Hello from Luxor! Today we visited Hathor’s Temple at Dendera. Tomorrow we fly back to Cairo, do a 4-hour cooking class, then the following day we’ll visit a real, working archaeological dig. I am still blown away by how awesome all 15 of these women are. Without a doubt this is the best one of these journey’s I’ve run so far.
Next week we’ll resume regular newsletter programming here, but for today I’ve put together an essay about the challenges and nuances of tourism in general, using all the fascinating, brilliant, and troubling things I’ve learned about Egypt in particular. I’ve been chewing on these questions for a while: What does it mean for a tourist to want an ‘authentic’ experience of a place? What does it mean when a place has been fundamentally changed be centuries of tourism? How can we seek to learn and understand the ‘real’ version of a place without imposing our ideas on it before we’ve even arrived? What does it mean to sit with the undeniable reality of fundamental economic inequality? In the last seven days I strung together some examples from Cairo, Aswan, and Luxor, to see if I could come up with any answers. It’s a work-in-progress, but as you can imagine, it’s subject matter I’ll revisit in the months and years to come.
Also, you’ve got a week left to pitch me your idea for BriLeeRama! I explained it all in my editor’s letter in the March edition of News & Reviews Magazine here. It’s a paid gig and I’ve kept the pitch form super short. Send me your ideas!
Finally, please do pre-order The Work and get a ticket for my launch in your city. Events are coming for Townsville and Maleny too. All the links are here.
Modern and Ancient Egypt: on tourism, authenticity, and economics
We met near reception and our guide, Ahmed, said to us that we would be taking a small boat to the Nubian villages on Elephantine to see ‘how people actually live, today.’ In other words: not the way the Nubians perform their past for tourists. When we arrived we met our Nubian guide, whose name was also Ahmed, and he showed us around his town. Over dinner at his cousin’s home that night we sipped fresh guava juice and he explained that he was about to turn 60 and everything had changed since he was young. Whereas the locals on Elephantine used to be farmers and labourers, now they built guesthouses and ran small shops for visitors. Every single person he knows works in ‘tourism’ in some way now. We carried our dishes inside to the small kitchen and told the cook her food was delicious. Our guide Ahmed takes groups to one of a few different families in the village each time they visit, to spread the money and work. I love eating this way because it’s always the most delicious food, and because it means our dollars are going straight to families and specifically to women.
The Tourism in Egypt Wikipedia page says tourism is one of the country’s ‘leading sources of income’ and absolutely ‘crucial’ for their economy. On one of our long bus journeys Ahmed told us about his two decades of experience in the industry, and explained the well-known phrase in Egypt that ‘tourism gets sick but it never dies’. It got sick in 2011 with the revolution, then in 2013 when ‘the second revolution’ happened that’s when it got ‘almost dead’. Arrivals gradually increased until 2019, then COVID hit, and it dropped by about 70%. 2024 was about to be the biggest year on record, according to the industry predictions Ahmed had seen, but since the invasion of Gaza there has been another 70% drop. In particular, the Americans have been cancelling.
As we travel in the bus I’ve been reading to everyone out loud from A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson, and in it he writes about how, in the first half of the 1800s, tourism was already changing the country.
‘Egypt’s capital had changed considerably since Champollion’s expedition fourteen years earlier. [Compared to 1842.] Most noticeably, perhaps, was the huge increase in the number of resident Europeans. What had been a relatively small community of around 3,000 in 1836 had grown to a sizeable population of 50,000 by the end of the 1840s.’
That surge forced all kinds of industrial and cultural developments. Muhammad Ali of Egypt was overseeing the rapid modernisation of the nation, doing some things wonderfully and some things horrifically. In the almost 200 years since, Egyptian economic and industrial development has been inextricably connected to its capacity to draw a crowd. Modern Egypt’s business is ancient Egypt.
There’s also the phenomenon of domestic tourism, which upsets the easy dichotomy of ‘tourist = foreigner’ versus ‘resident = local’. There’s a government initiative well underway here that encourages Egyptian citizens to get more interested and educated in their country’s history by providing cheap accommodation and their own designated trains. It’s not as simple as saying the Americans and Europeans are ruining things or spoiling the ‘real’ Egypt when there’s such a push and demand for domestic tourism too.
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