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TOURISTS HAVE TRAVELLED to Egypt’s ancient pyramids and historic monuments for centuries.
But tourism has dropped rapidly in recent years, as violent conflicts following the 2011 revolution have been particularly successful in scaring off travellers.
According to a recent Reuters article, 9.9 million tourists visited Egypt in 2014, compared to 14.7 million people in 2010. The country’s tourism minister recently said that he expects that number to be around 10 million again this year.
“From January until the end of August the rise was very little, barely 5%,” he told Reuters.
In 2014, photographer Ben Terzza left Wales with his partner to live in Egypt for several months. A teaching job had been offered to his partner, so Terzza decided to tag along.
Terzza and his partner eventually made a trip to the capital city of Cairo. What they found there was a disappointing surprise. Cairo felt desolate and was visibly empty, which Terzza captured in a selection of his photos below.
After four months of living in Egypt, Terzza and his partner decided to take a trip to Cairo around Christmas time. It was about five hours north of El Gouna, where they had been staying.
They were warned to be careful while visiting Cairo, and sure enough, they felt isolation in the air as soon as they got there.
When they went to the Saqqara pyramids on the edge of the Cairo region, they found they were the only people there. Besides feeling nervous to be off that far alone, they were also being bothered by locals while they were walking around.
The locals were constantly asking Terzza and his partner for their tickets, begging for money, and trying to show them around the premises.
Terzza even had to resort to shouting at them to stop them from bothering him, which he was uncomfortable doing.
But Terzza knew it was deep-seated problem. “As you spoke to more and more locals, the reality of their political, economic, and social cultures started to make sense,” he says.
He had done plenty of research about the state of the country beforehand, but the level of corruption and dysfunction within the government was still both surprising and upsetting.
According to Terzza, one of the most disturbing parts of Egypt’s culture was their sense of women’s rights, which were pretty much nonexistent. “To watch my partner be treated like dirt was extremely infuriating,” he said.
Not many other people were there to check out the pyramids with Terzza.
Egypt has had problems with tourism in the past. Visitors declined dramatically after a group of 58 tourists were killed in a 1997 attack by Islamic militants.
It is a priority for the government to get the industry booming again. Tourism is one of Egypt’s biggest moneymakers, bringing in billions of dollars a year.
The tourism minister of Egypt told Reuters that the country is planning to launch a global advertising campaign in November.
Even if tourism makes a rebound, however, the country still has a lot to work out with its government and citizens.
Until then, a campaign might not be enough to save them.
More of Terzza’s work can be seen on his Instagram and Twitter.
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Coming soon – Aldi OS
Obviously to be followed the week after by the Lidl one
Would the windows os smartphones not be the third and Firefox the fourth?
They.have blackberry and now tizen to deal with too.
LOL Microsoft mobile products. That’s a good one. Its already dead in the water along with Nokia who is flogging them. They’ve recently indicated they’re ready to make android phones in the near future and to prevent its total destruction and no amount of cash MS throws at then will make or worth their while.
I don’t see what niche Firefox OS is going to service. Their browser has been hemorrhaging users to Chrome for years, and iOS and Android are mature systems which are meeting most users needs. Another OS is just another headache for developers and users.
I have to agree with Eric here, i think they’ll struggle, android is already more or less free to use, Apple has it’s market. if these guys have a few good ideas they will just be copied by the others. Android became established because they were up against an established closed expensive opposition, they came in with the concept of being free, someone else now has to compete with two established companies the slick apple designs and the open free androids.
What’s the Firefox edge?
While OpenSource is great and all, the reality is constantly full of bugs – FireFox browser is one of the most resource heavy applications you can run
Agreed, the Android SDK feels like it’s being held together with duct tape.
You’re talking crap. If open source is so buggy then linux wouldn’t be powering 70% or more of the worlds servers. I could go on and on with examples of the crap you are talking but I think my first point illustrates it nicely.
Conor, I was referring to FireFox and it’s browser with its countless bugs, not Linux which I am fully aware of
http://m.threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/firefox-18-brings-21-updates-fixes-nearly-3000-bugs-010913
They’re really coming to the market *very* late. When you consider that even the mobile industry giant that is Nokia struggled (and ultimately failed) to get their next generation Maemo / Meego smartphone OS to market and even Windows Mobile 8 isn’t getting all that much traction so far, you’d have to wonder if there’s space for yet another mobile OS ?
To me, it looks like Android is becoming to the mobile/tablet world what Windows is to the desktop world i.e. the de facto OS. It already has 68.4% of the global market!!
Apple’s iOS is occupying a similar (but bigger) space to the Mac OS for laptops/desktops i.e. a very respectable market share of almost 20% of the global market, but a closed Apple-only hardware-software solution that occupies a chunk of the market at the high end. With that kind of chunk of the market, at the top end, and controlling the hardware, software and ecosystem (App Store). That still makes Apple an absolutely hugely profitable, runaway success.
Blackberry’s rather niche and business-focused and fighting to stay relevant while Windows Mobile is still to prove itself as a main stream mobile OS. It may well do this year, but the jury’s still out.
Personally, I just can’t see where Firefox’s Mobile OS would find a foothold in the market! It could be a great OS, but it would still have to sign up handset makers and create a massive ecosystem of developers to build apps before it would be even in the same league as Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Getting into the Google / Apple league would be a rather amazing feat if they ever achieved it!
I don’t think it’s much of a challenge to Google or Apple to be perfectly honest.
There is always a market, especially in one as competitive as the mobile phone market. The problem is you need to offer something unique that sets your product apart. iOS has simplicity, Android has customisation and Blackberry’s OS is marketed as a business solution.
Microsoft didn’t offer anything new to set it apart other than the name. What will this offer? If it does bring something new it will find traction but if it doesn’t it will be dead in the water.
I guess you’re not anybody these days unless you have a mobile operating system.
Its not going to be here 2013. Thus is firmly a third world is for this year. Cheap and cheerful, wil probably be really successful at that
Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile are the big 4.
Now it seems everyone and their mother are making operating systems for phones: Firefox, Ubuntu, Samsung Tizen. Symbian and bada are still alive somewhere.
More OS’ means more time developers take to make apps for each platform which in turn means slower updates, more bugs and less stable.
Probably means the browser…
Uh, reply to Partysaurus this was.
Mybe if they went with decent manufacturers they might have a chance but generally ZTE LG and Heuwei don’t make great handsets. This is talking from experience.
have your say