| Will the new tariff mean more security for tourists or less people going out to El-Gilf El-Kebir area? By Lamia Hassan |
| In the farthest southwestern corner of Egypt’s Western Desert, 500 kilometers from the nearest stretch of the Nile Valley, stands the massive sandstone plateau of El-Gilf El-Kebir — the ‘Great Barrier.’ It is a place seemingly older than time and most certainly older than history, immortalized in ancient art and modern literature.A natural protectorate, it has sheltered nineteenth-century explorers, twentieth-century armies, and twenty-first century tourists. And it has just become nearly four times more expensive to get to. In September, the Ministry of Interior, in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism, announced that tour operators running safaris to El-Gilf El-Kebir must pay a security fee of up to LE 100 per hour per tourist to cover the costs of a police convoy for each trip. Given the site’s remote location, El-Gilf El-Kebir safaris run between 10 and 15 days, meaning the new security fees add LE 24,000 to LE 36,000 to be borne by either the safari operator or the client. Government officials justified the new tariff as a necessary security measure in this remote area. Some tour operators, however, fear that the move will take El-Gilf El-Kebir off the safari map by making trips prohibitively expensive. “We lost 4 percent of El-Gilf El-Kebir tourism, as many people cancelled their trips and others decided to head north of El-Gilf instead, where you do not have to pay the insurance fees,” says Khaled Khalifa of Khalifa Expeditions, which arranges regular trips to the area. “At this time of the year, there would be around 10–15 trips to El-Gilf. Now there are only two.” For desert safaris in the less-remote areas near Farafra, Bahariyya, Siwa and other oases, a single guard per group remains the standard, with no additional security fee. A Novel Destintation El-Gilf El-Kebir entered the West’s imagination with Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 book The English Patient, which in 1996 was turned into a movie of the same name. In the book, a severely wounded World War II aviator is nursed to health in the plateau’s Cave of the Swimmers, named for the neolithic rock art on its walls. While the actual Cave of the Swimmers is an alcove too small to shelter a human, the film put El-Gilf El-Kebir on the adventure tourist’s must-do list for Egypt. A standard expedition includes stops at a World War II camp from where the British conducted raids into enemy territory, a cairn left in 1874 by a German explorer saved from a desert death by an unexpected rainstorm, the moving dunes of the Great Sand Sea, and, of course, the petroglyphs at Wadi Sura, which show not just swimmers, but giraffes, lions and other animals. Since 1980, more than 25,000 tourists have made the trek to the El-Gilf El-Kebir area, with the season running from mid-October to the end of spring. El-Gilf El-Kebir’s location in the empty desert near the Libyan and Sudanese borders means the site has been popular with bandits. In September 2008, the problem attracted international attention after a group of 19 Egyptians and foreigners were kidnapped from the area. After Egyptian and Sudanese authorities launched an extensive manhunt, the group was reportedly released without ransom after ten days. In a September 7, 2010, interview with the state-run French-language newspaper Ahram Hebdo about the new security fee, Minister of Tourism Zoheir Garrana said, “After the crime that involved a number of tourists kidnapped in this region, the Ministry of Tourism immediately contacted the Ministry of Interior, regarding this region that attracts a large number of tourists. After several meetings between the ministries, an agreement was reached to have a convoy of police guards exclusively for this area.” The size of the convoy depends on the size of the group: Safari operators are charged about LE 60 per hour for one fully staffed police vehicle and about LE 100 for two vehicles. “The job of accompanying tourists on trips was previously done by the border guards, where one guard would be sent to accompany the whole group,” explains Samir Saada, general manager of Safari White Desert excursions company and Western Desert Hotel, adding that the border guard was assigned to a El-Gilf El-Kebir group at no extra cost to the tour operator or the clients. “Now, with the new tariff, the job is handed to the tourism police authority, where the money paid will provide two police Jeeps with six police guards to accompany groups.” Saada admits that the new costs are being passed on to the customers, either in part or in total. He says that tourists normally used to pay around $120 (LE 914) per day for El-Gilf area. The new security fee adds $189–314 (LE 1,440–2,400) per day per person to the safari company’s operating costs. A company cannot afford to pass the total cost along to the client, Khalifa says; he has raised his prices a little and pays the rest from his own profits. “If I add the tourism police fees on the tourists, no one would want to go on a trip with my company,” he says. “The most expensive safari trip in Tunisia or Algeria would be around $2000 [LE 15,225] for 15 days, while our trip exceeds $4,000 [LE 30,453], so it’s almost double. This is not really promoting tourism.” To minimize his costs, Khalifa says, he is considering “shorter trips, like six or ten days instead of 15 and 20.” Saada admits the tariff has affected some trips for some companies but insists there is still business for El-Gilf El-Kebir. “It affects people who did not have in their plan to pay this tariff and have a certain budget for their trip,” he says. “So they would have to postpone it.” While the new fees present a financial burden for safari companies, Saada says the ministry mandate shifts the security burden off the safari staff. “It leaves the job of protecting the tourists solely to the tourism police. From now on, if anything happens to the tourists, the guides or the drivers are no longer held responsible for it,” he says.. “This is actually better for the safety of tourists as the guard that previously accompanied the group was unarmed, and one person is not enough to protect the whole group. This way there is better security during such trips.” Khalifa says his clients are complaining about too much security. “The number of people going on the trips has gone down. I used to have around 12 people and sometimes up to 15, but [on] the last trip I only went with three people,” says Khalifa. “In the trip I had in October, I had only six people, and the tourism police sent out 11 people to guard just six people, which was really annoying to the group.” He claims the guards were overprotective, trying to follow his clients around and questioning their every move. “I was trying to keep [the clients] calm all the time, as these are people who want to go out, stay in tents and relax. Now, this is not really a relaxing trip for them.” Mohamed Hassan, a frequent desert traveler, just opened a safari company with his brother and believes that people won’t pass up a trip like El-Gilf El-Kebir just because of the extra fees. He says that even after the government announced the new tariff, he is still taking trips out to the area. “It is good to have guards for this area, but I don’t believe it is solely done for security reasons,” asserts Hassan. “The area there is not really that dangerous and people have always planned trips to this area and nothing happened before, so it should not be a really big deal.” Ministry of Tourism officials referred Egypt Today to the Tourism Police to discuss the issue. At press time, however, Tourism Police officials were not available for comment. Protecting the Protectorate An unintended beneficiary of higher safari fees could be El-Gilf El-Kebir itself, which was named a protectorate in 2007. Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo who conducts archeological surveys around the Kharga Oasis, notes that the more traffic an area gets, the more damage that occurs to the features that draw the tourists. “The impact tends to be by too many people in close proximity to the rock art, touching it [and thereby destroying] it,” she says. Ikram says that the area still has prehistoric artifacts such as stone spearheads, knives or large grindstones lying around. Some tourists take them as souvenirs, destroying the archeological integrity of the site. Unaware of the importance of these sites, visitors are inadvertently destroying the heritage. “They might be aware but they do not really care or think that the rules don’t apply to them,” says Ikram. “It is hard to secure these areas and protect them because you cannot leave two guards in the middle of the desert all the time.” The increased security presence is not likely to protect the protectorate, as the police are there to keep the tourists safe from outlaws, not keep the protectorate safe from tourists. Fewer safaris due to increased costs, however, could reduce the human damage to the area. Operators like Hassan and Khalifa, however, are more concerned with the damage the increased security presence might do to the country’s — and their industry’s — reputation. Khalifa asserts, “This is not a good image for safari tourism here in Egypt.” |
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