Valley of the Lone Tourist

ASWAN, EGYPT — "Caliche!"

"Felucca, please! Special price!"

The touts are always tireless in Luxor and Aswan, where tourists have long gone to experience the Nile and the tombs on its western bank, but now there’s an edge to their pleas: "We haven’t had any work for a month!"

There’s not a street in Cairo within a mile or two of Tahrir Square that’s not lined with vendors hustling Egyptian flags or laminated tags depicting men and women who died over the weeks in the square, where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, gathered on Feb. 18, in a raucous street party that never seemed to end. Gangs of young people were painting the curbs, lampposts, bridge railings; picking up trash; sporting Egyptian flags drawn on their faces. A month after it began, Egypt’s revolution still feels visceral there, ongoing, this pumping heart people carry in their hands every minute.

But on a hot, still day in the city of Aswan, 550 miles to the south, there are no flag vendors to be seen. The Egyptian tourism industry, the country’s second-largest source of revenue (some  $11 billion in 2009), is dead. There are no young people painting anything, much less their faces. Cruise ships line the docks empty and going nowhere. Hundreds of feluccas — those ubiquitous, shallow-draft, lateen-rigged Nile sailboats — and tourist ferries lie at anchor as ibises wade the river’s bank and kingfishers hover and dive. In search of an evening beer, I sit alone in the Isis Hotel bar overlooking the Nile. There isn’t another tourist in the whole hotel. You can buy mini pyramids and shisha pipes and papyrus and T-shirts at a dizzying array of bric-a-brac shops, but an Egyptian flag? Forget it!

The streets may be quiet, people may be hungry, but there remains a striking unanimity here, every bit as strong as in Cairo. Gone are the Mubarak posters, and conversations bear a striking similarity; the narrative is always the same.

As Tahrir Square erupted, protests swept through Luxor, a city of nearly 500,000 best known for its spectacular ancient ruins. One demonstrator was reportedly killed. At a cafe I find Omar, a former tomb restorer who now runs a restaurant and wouldn’t give the rest of his name, taking long, slow drags on his shisha and sipping tea, whiling away the hours. People raided the police station, he said, "and we took away their guns and they ran away."  The police, he said, looted Karnak Temple, but "all the people stood on the highway and set up road blocks and checked each car; for 20 days we guarded the tombs. Tourism is our business, so we protected it."

As in Cairo, it is the police who are hated. "The police are thieves like Mubarak." He had two live crocodiles to lure tourists to his restaurant and one day the police took them away. "Why? No reason! The police want money, but now they are finished! We are fed up! I have no business now, nothing, but it will get better."

Across the river at the Valley of the Kings, the site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the vast concrete parking lot was empty. Not a bus, not a car. Not a single tourist.

From Luxor I headed south to Aswan by car, and we drove past an endless string of crumbling villages, dirt streets awash with trash and dust on the banks of fetid-looking canals, men astride donkeys, a world of poverty that made Cairo look as fresh and modern as Disney World. There were no flags, no celebrations, just the daily grind of everyday life.

"Look at this," raves Hamady el-Shoby, the owner of the taxi service, who came with me to see whether the traditional police checkpoints were still active along the road. "You can’t feed a dog on what most people earn a month." There are multiple routes, but historically any bus or car carrying tourists had to take the "tourist road" heavily "protected" by those multiple police checkpoints. "Why? More bribes!" he said. "At every checkpoint the police will find something wrong with my car and we have to pay." The checkpoints, however, were as empty as the tombs. The police were gone, at least for now. Shoby was ecstatic. "I have lost so much money," he said, "but I am happy. We are free!"

In Aswan, the jumping-off point for tours of the famed ruins of Abu Simbel and cruises down the Nile to Luxor, even as the rest of the country exploded, nothing much happened except the exodus of tourists. I see no tanks, no armored troop carriers. One morning after Mubarak’s fall a protest about wages erupts at the post office. There is shouting, arguing, and a small crowd watches alongside a busload of soldiers. But most people just stroll on by, and the soldiers watch half asleep, picking their teeth.

Aswan’s west bank is even further removed, a world of Nubian villages and closely packed mud houses and women in burqas, quiet and still, save the voices of children playing. There I find Abdel Sabour Dahab, a bear of a man with a booming voice who runs a small hotel that has no guests. Tourism, he says, is everything in Aswan. "You start as a camel boy at 12, graduate to a felucca captain at 15 or 16 if you’re good, and rise from there if you’re smart," he says, watering his garden and offering me tea. "To the Nubians Sadat was our father — he hid here from the Germans in the 1940s and he loved it here — but Mubarak was just a thief and his police gave me nothing but trouble, saying I cannot build my hotel."

We sip our tea and gaze at the desert hills that rise from the garden in front of his hotel. "Mubarak may be gone," he says, "but it will be slow, like building a house. You build the foundations and the walls and that’s what we have started. But then you must furnish it and decorate it slowly. And that will come, inshallah. We have no business now, but at least I am free to speak."