Greenberg touring again with country’s highest ranking guide
With one notable exception, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan seemed to enjoy guiding American journalist Peter Greenberg around her country for the television show “The Royal Tour.”
The time spent recording voiceovers she could have done without.
“You tortured me!” the African leader needled Greenberg at a New York screening of the show, which is airing on PBS stations.
“The Royal Tour,” a periodic feature on PBS for more than two decades, is just as the name implies. The veteran travel journalist, and by extension his viewers, are shown a nation’s points of interest by the country’s leader. Mexico, Israel, Ecuador, Rwanda and Poland have all been featured in the past decade.
“It’s the one show where I’m not the tour guide,” Greenberg said. “I’m the visitor. And it’s the one where I’m happy to be that way, because who knows a country better than the person who runs it?”
Tanzania is the first royal tour since the start of the pandemic, which briefly grounded Greenberg.
When the shutdown began, “I was in a bunker, like everyone else,” said Greenberg, who is at the center of his own empire as travel editor of CBS News. He hosts the regular program “Eye on Travel” for CBS Radio and “The Travel Detective” on PBS.
His bunker was in New York City’s borough of Manhattan. Restless, he began rediscovering his neighborhood like a traveler, spotting one bronze plaque that honored a New Yorker who died on the Titanic.
Hassan’s royal tour program unfolds like most of them. Greenberg gives a brief historical sketch of a country and illustrates where it is located, and is shown arriving at the leader’s official residence for an interview. Then, they take in the sights.
In Tanzania, they wandered around a marketplace and toured a primary school in Zanzibar, surveyed the majestic Mount Kilimanjaro from the air, saw mining of the rare Tanzanite gemstone and went on a safari in the Serengeti National Park. Hassan got behind the wheel, driving for what she said was the first time in 15 years.
Hassan also had a more sobering stop, a huge government warehouse stuffed with ivory confiscated from poachers, which allowed her to talk about the illegal trade that has decimated the elephant population.
“The Royal Tour” is often filmed as if Greenberg and the leader are taking in near-empty tourist sites alone, but selfaware producers sometimes pull the cameras back. In Israel, it looks like Greenberg is taking a boat ride down the River
Jordan just with thenPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family, until another view shows them surrounded by other boats stuffed with aides, a security detail and the press.
To participate in “The Royal Tour,” Greenberg needs a leader who is comfortable speaking English, is willing to give up at least a day for filming and who cedes all editorial control — the latter requirement one that some potential participants chafe against.
“When I was doing it, I never knew it would come out like this,” Hassan said after viewing the episode on her country.
While not necessarily valentines, “The Royal Tour” does offer countries that want to boost their tourism a unique opportunity to show off their features to millions of potential travelers.
Hassan clearly recognized this when an audience member at the screening asked her the best time of year to plan a visit.
June or July, she said. But don’t limit yourself.
“You can come anytime,” she said. “We can stop the rains for you.”