Month: September 2008

When you pick a travel destination, you may think of how far it is, how easy it is to get there, what there is to see, what there is to eat, where there is to stay, how much things cost, and how safe it is. It may not occur to you to gauge who will be there with you–what kinds of people your fellow tourists will be. But the more you think about it, the more you realize that who else will be there should be a key consideration in choosing a travel destination.

Perhaps the “best” fellow travelers, for us, are independent budget travelers. Most typical is the late 20s/early 30s backpacker, usually from Western Europe or East Asia, traveling after graduating college or post-graduate education, or between jobs. As a whole, Central Asia attracts a well-educated, well-traveled lot, with ample linguistic abilities, travel skills, cultural sensitivity, and so forth. Almost without a doubt, a fellow traveler in Central Asia will have something interesting to show for themselves, a good story or two from the region or elsewhere on their travels. The types of fellow travelers, I find, broadens the “easier” the destination is, but broader does not necessarily mean worse. For example, in Southeast Asia, you may find a younger or less-worldy crowd, but for the most part you are still dealing with independent travelers, people with some sense of adventure and desire to immerse themselves in local cultures.

This issue occurred to me because Egypt is perhaps the worst place in the world that we’ve experienced, in terms of fellow travelers. Egypt is overrun with package tourists. Now, there’s nothing wrong, fundamentally, with going on a package tour. Travel planning can be a daunting and demanding effort (however much I love it), and going on a tour does maximize the amount of things you can see and learn in a limited amount of time. A knowledgeable guide could even afford you cultural insight that would be hard to access for an independent traveler. And, of course, tours can be quite cost-efficient.

But far more often, tours have serious deficiencies. Traveling in a guided group insulates you from interactions with locals (however appealing that sometimes sounds in Egypt). Traveling in a group means that you never have sights to yourself, paced according to your own interests. Explanations are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Many tour groups stay at mediocre hotels and eat mediocre food. That is why many (though by no means all) tours attract people who are intimidated by traveling by themselves, people who are less interested in cultural immersion, people who are satisfied with a quick and superficial understanding of history and people with relatively low standards for food and hotels (at least as far as value, authenticity and atmosphere are concerned–no doubt almost all tours stay and eat at fancier and more hygenic places than we do). (One might even go so far as to suggest that tour group tourists don’t really enjoy travel for travel itself. Let’s face it, spending long periods of time immersed in places where people speak little or no English and may have little else in common with you can be lonely, no matter how close you are to your travel companion(s). It should come as no surprise then that people turn to groups and in the end derive as much or more pleasure from internal group interactions as from external stimulus–that’s certainly been the case in the groups we’ve had the pleasure of joining.)

Egypt is full of such mediocre tours. Perhaps people are intimidated by traveling in an Islamic country, or maybe they have very little travel experience and are fulfilling some childhood dream of seeing the Pyramids. But this lack of standards, on the part of the tourists, results in a country whose travel infrastructure is, considering the volume of tourism, largely unspectacular. Package tourists, for the most part, stay in mediocre three-star type hotels that are absurdly overpriced when not booked on a tour, and so Egypt does not have the wonderful range of budget accommodations that one finds in, say, Southeast Asia. Food is similarly uninspiring, with many restaurants offering bland adaptations of local food (I suppose we can thank the abundant British tourists for that). Worst of all, having undiscriminating, relatively free-spending package tourists with apparently little interest in learning about local culture or spending time with locals constantly breezing in and out of cities promotes the worst kind of behavior in local merchants: aggressive salesmanship, overcharging, poor service.

Heaven forbid you have to walk a little to see the Pyramids!

There are other fellow tourist considerations in addition to the prevalence of tour groups at a given destination. In some places, there are large numbers of domestic tourists. The most extreme example of this, I believe, is China, where foreign tourists are almost always dramatically outnumbered by domestic tourists. This can be good or bad, depending on your perspective. Hawaii and Tahiti attract a lot of honeymooning couples, and so a single traveler may feel awkward and lonely. There are cultural issues, too. If you speak French, and only French, you would have more opportunities to meet fellow French speakers in a destination that attracts relatively more French, such as Cambodia or Madagascar.

One small story, showing that hotels understand that travelers care who their co-travelers are: Somewhat shockingly, the Hyatt in Sharm El Sheikh enforces a dress code banning Islamic dress (euphemistically called “ethnic dress”) at the pool and on the beach, even while allowing topless bathing on the beach–no doubt their research showed that their “international” clientele felt more comfortable without a burqa in sight.

Like my posts of 5.3, 9.2 and 9.24, a picture from a place you’ve heard so much about, but perhaps never seen a picture of, or tried to imagine.

The Suez Canal, like the Straits of Malacca (see post of 9.2), is a great “bottleneck” of global trade, and through it passes approximately 7.5% of the world’s shipped cargo and much of Europe’s oil requirements. The Suez Canal is bigger (in depth and width) than the Panama Canal, and so the latter acts more to set the maximum size for ships–“Panamax.”

Egypt made some $4.1 billion from the Suez Canal tolls in 2007, its third largest source of hard currency after tourism and remittances. Geography matters!

One reads about the “cataracts of the Nile” in history books (always with ordinals, like “the first cataract,” “the second cataract” and so forth), but until I saw the first cataract just south of Aswan it was hard for me to picture them–I thought of something like a series of little Niagaras, walls of water blocking passage north. Now, the first cataract currently lies just on the other side of dams (the old Aswan Dam and the High Dam), and so the sort of rapids or rush of water is no longer there, but seeing the rocks in the water at least helped me visualized what these cataracts are–places that, due to topography, are unnavigable.

One of the wonders, to me, of Egyptian civilization is now much it stayed put along the Nile. There were of course times when Egypt controlled south toward Nubia, west toward Libya and east toward the Levant, but despite its incredible wealth and advancement it was never an expansive empire, instead being controlled by the Persians, the Greeks (or Macedonians), the Romans, the Arabs and the Ottomans. One basic reason for this, I suppose, is that Egyptian civilization was centered on the Nile, and perhaps they saw no reason to stray far from what they saw as the source of all life. In periods of ascendancy Egypt did control regions further south, into Nubia, but the cataracts–areas where the Nile was not navigable–presented a barrier. Were it not for the cataracts, perhaps Egyptian civilization would have traveled all the way to Lakes Tana and Victoria, deep into sub-Saharan Africa.

Ramadan lamp in downtown Cairo

From a traveler’s perspective, one reads, there are good Ramadan countries and bad Ramadan countries. And we were led to expect that Egypt would be one of the greatest, with the streets erupting into all night parties every day as people break their fast. We also thought that, given the volume of tourism in Egypt, we would not actually be forced or feel pressured to fast ourselves. As we’ve discovered, traveling in Egypt in Ramadan has its pluses and minuses.

Ramadan Coca-Cola

Ramadan in Egypt is observed far more strictly than we had thought. We certainly are having no trouble getting food in Luxor, which is a city that exists largely for tourism, but we did have a great deal of trouble finding open restaurants in downtown Cairo, once resorting to the Nile Hilton for lunch. Even McDonald’s and KFC were sometimes closed during the day (including the KFC across the street from the Giza Pyramids). (Compare this to a recent Turkey Ramadan story we heard, where a local McDonald’s was shuttered for privacy and full of Turkish customers, one of whom told the tourist upon friendly questioning that God couldn’t see inside the store.) A lack of restaurants is not only frustrating from a hunger perspective, but of course eating is one of the great joys of travel–eating at hotel or tourist restaurants is generally not as fun, not as tasty and far more expensive. Even where more local restaurants are open, the lack of local clientele makes eating less fun.

So how about the parties every night? That part was pretty much right. Everyone starts cooking starting mid-afternoon (rather early, I think–things must get overcooked; also, are things poorly seasoned because the cooks cannot check for flavor?). Tables are laid out on the streets. Starting about an hour before sunset, people start sitting down and waiting, and starting about twenty minutes before, prepared food is delivered all around town. A few minutes before the muezzin signals the end of the fast, the streets grow eerily quiet as people stop what they’re doing in order to break their fast.

Sunset over the Mediterranean in Alexandria. In some cities, a cannon was sounded to let people know the precise moment at which the sun had set and food could be eaten.

If you’re walking about the streets of Islamic Cairo or less touristy parts elsewhere in the country at this time, it’s quite likely that someone will invite you to their iftar (fast-breaking meal). Or, in many public places such as subway stops, youth will hand out some free beverage or snack (dates are popular) intended to pump some sugar into your blood, a nice custom that we believe is sponsored by local mosques.

Bread deliveries, shortly before sundown

But iftar isn’t about long, lingering meals or happening restaurants–it’s more about eating a lot very quickly. So, unless you’re invited to a fast-breaking meal, it’s unlikely that your dinner will be particularly fun. In fact, dinners were the sources of some of our greatest frustration, as we were often not allowed to order from the special Ramadan menus (which felt to us bizarrely inhospitable–like being refused a Thanksgiving menu because you’re not American or a Christmas set because you’re not Christian).

Eating in the streets

After the meal is when the real fun begins. All of the coffeehouses that were shuttered during the day fill up with customers. Especially in Islamic Cairo, around the touristy Khan Al Khalili, thousands gather for eating, shopping or just hanging about.

In Islamic Cairo

One minor inconvenience of Ramadan is shorter business hours, including at museums and other tourist attractions. We were initially concerned about this, but it ended up not being too big a problem. While the shorter hours mean a little more careful planning, things are generally open long enough–after all, in this heat, one cannot sightsee 8-9 hours straight every day.

Favorite pasttime — reading the Quran

Many countries with a critical mass of tourism, especially in the developing world where the average person may not speak any English, often have separate “tourist police” forces. In every country we had been in, prior to Egypt, the essential functions of tourist police have been to act as English-speaking policemen for whatever visitors may need, to police tourist areas for additional security and peace of mind, to prevent tourists from interacting with “regular” police, who may not speak English or might be incompetent or corrupt, etc. Yes, it’s possible for tourist police to become involved if a tourist commits a crime, but really they’re there to aid tourists. To encourage tourism and tourism receipts.

Not in Egypt. Egypt has a very large “tourism and antiquities” police force, seemingly omnipresent, but they are not the helpful tourist police that travelers may have gotten used to in other countries. Nowhere have we met police, *tourist* police no less, whose job it seems to be not to aid tourists, but to harass them and otherwise get in their way, like the tourist police of Egypt. Even if the primary mission of the Egyptian tourist police is to deter terrorist acts against tourists, which have occurred with some frequency in Egypt [post to come], or there is a special concern in Egypt that tourists themselves may commit crimes (a relic of the days when tourists doubled as antiquities thieves), even then, the Egyptian tourist police should not be so useless to tourists, so negatively harassing.

1. Egyptian tourist police don’t speak English. Given that part of these people’s job description is to interact with tourists, wouldn’t it be useful if they were able to speak to tourists? Even superior officers frequently speak none or only a few words.

2. Egyptian tourist police beg for baksheesh. Now, petty bribery is common in many parts of the developing world, but nowhere have we seen police officers beg for tips. This is common behavior by tourist police at all Egyptian tourist sites. They ask for it in exchange for allowing you to enter restricted areas, for taking photos, for acting as informal guides or for doing nothing at all. Even a policeman guarding a police station asked us for a tip, with four other guards in earshot. Is this really the impression that the Egyptian government wants to give to tourists? That their police officers are beggars?

Acting as an informal guide

3. Egyptian tourist police may steal. I’m almost certain that I had my cell phone stolen during a security check at Philae Temple near Aswan. Most of the time, tourists are simply waved through security checks (perhaps too crude a profiling method), and so I didn’t pay too close attention to the guy going through my bag. Next time I looked–phone gone.

4. Egyptian tourist police are rude. Not only have tourist sites closed early because of Ramadan, but the guards close off sections of sites and try to have you out well in advance of even the early closing time. Given that admissions in Egypt are not cheap (often in excess of USD 10 per person), it is very upsetting, after you’ve paid for your ticket, to learn that much of the site is already closed or to be chased out early. After such an experience at the Egyptian Museum, I refused to leave until the proper Ramadan closing time, at which refusal all sorts of expletives and insults against my country were hurled at me and I was physically handled. Police may have threatened to detain or arrest us in other countries, but never have they stooped to this sort of base hostility, in this case for simply wanting to stay until the designated closing time.

One bizarre incident. We were visiting a small mosque in the “northern cemetery” region of Islamic Cairo. The mosque is famous–on one of the Egyptian bills–and a standard tourist attraction. When we showed up, a keeper of some sort started showing us around, as is usual, in expectation of a tip, or baksheesh. This was fine, especially since the mosque itself didn’t charge any admission. In the middle of our tour, the “guide” was called aside by a tourist policeman who had just entered, and returned to say that we had to leave because of the police. Now, there is no rule in Egypt that tourists cannot visit mosques (they actually make up a fair percentage of the sightseeing in Cairo), and this mosque was one that is quite prominently listed in guidebooks. We were mid-day, at no special time. Annoyed, we finished taking some pictures and exited, giving a few pounds to the custodian/guide at his request. The man then handed the money to the tourist police! You may think that forfeiting the baksheesh could have been some kind of punishment for showing us around, but not if you’ve been to Egypt. The most likely scenario was that the whole “chasing us out” was some sort of setup to encourage more tipping–to make us feel like we saw something that we weren’t “supposed” to see. Derek grabbed our money back.

I did not even know the well-established fact that Art Deco was inspired by (if not outright lifted from) ancient Egyptian art, but even if I did, I think that seeing the extent of the influence would have been astonishing. Staring inside a four thousand year old tomb and having what looks like the facade of a New York skyscraper staring back at you is quite an uncommon deja vu experience.