Nile tour operators worry as crowds stay away

Hesham Khattab is a humorous Egyptian tour guide.

"That thing costs a euro," he says, pointing to a zither, a music instrument that makes a shrill sound and is being sold everywhere by souvenir vendors.

"Please, don't buy one."

His travel group laughs, getting the point.

Khattab himself doesn't have too much to laugh about these days.

"I don't want to get any hopes up, where none exist. But I'm also not painting everything black," the Egyptian says, the resignation on his face evident as he looks around the lounge of the Nile Smart holiday cruise ship.

For a week now the ship has been stopping at historic sites of the Upper Nile, with Khattab hired as tour guide. It's a job he's not doing very much at the moment.

Bookings for Nile cruises have dropped drastically in the wake of the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and the turmoil that has followed. Before the revolution, 150 ships were constantly cruising up and down the river between Luxor and Aswan.

Today, the figure is barely 30, with disastrous economic consequences for Egyptians. For tourists, it means a lot of advantages. The major cultural sites of the pharaonic period are no longer overcrowded.

The Nile Smart cruises back and forth between Luxor and Aswan. The first stop is the Horus Temple at Edfu. Now, it is easy to take photographs of the huge entrance pylon without other tourists crowding the picture.

The same thing goes for the row of columns of the Isis Temple near Aswan the next day.

The mighty temple of Abu Simbel near the border with Sudan is reached by a convoy of buses. Nowadays, the number of such visitors is often only around 100 per day.

"In the past, it was a thousand," says Sabri Okasha, a tour group minder.

And of those few cruise ships still operating, often times they are only half-booked. Guests have plenty of elbow room at the buffet table and up on the sun deck.

Otherwise life on board is about the same, perhaps one disadvantage being that with so few people, it can be harder to avoid certain travellers.

On the fourth day, the Nile Smart is back in Luxor again. In the afternoon the group visits the Karnak Temple of the ancient god Amun-Ra. The Temple has a gigantic hall of columns and s 320-ton obelisk of pink granite.

Exceptionally, this site is more crowded because many visitors have been brought across the desert on a day trip from the Red Sea holiday resort town Hurghada.

On the return ride from Thebes, Hesham Khattab for the last time stands at the head of the bus and talks to his group.

"This was my work for this year," he tells the travellers. He has looked around for other work but found nothing.

He could have completed post-graduate studies and later moved abroad, but he did not.

"My roots are here," he says. His family is waiting back in Cairo.

"Your country is like a mother. You worry when she gets sick."

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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