Egypt’s fabulous charms as a bucket-list destination are under the scanner again, as headlines worldwide reported the horrific November 24 terror attack on a mosque in Bir al-Abed, to the west of the North Sinai capital of El Arish, which left at least 235 people dead. As a pleasantly cool holiday high season approaches in the transcontinental country that has borne and absorbed larger-than-life dynastic and foreign influences over five millennia to triumph as a warmly hospitable people, here’s the question many of us are asking: how safe is it to travel to Egypt?
“I would advise people to come to Egypt now,” says Mohamed Mabrouk, 50, an engineer with a telecom company, who lives in Cairo and pursues his love for hiking and off-roading via the non-profit Sahara Safaris Club, which he founded in 2001, enabling like-minded safarists from diverse places to plan ‘cooperative journeys’ in Egypt, for their friends and families. “Egypt is the first ‘united states’ of the world, so the chances of its descent to chaos is perhaps least likely among all nations, developed or developing, facing a variety of challenges.”
Terror strikes in Egypt have occurred in regions that are not typically tourist haunts, including an attack by gunmen on a bus with Coptic Christian passengers in the Minya province in May 2017, and explosions in and outside churches in Tanta and Alexandria in March. In public memory, the sporadic violence has become broadly linked to the January 2011 Tahrir Square uprising, which rendered tourist sites inaccessible, and resulted in curfews and disruptions of flights out of Egypt, leading to widespread panic.
Other events cemented this impression. In May 2016, EgyptAir’s Flight MS804 was lost over the Mediterranean in an unexplained crash that killed all 66 people on board. In October 2015, Metrojet’s Flight 9268 exploded mid-air over North Sinai, taking down its 224 passengers and crew in what was later confirmed to be a terror attack. Russian flights to Egypt have been called off since then; the most number of visitors to Egypt in the year preceding the tragedy had been from the Soviet nation.
Camel rests near ruins of entrance to pyramid
“Several incidents of terror-linked violence in the past few years have led to hyper-sensitivity about Egypt as a travel destination,” concurred seasoned UK-based travel writer and broadcaster Simon Calder, on email to The Hindu . “But widespread no-shows by tourists has not only hurt the local economy badly, it has denied visitors to this wondrous destination the opportunity to see it with hardly any crowds.”
Egypt was visited by a record number of 14.7 million tourists in 2010, says the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), something it never achieved after the events of January 2011, and inbound tourists fell to 5.4 million in 2016. The North Sinai mosque attack could not have come at a worse time: UNWTO data for January and February 2017 showed an increase in international visitors by 52% when compared with the same period in 2016, a figure that was expected to rise again this year.
“Egyptians have a spectacular love for life, as you will see if you come,” says Mabrouk. “I know the future of some regions looks grim. This may scare some people from visiting, but I think Egypt will only continue growing safer for tourism in the coming years.”
Felucca boats take sail on the River Nile at Aswan, Egypt
The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) cautionary travel advice of November 6, with a colour-coded map showing levels of risk, also notes, “Around 231,000 British nationals visited Egypt in 2016. Most visits are trouble-free.”
Egypt hasn’t been in the news only for scary reasons: recent discoveries that made global headlines include the excavation of a magnificent Pharaoh’s head, a bust of Seti II, and a new pyramid. The billion-dollar 60,000 sq ft Grand Egyptian Museum coming up near the Giza Pyramids, described as the largest for antiquities in the world, is slated to open in stages from 2018.
Calder concludes, “I would say the only response to the tragedy of tourism in Egypt is to return to it in ever-larger numbers.”
Elsewhere: In November, the US Department of State alerted its citizens to heightened risk of terror attacks throughout Europe, particularly during the upcoming holiday season, citing “widely-reported incidents in France, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Finland” and “last year’s mass casualty attacks” at a Christmas market in Berlin and a nightclub in Istanbul. The world, frequent travellers know, is a dangerous place. There are no guarantees of complete safety.
Ground realities
* Popular tourist destinations across Egypt continue to be fully open in every season.
* Fewer desert safaris operate, and should not be attempted without a travel agent.
* Group tours are favoured over independent travel.
* Operators like Cox & Kings run packages from India; sources in the company confirm there have been no major cancellations.
* The Egyptian government has considerably enhanced security arrangements in airports and major tourist sites, including down the Nile Valley to Luxor, Aswan
and Abu Simbel.
* Intra-country air travel is considered safer than land routes, in particular to South Sinai’s coastal resort towns.
* The US Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), which offers updated safety notices, is available as an email subscription service to non-US citizens as well.
* Significant investments in tourist infrastructure, including superb hotels in great locations, which once needed advance planning, now wait for the asking.
* Deeper discounts can be had for a weaker Egyptian Pound.
