2012:2 - Repeat Business

Hans and I have been enjoying several days of rest and relaxation in Luxor, ancient Thebes to students of Egyptian history. This is my third visit here, Hans’ second. We’ve returned because Luxor is beautiful – home to the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut’s Temple as well as the Karnak and Luxor Temples to name some of the best-known places. We’ve also returned because this city knows how to cater to tourists. The summer daytime temperatures are hot – routinely 105 or above – so the normal pattern is to wake early in the morning and hit the outdoor monuments and then return to your hotel by noon for an afternoon of relaxation by the pool. (Yes, everyday we’ve been singing, “It’s a hard knock life for us . . .”!) Tourist hotels take great care of their guests and we have been spoiled since Friday.

Here’s what we’ve noticed though these last few days. Tourists are hard to find in Luxor this year. The sites are not teeming with them. The poolsides have lots of empty deck chairs. The restaurants have few diners. Sure it’s low season, but there seems to be noticably fewer people hanging around. Those we have seen are predominately from England, Germany and Russia. Brief conversations with local drivers, shop keepers and the like have confirmed our observations. Tourism has taken a hard hit since the 25 January revolution. Those who are here are often repeat visitors, like us, not new comers. And those who come on tours are more reluctant to go solo on individual excursions.  

This makes life hard for local businessmen (they are mostly men) who try to make a living from driving taxis, piloting faluccas, guiding private tours and keeping shops and restaurants. In the midst of these lean times, everyone wants repeat business. We’ve received business cards from nearly early cabdriver we’ve hired.  One restaurant owner even scrawled out his contact information on a piece of paper so we’d have a way to contact him again. Everyone wants to  offer us something extra – a discount on dinner, additional day tours, anything we need to make our stay happy. Today as we returned from the Luxor Museum and made a brief stop at a Fair Trade store, our driver offered to take us anywhere in Luxor for better prices, nicer goods, ANYTHING we wanted.

To be fair, this is what you do when you’re trying to make customers happy and maybe it’s not so different from other times we’ve been here.

But if I’m not mistaken there is desperation in the voices that I’ve not heard before. The fun-loving, jovial nature that I’m used to is not quite so readily apparent. This desperation is likely born of uncertainty of all kinds – who will be elected president next weekend? When will some semblance of normalcy return to their beloved homeland? When will the tourists come back? In the midst of such uncertainty hustling for repeat business might be the surest bet there is.