Perhaps the fly fishing travel trade should consider taking a page from the Rick Steves playbook and cancel all their 2022 trips to Russia?
Our mission at RSE is to help Americans better know and understand our neighbors through travel. But when we bring travelers to another country, we also bring their dollars — dollars that would support Putin’s aggression. Therefore, we have canceled all 2022 tours that include a stop in Russia as of today.
Litvinenko’s poisoning in London in 2005 followed by the “three hitmen in Britain to look at a fine medieval cathedral” Salisbury poisonings of the Skripals in 2018 ended the since the mid-1990s love affair with the salmon rivers of the Kola Peninsula of three elderly Britfishers of my acquaintance – they stopped fishing in Russia. One of them used to take an annual family and friends and friends of those friends group almost big enough to book out an entire fishing camp. Other Brits, I’ve been told in recent years, did the same and moved their overseas salmon-fishing attentions back to their former foreign fishy haunts, Iceland and Norway.
Continuing to support the Russian economy via fishing tourist dollars should stop. Just as divesting from apartheid South Africa was necessary to change that immoral regime, the same type of pressure needs to be applied to Putin’s Russia. Thanks for raising this issue.
Tangential – I keep wondering what it’s like for Russian hockey players in the National Hockey League dressing rooms now that Putin is running amuck?