Amakove Wala, the medic behind Wanderlust Diaries

Harriet James @nharriet86jim

For most of people, home was the safest place to be last year when the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions forced everyone indoors.

For Dr Amakove Wala, a health practitioner, the travel restrictions fuelled a passion to create a group where people could share their travel experiences and escape the limitations of life during lockdown. 

The Facebook page, Wanderlust Diaries, has now more than 300,000 members and was inspired by her own passion to share her travel experiences  with her children.

So impactful was her group that she was featured in the #realpeoplerealstoriescampaign, a partnership between Facebook and Creative Garage to tell the everyday stories of real people bringing change in communities. 

“I was interviewed by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook and it felt so great to be recognised. The Tourism Confederation and the Kenya Tourism Board also congratulated me for placing Kenya on the map,” she says.

Amakove adds that being interviewed by one of the leading social media apps brought about authenticity and stability in the group as the trolls left.

She also received training from Facebook on how to better the group, increase engagement and to keep it safe. 

For the mother of four, travel has been a way through which she gains independence, rejuvenates and learns about the world.

When she gave birth to her triplets, Amakove began carrying them along in her travels as she believes it exposes them to experience different cultures and practical things they might not learn in school. 

“Travel makes them experience things in real times and refreshes their memory on things they have forgotten.

It also makes them realise they are not living in a sheltered space and they don’t need gadgets to have fun, but can do something outdoors,” she says.

And when she travelled, she would document her experience on social media. This is what gave her the confidence to start the group.

However, this is not the first time that she has ever tried starting a group. She has another Facebook group called ‘Multiple Blessings’ that was set up when she gave birth to her triplets and didn’t know how to go about parenting. 

“The group was created for parents or siblings who have multiples and there are presently over 786 families on it.  There’s a lot of psycho-social support there because people walk with each other and answer your inquiries,” she explains.

Fast growth

Unlike this parenting group that took long to grow, her Wanderlust Dairies grew so fast that within 24 hours over 10,000 people had joined the group sharing their travel memories. 

To give the members confidence to share their experiences, Amakove posts her travel experiences with her children. However, the challenging bit became controlling the content.

“This made me get a friend, who also loves travelling, to assist me in moderating the posts.

The unfortunate bit is that people love bullying others; they project their anger towards people so there is a lot of body shaming. Luckily, a majority of Kenyans have learnt how to stand up for others,” she explains. 

The health enthusiast is glad of the change the group is bringing to the travel industry and how hopeful members have become when it comes to travel.

For instance, some members have shared that they have travelled abroad for the first time or for a social cause or that they taken their parents on their first trip.

“I also sit at Kenya Private Sector Alliance where we have a tourism sector that has been hit badly by the pandemic. 

The group is also giving feedback to the tourism sector and we’ve pulled in members of the Kenya Tourism Federation and Board, county governments just to show them how much Kenyans want to travel, only that we need to package our destinations to be right for them.

Some rates are exorbitant and not everything has to be that expensive or to be quoted in dollars,” she says.

Ready market

They try to avoid posts related to politics or religion as they evoke strong emotions. Amakove and her team try as hard as they can to ensure people do not post too many advertisements so as not to lose the essence of why the group was created.

They also restrict paid adverts to just one post a day. For now, they are trying to see how well they can make the group interactive to make it alive and have registered it as a company to protect its name. 

Amakove believes that currently people are more confident to get out and explore the country more compared to the first days when people were scared because of Covid-19. 

They are also going beyond borders and advising others in the group on what to expect. The north is also opening up and more people are touring counties like West Pokot, Baringo and Turkana.

Through the group, she has also learnt a lot about other places in Kenya such as Mambrui in Malindi.

Amakove says the local market is ready only that stakeholders ought to be better equipped in terms of providing the right information, pricing and experiences.

She also believes more support ought to go to the young tour operators in the industry who are creating employment for themselves. 

Being that she has a demanding career as a health practitioner, Amakove ensures that every school holiday she takes leave for a week to be with her children and releases her house help and she plans with her children on their next travel destination. 

“We plan and sometimes take a vote on the destination where we will go because I realised that not all my children want to go to the same place.

In most instances, we do road trips and I’m the one who usually drives them and this gives me the autonomy of stopping in places,” she says in conclusion.