Egypt's tourism suffers

Every time some kid imagines he is a revolutionary and throws a stone or fire bomb in Egypt, Ahmed Ki-nawy quietly rages at the price he and many of his countrymen pay for Egypt's tumultuous variant of the Arab Spring.

"The violence at Tahrir Square, the presidential palace and now Port Said really brings us down a lot," the 33-year-old tour guide said as he took a pair of forlorn tourists around the pyramids at Giza, which emerge out of the desert on the southwest edge of Cairo. "Where I used to bring one or two groups around here every day, I often go four of five days now without a single tourist. I am earning about 70 per cent less than I used to.

"The revolutionaries claim to be acting this way because they love our country, but they really only love themselves."

Because the government may be cooking the books, it has been difficult to get an accurate idea of how much tourism has declined as the result of two years of street violence and political upheaval. That unrest began with the downfall of military strongman Hosni Mubarak and continues with bitter secularist and Christian opposition to the democratically-elected Islamist government of President Mohammed Morsi.

However, in a country of 91 million where nearly half the population survives on less than $2 a day and about one in eight of those with a job works in the tourism industry, there have been devastating losses.

Officially, the number of tourists has dropped 32 per cent since the troubles began. But those numbers included all foreign visitors, not just tourists. Tourism revenues plummeted from nearly $12 billion a year to a little more than $9 billion over the past two years, the finance ministry said. The cost to the economy since the revolt began two years ago this January is $267 million a week.