![]() ![]() ![]() “This is the worst season ever,” says tour guide Joseph Selim. Before 2011, it was more than double that. They seem to lack the persistence, sometimes bordering on aggression, which they once used in persuading tourists to buy their goods and services.Ībdurahman Adem, 61, proffering a plaster Sphinx with each hand, says these days he makes between $1.50 and $2 a day. In Giza, even the trinket sellers and self-appointed “guides” are few and far between. In Cairo, only 17 percent of hotel beds were occupied in July, according to the hotel research firm STR Global, compared with 53 percent a year earlier and 70 percent in July 2010.Įven in Sharm el-Sheikh, a Red Sea resort largely shielded from the political upheavals in Cairo and other big cities, occupancy tumbled to 49 percent from 79 percent two years ago. Tourists have increasingly stayed away since then, put off by hundreds of thousands or even millions taking to the streets every few months, to say nothing of the killing of hundreds since July when security forces cleared Islamist protest camps. The army’s overthrow two months ago of Islamist Mohamed Mursi, Egypt’s first freely-elected president, is just the latest in a series of upheavals since the autocrat Hosni Mubarak fell in a popular uprising in January 2011. ![]() In the burial chamber deep inside the 136-metre (448-foot) Pyramid of Khafre, a Reuters reporter had only the pharaoh’s granite sarcophagus for company. By contrast, Egypt’s rulers of the last 2-1/2 years have failed utterly to provide for a nation that is once again unsettled.īefore 2011 the pyramids of Giza, which stand on a desert plateau overlooking modern Cairo, and the Great Sphinx that guards them below drew thousands of visitors a day, most bringing foreign currency with them.īut on one day last week two armoured vehicles stood at the gates and a bus park easily big enough for 100 tourist coaches lay empty. ![]() In a way they still provided for modern Egypt 4,500 years later, their pyramids attracting the tourists who accounted for 10 percent of its national income and one in eight jobs. As soon as they ascended the throne, they began building a pyramid that would not only see them through to the afterlife, but also give work and purpose to an unsettled nation. GIZA, Egypt (Reuters) - The pharaohs of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty knew what they were doing. ![]()
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