Last year in late 2020, I, along with a group of friends, travelled to Luxor in the south of Egypt for a Nile Cruise. While the train to Luxor from Alexandria was packed full of people, the cruise was comparably empty. Each day, we would disembark the cruise and visit some of the ancient world’s most reputed sights with few other travellers in sight. Save for the odd scattered Egyptian groups and sometimes a few foreigners, we would wander around uninterrupted. No queue for a photo in front of an obelisk, sphinx or tomb, and, apart from our phones, no clicking and flashing of cameras anywhere. Our local guide, in between effortlessly reading hieroglyphs straight from the walls, tried to convey to us how lucky we were. “It is normally so filled with people,” he said, “I have never seen it so empty.” We were extremely lucky indeed. However, in reality, our good fortune was a very stark sign of the great misfortune that has beset the entire tourism industry in Egypt since the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. In 2019, Egypt attracted over 13 million foreign visitors, the…
