Some thoughts on Egypt

Clare ignores the Nile (from our cabin) in favour of The Times

Clare and myself were recently in Egypt; specifically we signed up with the "Wonders of the Nile" cruise with Riviera (excellent, by the way). This was the first time we had visited a lower middle income country.

Arrival

We arrive at Cairo airport at 9 pm. The short, tubby, authoritative Egyptian guy (the Riviera official) is the local big man, there to welcome us, smooth our way through customs, organise our police escort.

There are 34 of us.

The three baggage handlers are black cotton ninjas. The largest, the one with the psychopathic smile, demands tips. One of our number, tired and intimidated, offers a two pound coin. It's indignantly rejected. "Paper," he hisses.

I ask the Riviera guy whether we are expected to tip (at this point none of us has any local currency). He says Riviera has sorted it all out, but "Of course you are free to tip if you wish." This will become a familiar refrain.

Egypt is a poor country and wages are low. Five English pounds equate to more than 110 Egyptian pounds. There's a local fortune to be made by a little hustling.

We are advised to check with our own eyes that our suitcases have been loaded onto the coach (what could possibly go wrong?).

Did I mention that the Middle East is a low-trust culture?

Security

We were rather shocked when we noticed that the athletic young man with cool jacket and shades sitting behind the driver was armed with a pistol at his waist-holster.

Our armed guard

When the coach leaves our moored boat (south Cairo) the next morning the escorting police cruiser slews across the road, blocking three lanes of traffic to allow the coach to U-turn. Everywhere we go we're cocooned within an armed security screen.

I think we're in a bad area (half-constructed tenements, rubbish heaped up in the gutters and side roads) but it turns out all of Cairo is like this.

We're told that each building is occupied by one extended family and will be extended upwards when the sons marry and require their own apartments. Meanwhile the tower blocks look like Swiss cheese. Empty windowless flats are holes; steel wires sprout into the sky above load-bearing columns.

Kin Groups

Egypt is not European. We're in a society of extended families, kin groups, tribes and patronage networks. As "rich Europeans" we're near the top of the status hierarchy. We are instructed to lose our English politeness and egalitarianism and to act imperiously - especially with hawkers .. and with the staff. We have a role model: our armed security guard is a senior officer in the Tourist Police. I try arrogance. It works.

Today our boat left Cairo at 6.30 am and we are presently cruising south upriver. The banks are a mix of mansions, fields and hovels. Donkeys and goats graze, children play amidst the litter and women wash clothes in the Nile. There are many derelict-looking buildings. Tall chimneys emit black smoke, borne south on the wind.

Hygiene

Since the recent fatalities of British tourists in Egyptian hotels (E. Coli? Fumigation chemicals? Both?!) the staff here are big into hygiene. When we return to the ship after an excursion, the first guy in the waiting line of greeters has a hospital-style antibacterial hand sprayer (the hot towels are second and the refreshing drink third). Ditto at the restaurant entrance before every meal. At the induction meeting yesterday, our guide reassured us that food hygiene on board was organised and monitored by a specialist English company.

Before coming, to be honest, my personal security concerns had been totally focused on ISIS and Al Qaeda.

WiFi

The boat's WiFi is said to be provided by satellite (via MikroTik). It's clearly under tight regulatory control. My Vypr VPN won't connect. I run Orbit (client for the Tor dark network, sometimes in VPN mode) and the log shows connections breaking every few seconds. I briefly had Vrpr VPN running over Tor but it went down after a few minutes.

The alternative Vodafone mobile network is excellent. As a recognised UK customer, it looks like my traffic is staying on their network until their UK gateway as the BBC News app works fine without me having to fire up the VPN (although it may simply be using my BBC account credentials).

So I'm using mobile data roaming, the phone WiFi is turned off and I have the phone configured as a WiFi hotspot for the tablet and Kindle. I notice that the Vodafone network doesn't like Tor too much. Traffic hangs. Perhaps that was the deal with the authorities?

Egypt is one dimensional for mobile companies. Just string towers along the Nile and the signal propagates easily to the edge of the desert. But then there's twenty million strong sprawling Cairo .. .

A walk around an Egyptian town

Last night we moored at Minya where our group was offered a walk-around in the town. I think we had visions of mud-brick buildings, locals ambling around picturesque byways, late-evening market bustle, a chance to relax and unwind.

Minya is a little Cairo: half-finished concrete and breeze-block tenements, dusty rubbish-strewn streets in poor repair, everywhere garish neon-lit, open-fronted shops selling clothes and food.

The mannequins carefully do not show a human face, heads covered by underwear or the features obscured by thick, horizontal wavy lines.

Our 40 minute tour required a complete security screen: police motorbikes to stop the traffic and block all side roads; four young and tense members of the paramilitary police in their dark blue uniforms and flak jackets, masked and carrying Kalashnikovs or the equivalent; khaki-uniformed regular police armed with snub-nosed machine guns; a very portly Police Captain in charge .. and of course our own armed security detail.

Part of our security screen at Minya

The bolshy questions from our group before we left: "We can pop into the shops, can't we?" ("No") were revealed as being entirely beside the point. Stories soon circulate about tourists held hostage inside shops until they buy something.

What did the locals make of these well-dressed prisoners, escorted under heavy security through their town?

The young women, walking arm in arm in jeans, frocks and hijabs ignored us, laughing and chatting with each other. Small boys smiled and shouted their few words of hustle-English - and were cuffed by the old men as a life-lesson. The young men stared at the police from kerbside seats, side alleys and their motorbikes with impassive, sustained hostility - one was dragged off his 500cc monster as he imprudently tried to weave between us.

The young men protecting us walked nervously, guns across their chests, swivelling to scan the crowd. The police captain was sweating.

Words like "powder keg" came to mind.

Haggling

Every site we visit we are pestered endlessly by lines of hawkers peddling scarves, postcards, cold drinks, small trinkets and guide books. Our tour guide recommends to look ahead, keep walking and don't engage in conversation, especially not to say "no, thank you" (it's an opening).

It's a scenario from game theory, from microeconomics. There is clearly demand for all their items: the hawkers do succeed in making a living and I've observed sales - we buy a few things ourselves.

If they all collaborated and set a market rate (like in England) they might collectively make more money.

Yet there is asymmetry. Tourists have little idea of the (low) prices that would emerge through perfect competition. The tourists are, in local terms, inordinately rich and able to bear gouging. In a somewhat rushed itinerary, there isn't time to engage in the lengthy process of haggling. Perhaps many introverted Brits neither warm to the process nor possess the nontrivial skills.

The hustlers either make a sale before any quieter and less hassling breed of vendor gets a look-in or simply drive customers away. This is how the good guys get crowded out.

We experience the suboptimal equilibrium of defect-defect between vendors.

We're at the cafeteria in Luxor at Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. I order two coffees. The guy says, with the slightest of pauses, one hundred Egyptian pounds. I know it's too much but have no idea how to respond. Do I haggle? What would be a fair price? I pay with ill grace.

Security for our walk-around in Sohag

Litter

Every occupied part of every town we visit is festooned with litter. They say that litter - all kinds of discarded cans, paper, plastic bags, cardboard, rags, burned wood - is the common feature of the third world. That it's more correct to say that the litter-free parts of the first world are the real anomaly. After a while you can habituate, become litter-blind.

Cairo street scene from our coach

It's tempting to blame individual fecklessness but weakness in public institutions and infrastructure is characteristic of poor countries and this includes sanitation and waste-disposal. This weakness, in its turn, derives from the inadequacy of the available human capital - those small, tight-knit kin/patronage groups display a very low level of society-wide assabiya.

Negative externalities are always someone else's problem in this defect-defect equilibrium.

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You may also be interested in the follow-up post: "Near-term prospects for Egypt".