Today in Luxor Egypt

I can only tell you what I see and hear here and what the people I know say. Luxor learnt a bitter hard lesson when the tourists at the temple of Hatshepsut were massacred by terrorists. Despite the locals doing all they could to protect ‘their tourists’, despite the fact it was they not the police that caught the gunmen, despite the fact they did everything they could; the results were dire for Luxor.

You see other places have manufacturing, large farms, service industry. It is both Luxor’s blessing and its burden that all it has is tourism. So in the lean years after the massacre people starved, lacked medicines and died. I know families where there are no children surviving who were born around that time. For every tourists there were 100 touts, even today levels have not returned to those of before Hatshepsut. The big tour companies take all the business.

So whilst a Luxor man will agree prices are too high, there are no jobs, he will do this whilst driving the tourist to the airport, taking them on a tour, sailing them on the Nile. His priority is earning a living and the only living in Luxor is servicing tourists and he knows if they are scared, they will stay away and he and his family will suffer. So that is why I have seen no gatherings, no demonstrations, no riots just people going about their daily lives and trying to earn a crust.