching, hoping
It was 24 January, 1971, and for Nicholas Garrigan, the fictional protagonist of the novel highlighted above, this was going meant to be a remarkable day, the day he arrived Uganda from Britain to be the adventurous doctor and white hat he had always dreamt up in his mind. And if nothing else, Nicholas was sure that Uganda had just the right dose of exploratoriness he needed to quell the Gulliver's spirit in him; at least his trusted guidebook, Uganda For Travellers by Charles Sabon Frazer told him that much. Well, it turned out there were many other things the guidebook failed to mention, such as the fact that Uganda wasn't just a beautiful jungle with enthralling landscapes and watery magnificence; it was also a place of bad civilisation and good wine-loving people. It also didn't quite mention the fact that on the arrival of Mr. Garrigan, yet another coup d' etat will erupt, leaving foreigners and travelers alike benumbed. Hence, Nicholas' faithful guidebook failed in many ways and left him no choice but to be his own traveler and guide.
Going forward, it's 23 April, 2018. Several broadcasting platforms are all ablaze with the news of 32 Chinese tourists who have been killed and injured in a major traffic accident in the south of Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, due to certain avoidable circumstances...
No doubt, these fictional and factual accounts bring to the fore the wide range of dangers faced by those with a strong, irresistable knack for exploring unknown territories and seeking homes away from home. And not just that, they also call into question the efficacy of the various travel aids that are supposedly meant to avert all such crises that come with crossing familiar borders into unfamiliar places for whatever reason. Online reviews, travel agencies, pamphlets and journals or blogs- nothing quite prepares us adequately for what Robinson Crusoe called the dystopia of "the common allurement of seafaring."
Well, I can rightly say that traveling and the many other indentations that come with it is about to take a new course with Cool Cousin on the block, or better put, on the blockchain.
UTOPIA
Image Source: Cool Cousin
True enough, the rather huge, centralised industry of travel and tourism has seen a couple of evolving trends that have, in a way, made traveling less of a "donkey, drudgery and inn" affair for people. These welcomed trends were only possible, in the first place, because they were in sync with the internet age. So that with online travel agencies like Expedia, Agoda and Priceline; online bread and breakfast platforms liie Airbnb and thousands and thousands of travel advices in form of reviews from the several voices housed on TripAdvisor and the likes, one would think travelers would be quite at ease with making the right choices.
But as shown by the really bad experiences recorded by many on several social platforms, this is not really the case. Now, the problem with the available traveling top-ups and tips on the internet is not just the issue of monopolistic capitalism, profit-oriented SEO manipulation, and information overload, it is that, more than the couched flight seats, cosy hotels, luxurious restaurants, and exotic gaze-locking sights, what a traveler really seeks is a close, credible companion, someone who is oddly familiar in the most unfamiliar of territories, someone such traveler can smile to and say,
Wow! Why does it feel like I have known you like forever?
July 2016 saw the inception of an invention masterminded by a team of 17 talented people who saw the need to hand one and every traveler a friend, no, even deeper, a cousin in every local town. This vision conceived the long-awaited 'Messiah' called Cool Cousin. Cool Cousin contrived a platform where travelers could connect with locals who know the nooks and crannies of their desired destinations. Now, these cousins situated in over 65 destinations won't just provide general information about the place they live, but based on the algorithm with which the website is configured, they will narrow down their information to include their own taste, idiosyncrasies and personal flavour.
This way, a traveler who nurtures the same flairs as a cousin could just as well find just what he/she is looking for by treading on the same landmark spots as the cousin. And what’s more, if such traveler feels the need for a personal connection or touch with the friendly cousin that is unconventionally serving as a travel agent, such chatty rendezvous is made available on Cool Cousin.
So say you want you want to come to Nigeria, where I come from, and you are quite as booky a person as I am, you could lay hold of my distinct map and travel review on Cool Cousin (I hope this becomes possible soon enough) and hook up with the places I frequent (In this case, you would be seeing pins placed all over libraries, bookshops, drugstores and cyber cafes- boring right?) Well, if you feel there is still something more I could tell you about books, then you could chat me up and we would be talking about book readings, literary festivals and just what Nigerian author you should read.
It's like a puzzle game - the traveler has an incomplete piece of some puzzling destination, and this puzzle becomes very well completed by a jolly good cousin who has all the remaining treasured pieces of the puzzle on a gameboard, or in the case, on the Cool Cousin website or app.
Judging by presence of over 500,000 travelers and 1000 cousins on the platform, translating into comment and accolades, Cool Cousin is definitely succeeding in helping many people solve many puzzles. It indeed is "a ready made itinerary from a kindred spirit, rather than a tired tourist trap top ten." (Cool Cousin Whitepaper 15).
For me, with every sense of decorum I can muster, I must say Cool Cousin is everything an embodiment of an utopic reality.
I mean who would I rather consult were I opportuned to go to a place like Guadalajara in Mexico: A company's website whose content is created from the comfort of a bedroom in New York or a resident drinking tequila, telling me about his elder brother's wife's cool breakfast and bed spot, and probably reminding me all over again about how I must not fail to stop by on my visit to dance to his mariachi tunes? I think this quite says it all. Just like it was said on Cool Cousin's Twitter page-"
One more thing, I was wondering why a cousin, why not sister, brother or friend or even grandma or grandpa, then it occurred to me that apart from the fact that it is a generic nomenclature, it conveys that sense of close-knittedness without betraying the very particular generic intonations popularised. Besides, have you ever heard this saying by Courtney Cox?
Cousins are people that are ready made friends, you have laughs with them and remember good times... You always know you love each other, they are a better thing than brothers and sisters and friends cause there are all pieced together as one.
Hey, hol' up, I gat pictures of my own place which is a must see-
So, this is my cloudy, rowdy and distinct hood taken with my phone.
ELDORADO
If there's any one place that can be compared with the erstwhile lost city of Eldorado, it is the blockchain. It's sprawling wealth of resources and opportunities for everybody alike has its weight in gold. In this light, it is only expected that such an utopic platform as Cool Cousin creates a nice niche for itself within the complex rung of the blockchain. Not only does this give Cousins within the platform a reliable stream of income, it also makes talking about the places someone loves suddenly become so much fun. Again, the throes of commercialisation which looms over quality services freely offered is gladly trapped and shown the way out with Cool Cousin developing a viable system of rewarding quality engagements with the blockchain innovation. These and many more are what makes CUZ, the Ethereum-based crypto token that has evolved from Cool Cousin, a welcome development. With the CUZ, Cool Cousin is revolutionising traveling and making it a decentralised tight grid whereby travelers and locals alike exchange ideas in an web chain consisting of two thick threads (the company and the community) and benefit from the community reward pool for their engagements. Hence, both the travelers and locals get to have a deep sense of joy and fulfillment wherever they are, home or abroad.
What's more, in this Eldorado the Cool Cousin platform via its adoption of CUZ has created, there is a room for everyone- the locals, acting as Cousins, get rewarded for their helpful, qualitative contents; some cousins will fancy their role of being a cousin and will take to being pro-cousins that act as personal tour guides and get paid in cool CUZ tokens which are easily transactable (they can even become a member of the board of representatives in time); travelers who use the platform gainfully will enjoy the thrills of traveling because with every contribution they make ranging from simply saying thank you to the cousins, promoting the platform with selfies plastered all over other social media platforms to pointing out and correcting lapses contained in particular information, they get more CUZ added to their wallets. Not only that, these travelers can just as well as buy the CUZ tokens, become editors with constant, consistent contributions. Business owners are not left out. Just as the Cool Cousin Whitepaper precisely states,
In the future, business owners, AirBnB hosts and independent vendors whose businesses have been recommended by a Cousin, will be able to manage their pages on the platform. Promoted content and special offers will be distinguished from Cousin content, and must be approved by the Community... For example, in 2017 we collaborated with bike-rental service Donkey Bikes. They created a map layer of all their docks in the city, which can be turned on or off by users and does not disrupt user experience. (Cool Cousin Whitepaper 25, 34).
All in all, Cool Cousin and its resultant [CUZ token] (https://www.coolcousin.com/ico) aim to revert, decentralize and humanise the system and practice of tourism and travel. As there is "no single source of truth when it comes to taste" (Whitepaper 25), there should be no single authority when it comes to making a suitable, tasty decision about traveling.
If you don't already know, Eldorado is a lost city of gold believed to lie deep within South America. While some people have discarded as a myth, many others such as a foretold gallant knight have gone in search of this city, even having to pass through the dreaded "Valley of Shadows" just to catch a glimpse of this sterling glory. Well, it won't be out of place on my part to say that Eldorado, this paradise of wealth and opportunities is right amidst us, in the shape and bearing of a travel app called Cool Cousin.
Look at it this way: what if Nicholas Garrigan, our fictional traveler, had access to such a platform as Cool Cousin where he could find a veritable cousin that would not just warn him about the heat in Uganda or about the history of the Speke hotel where he first lodged but would warn him about his wrong timing due to the intense power play between President Obote and Idi Amin Dada and its resultant coup d'etat? What if the Chinese tourists had interacted with a cousin residing in Pyongyang who forewarned that with the heavy rain falling at that moment in the capital city of North Korea, it wasn't quite a good time to visit the historical sites related to China's military intervention in the 1950-53 Korean war? Without doubt, a lot of heartaches and painful memories would have been avoided. This goes quite a mile to say that with Cool Cousin planting a taprooted global, decentralised ecosystem in the travel industry, powered by CUZ, a sort of paradise will soon be regained.
You want more information about Cool Cousin? Then visit these places -
Cool Cousin Website
VIDEOS
I found these videos on YouTube, and I think they are quite helpful in understanding the whole system.
Need I say I would want to be a cool cousin in my local environment anytime Cool Cousin happens to cross into my homeland?
So, this post is an entry to a sponsored contest organised by 
cc2018