Marina Mahathir Wants To Help Women Travel Safer With This New Website

Malaysia-based website Zafigo, founded by Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir offers tips, guides and insights to make travels better, safer and more interesting for women travelling both for work and for leisure. Zafigo highlights travel from a woman’s perspective. “Travel is a very gendered business. Female travellers have very different concerns from male travellers. For one thing, we have to be far more alert to physical dangers than men, and if we travel on business, we have to think a bit more about culture, local customs, behaviours and norms. These concerns are rarely covered in other major travel websites”, explained Datin Paduka Marina.

"In the work that I do, I travel a lot to funny places. I realised that there's alot of cultural stuff you just cant get information from, particularly like how to dress. I don't always travel to Europe, that’s easy, you know how to dress for that. But if you travel in Asia, and you’re Asian, there are different expectations of you. I couldn’t find any information because a lot of the website that caters to women travellers are written from a western point of view and very corporate- they just wear business suits.

If I went to India and I wore a business suit, what sort of message am I sending? This sort of cultural nuances used to bother me because you don't want to send the wrong message. Since I couldn't find any information, I always thought that it would be good to have a website like Zafigo."

"It’s not easy to find information on cultural nuances of a particular country. In many countries, people are simply not used to women working. I’ve heard stories of women leaders walking into a room of all men, and the men told them to get out. I think the trouble with Western websites is that it's a given that women work. I've been to an advertising agency in India where I saw that the offices were just filled with men. It's visually very strange. How do you deal with that? It's sort of awkward sometimes."

"You’re finding that this type of information is becoming more necessary for women. I met this New Zealand woman minister at a woman’s conference and she said 'Yes, absolutely, we need a website like this'. She was on a mission to Afghanistan and had the full security briefing from her foreign office. By the end of that she asked 'What do I wear?' and they couldn't tell her. Because they’re all men, they don't have to have to worry, they wear suits and that’s okay. But we’re female, we’re gonna enter spaces where it’s mostly men."

"I like to see new things, I like to visit places."

Work aside, Marina often travels with her family. "I try to fit in maybe two holiday trips a year with my family. Every time we travel as a family we try and go to a new place. The idea is to be able to do things together, and not all split up to do your own thing, then we might as well not go on holiday. I took my two daughters and my niece to Paris last year for an art tour because they all like art. I gave them a choice of what to see. Each one could choose something that they like, but the rule is that we all have to go and see all these things together, and not slip out. And it was really good. Sometimes you get to do what you want, other times other people get to do what they want."

"What I appreciate most about travelling is seeing how big the world it, how diverse the world is, but also how similar the world is."

"Travelling humbles you. You think you've got everything so great and then you go and somewhere else has buildings of thousands over years old, what do you have to compare? I was in Cairo last year and I went to the museum. I was looking at Tutankhamun’s mask and it’s 6,000 years old, it’s unbelievable! You can't believe that you are looking at something that’s possibly 6,000 years old! How can you be arrogant about anything once you see things like that? I think that’s the greatest thing about travel."

"Most people don't know very much about Malaysia. People sometimes don't have any idea, we are a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy, what’s that like? Foreigners notice straightaway that everyone here is different. I think that’s like the first thing we talk about. Because Malaysia is so unique in many ways. You have to explain there’s Muslims and there’s Muslims. One of the ambassadors here, the most amazing thing he found is that there’re girls in tudung walking around girls with shorts. You don't actually see this in many countries. The fact that these two are side by side with no issues. And we live here, we don't notice this. And that’s something to say. That says a lot."

"We expect certain things already, we take for granted so many things in our lives. I went to Kenya once, and you see along the side of the roads and highways people just walking, just walking everywhere. They can't afford cars, they can't afford motorcycles, they can't afford bicycles, so they walk. You'll see for a thousand miles people just walking. Over here (Malaysia), people walk to taxi stands or LRT stations, not from A to B. This sort of things makes me go 'Oh my God, we have gone the wrong way. We have.” I've visited slums in Kenya, one of the largest slums in the world, and it can be quite shocking and unnerving. We don't have anything, ANYTHING, like the slums in Nairobi or Dhaka. It gives you an idea of the relative comfort that we’re in. We have no right to complain because there’s so many things that we can improve, we should always be on the track to improve. But comparatively, wow, we’re so lucky to be born here. So that happened, luck."

"There are plenty we can learn from other countries, as long as we are humble enough to accept that we can learn from others. The trouble is very often we think that we know it all, and we don't need to learn anything. There are many places that have really interesting transport system. There are lots of things that people do really well, whether it's to make life easier for their citizens, for places to look nicer, clear or whatever, there’s just lots of things to learn from."

"I think there many places in the world that used to be advanced, more advanced than us, and are now not. And I think that’s another thing that we should always remember. We can easily go backwards if we don't watch out. In the 60's Manila was way ahead of us. And now it’s not. So don't think that we’ll always stay ahead of people. We can easily go backwards and become what would be considered third world if all the margins move forward."

"I think the fear is real. I don't know if anyone realizes, it is very real. There are so many problems but no body is sitting down rationally thinking out solutions, so the possibility of us going backwards is always there. Plus, of course, global economic development, globalization, the price of oil dropping and wiped out our GDP just like that, we have no cushions at all. We could easily become Bangladesh. Dhaka University used to be way ahead of ours, some of our people used to work there. Now, it’s just.... All these things can change easily. We have no reason to be arrogant about anything."

"We've got to talk about bad things too, safety concerns, taxi who will rip you off and all that. That is something we are really mindful of, that Zafigo is not going to be a tourist website, that its got to be real, its got to be of genuine service to women who travel, then we’ve got to talk about real things."