Egypt Tourism Quotes

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

أنتِ تحبين مصر تماماً كما تحبين عرضاً طريفاً فى السيرك أو حيواناً نادراً فى حديقة الحيوان.لكن صدقينى.أن تولدى مصرية,فهذه مأساة!!

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

All this may seem trivial. But in 1997 such corruption at the bottom end of the tourism industry helped to allow a band of heavily armed jihadists to breeze their way through numerous police and army checkpoints leading to the Hatshepsut Temple, near Luxor. There they proceeded to massacre dozens of tourists and Egyptians before escaping into the desert unhindered. Before the attack, the priority of many local soldiers and cops had been to extract bribes from locals working with tour groups, smoke cigarettes, and sleep away the long hot summer afternoons in the backs of their vans.

Some people travel for the culture, or the place’s history, or the sheer experience. Our aim is total dissolution. We travel from Egypt to Estonia, big clunky blocks of metal hanging from our necks, naïve and stuttering and asking all the right questions at all the right times—“Is this the Great Wall I’ve been hearing so much about?”—flashing a few photos and no one looks twice, except maybe to point and laugh but we are just harmless Americans come for a tour of life on the other side.

Tourism Minister Zoheir Garranah has been quoted as saying that hassle is a bigger threat to Egypt's tourism industry than the bombs of militants, and has acknowledged that many tourists, frustrated at being accosted by touts, leave the country "with a bitter taste and vowing never to return." Even for an Arabic speaker, peeling them off can prove a Herculean task, the last resort being a threat of violence.

But in northern Sinai, there is hardly any tourism. Tourist villages built by the Egyptian government along the northern coast are effectively ghost towns, and the small Al-Arish industrial zone and the airport are not enough to support the Bedouin families. Promises of new projects and financial aid for housing or employment have, as the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz put it in an October 2007 article, "turned into a joke." As ever in Egypt, there were grand plans and feasibility studies, but in reality no large factories have been built since 2001, and the total number of people employed in the factories that already exist is reported to be less than five thousand.

Luxor attack in 1997 in which Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya killed fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians outside a pharaonic temple. In the same year, an ambush near the Egyptian museum in downtown Cairo by the group took the lives of nine tourists. In 1995, eighteen Greek tourists had been killed close to the Pyramids. But the violence was not only directed at the ‘infidel Westerners’ (though they, and the tourism industry, were especially prized victims). Egyptians also suffered: between 1982 and 2000, more than 2,000 Egyptians died in terror attacks – from the speaker of parliament to a number of secular writers and commentators (for example, Farag Foda, a prominent and controversial writer, was assassinated in 1992, and in 1994 an assassination attempt was made against Egypt's Nobel Literature Laureate Naguib Mahfouz), to a series of senior police officers,39 and children caught up in the blasts.

It’s the money. A lot of money. And lower risk than being a real thief. Truth be told, most governments don’t really care what happens to their artifacts—not enough to arrest anyone . . . or shoot. Except for Egypt, that is, but with the right palms greased, it’s a moot point. After three revolutions, the tourism industry is shot and they’re hurting for cash. Another perk is I actually get credit for the work I do—not screwed over by some talentless dick of a postdoc who spends more time trying to stare down my shirt than dig . . .