Innocents Abroad

As anyone who has ever walked through downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square on a sunny afternoon or dared to make the hassle-fraught trip to the Giza pyramids can tell you, the tourist industry in Egypt is large, boisterous, and in-your-face. In 2007, according to data provided by Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, almost 7 million tourists passed through the country. The greatest number came from Europe, riding high on the windfall of the strong Euro, which finished last year at a rate of 8 to 1 against the Egyptian pound. East Asian tourism boomed, increasing 40 percent from 2006 to 2007; today during the height of the tourist season, Koreans and Japanese armed with cameras and parasols flood Luxor by the busload. Arabs from the Gulf mingle freely with Americans and Africans.

It is easy how the Egyptian economy benefits from tourism. Foreigners eat at expensive restaurants, spending up to fifteen times on a single dish what Egyptians spend on an entire dinner without blinking an eye. Alcohol, unaffordable for most locals at the vast majority of bars in Cairo, is consumed by tourists in large quantities despite being pretty much the only thing in this country that is sold at Western prices. For an hourly wage plus tips, guides will drive you into the desert in a jeep, sail you up the Nile on a felucca, buy carpets and perfume for you at the bazaars, and take you for sunset camel rides. Hotels offer convenient (and for the foreign wallet, inexpensive) all-inclusive deals that provide lodging, three meals a day, a translator to accompany you on your excursions, a spa to help you relax after a long day of battling traffic and haggling for souvenirs, and anything else your heart desires. This is a third-world nation with a staggering unemployment problem, and almost any service is available for a price, from cigarettes delivered straight to your hotel room to a personal coiffeur to style your hair before a night on the town. Egypt, which is home to some the world's most famous antiquities but boasts few natural resources, relies on the flow of foreign currencies that tourists pump into the economy on an annual basis as one of its main sources of revenue.

A more interesting question is what the tourists themselves get out of the experience. Why do people travel to Egypt? Some come to broaden their horizons, citing lofty ideas of cultural pluralism and a desire to 'see other places' to justify trekking all the way out here to the northeastern tip of Africa. Others come chasing childhood dreams of King Tut and hieroglyphs and are surprised to find themselves in a Muslim country of 80 million where the ruler is a modern military autocrat and Arabic, not Egyptian, is the national language. Still others come to vacation, fleeing Cairo immediately for the lush beaches and hopping club scene of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt is a hard place to get to know. Westerners traveling to other Western countries can ease themselves in on the shared commonalities of history and tradition, and even Asia, with its mass consumption of Western pop culture and well-organized tourist apparatus, poses less of a challenge. Without doubt, the majority of the 7 million tourists last year left Egypt having barely scratched the surface of what this country is all about. So why do they come here? Is it just to say they've done it? To regale friends back home with photos of pharaonic monuments that have been photographed millions of times before? To better enjoy the comforts of home after having been deprived of them for several interesting-but-stressful weeks on the road?

After all, there's no place like home.