In Part 1 of my two part series titled Is It Safe to Travel to Egypt, I gave my personal experience of the Egypt I encountered on my recent trip to Cairo and Alexandria.
Here in Part 2 I’d like to share a video that I made with our tour guide, Maha Mahmoud. In it I asked Maha about the current situation in her homeland. She was a fantastic guide who was incredibly knowledgeable about the sites she took us to, as well as mature beyond her 28 years.
Sure, tourism is down by a high percentage in Egypt, and as a tour guide whose living is directly affected by the number of tourists who visit her country, one could assume that it’s probably in Maha’s best interest to encourage people to visit. But listen to the sincerity in her voice as she describes the new Egypt she’s looking forward to living in, and the fact that, even though she’s in her late 20s, she’s voting for the first time in her life.
About the Video
The video was made at the Red Pyramid, outside of Cairo and just down the road from Dahshur, a small, one road town that I had the good fortune to come back and photograph at a later time. I apologize for the sound quality, but I shot this handheld with my Nikon D300s and only the on-camera microphone, which is less than ideal.
Look for a future blog post with images from that shoot.
What questions would you ask Maha about the current situation in Egypt if you had a chance to speak to her?
Disclosure: I was in Egypt to speak at the 4th Annual IOETI Conference in Cairo. The trip was paid for by the conference organizers, but all opinions here are entirely my own.
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Ralph Velasco is an Orange County-based photography instructor, international photo tour guide
and author who frequently speaks on the topic of travel photography.
He’s an award-winning blogger and creator of the My Shot Lists for Travel app for iPhone.
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I envy nearly everyone who gets to go to Egypt these days. I was born there in 1951 and had to leave with my Jewish family in 1961 when Nasser came to power, and decided the Jews had to go.
After the incredible events of January 25 and thereafter, I was under the illusion that I might be able to go back to the land of my birth just to be able to revisit and close the chapter in my life. Hah!
That Maha will tell you how safe it is to go to Egypt, and that the time is now is required by the Egyptian government, as no one who wants to survive can say otherwise. No it is not safe to go to Egypt, and since I’ve been in constant contact with Egyptians, both in Cairo, Alexandria and other major cities, that was a constant question I asked from them all year long in 2011. The answer was a resounding NO. Ask the women that were raped, given virginity tests, beaten, derided, jailed with no charges, etc.. There is nothing more that I would love to do than go to Egypt for a month or so, but I will not be persuaded by propaganda video. And that is just what you posted happens to be. You are misleading readers, whomever they are.
Aimee, you’re entitled to your opinion, and I clarified in the post that it’s certainly in the best interest of those in the tourism industry to shine a favorable light on travel to Egypt at this time, but I never would have posted this video if I hadn’t been there first hand to experience both Cairo and Alexandria myself. No one is denying that horrible things have happened in the recent past, and probably will for the foreseeable future, but because these acts are concentrated in very isolated parts of the country, I felt entirely safe wherever we went. People need to make their own decision as to whether or not they go to Egypt at this time, and all I can do is offer up my experience as one bit of information that they may or may not want to take into consideration in making that decision, and so to reiterate, I had a great time and couldn’t have felt more welcome.
“because these acts are concentrated in very isolated parts of the country,” – Tahrir Square was the epicenter of “these acts” and can hardly be called an isolated part of the country.
Until very recently, I was foreign policy writer at Examiner.com, and I wrote volumes about the Egyptian revolution. I continue to read the Google Front Page. Your readers need to do the same.
I highly recommend that my readers research more than just my blog as a source of information in making their decision to travel to Egypt, but to say that violence in one square, albeit the main one in the capital city, should deter people from traveling to a country of over 380,000 square miles is a dis-service to all Egyptians, from tour guides like Maha, to the man selling produce in the market to the lady making souvenirs on the waterfront in Alexandria and beyond. Boycotting travel to Egypt is not going to help the Egyptian people at all, it’s going to hurt them in a big way.
I’m trying to encourage responsible travel to a great country and I’m surprised you’re arguing against that.
I get a feeling I am speaking to a deaf ear.
I am not boycotting travel to Egypt. I want to go to Egypt for reasons more serious than just tourism; it is my birth country. But one must not keep one’s head in the sand. Why are you not encouraging people to go to Iraq? Pakistan? How about Syria? Somalia?
I am a traveler rather than a tourist.
And I understand the world as it is.
Why?! Because I haven’t been to those places and so don’t have first hand knowledge of them from having just experienced them 3 weeks ago. Syria and Iran are at the top of my list of places I want to experience.
See what the very famous Peter Greenberg has to say about travel to Egypt, he’s had much more experience traveling there than I have, but he just returned a few weeks or so ago, as well.
The Travel Detective Blogs: Is It Safe to Travel to Egypt?