Honeymoon in Egypt

I try to avoid blogging on personal issues since I consider it a lazy form of writing. But Steve Denbeste’s essay on the decline of the French tourism industry reminded me of my last trip overseas: my honeymoon in Egypt.

The wife wanted to go on safari in Africa, but I steadfastly refused to go sub-Saharan. The compromise was a cruise down the Nile river with stops in Luxor, Edfu, the Valley of the Kings, Memphis, and of course the Pyramids. The last standing wonder of the world truly is beyond comprehension or description. But my standard response whenever I’m asked about Egypt is: “I’m glad I went, but I’ll never go back again.”

The begging is relentless.

It’s not just street urchins, one of which ran behind our carriage wailing in a foreign tongue, hands outstretched. It also took the form of gentle gouging by bellhops, taxi drivers, bartenders and storeowners. It was as if I had “American ATM” tattooed across my forehead. Egypt has a special “Tourism Police” whose sole purpose is to protect tourists and the hard cash they bring to the country. (Egypt’s tourist trade – the top revenue generator for the country – topped $4 billion in 1999) The final straw was when one of these “policemen” took me aside, allegedly to show me some Sphinx statues, and then rubbed thumb to forefinger in the international symbol for “can I have a dollar?” Our final day before flying back, we hired a taxi driver to take us to the Pyramids one last time. We negotiated a price at the hotel only to find it had inflated somewhere along the way. I nearly punched him. There were other incidents I won’t mention here.

On top of this, October 1992 saw the first incident of terrorism aimed at tourists, occurring in the middle of our trip (there would be more to come). The crew of our tiny cruise ship huddled around the radio trying to figure out how this would affect their business. Meanwhile, I tried to get an English language news broadcast on my shortwave. Tourism revenue started to slide soon afterward and Egypt would lose an estimated $1 billion in tourism revenue in 1997 after terrorists massacred 58 tourists at Luxor. And as this October 2001 New York Times article indicates, Western tourism has evaporated after 9/11:

Tour operators there said they could not remember seeing a single American at the famous monuments since the attacks, with cancellations running between 70 and 80 percent for the fall. Visitors from Scandinavia, Britain, Japan and Australia have also all but disappeared.

And it’s not just Egypt:

Egypt is not alone in this. Saudi Arabia's nascent tour industry, for example, was expecting 35 to 40 groups from the United States and Europe to visit the southern Asir region between September and January. All of them canceled.

Well boo-hoo for Egypt, France and Saudi Arabia. I think American tourists are going to be much less tolerant of the tight-smiled mendacity of people who are silently contemptuous of (or hostile to) the United States. As for me, the last big vacation I took was at Walt Disney World. Yes, it was expensive, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least all my money was staying in America.