Travel restrictions in the Western Desert

I stumbled onto a thread on the Sahara Safaris discussion forum this morning which makes for interesting reading.  My Google Alerts picked it up under “Gilf Kebir” but it is more concerned with the desert areas around Bahariya and Farafra, most importantly the White Desert.

I have posted both in the past and more recently about the state of tourism in the Bahariya area, and its impacts on both the desert itself and on the local community. This thread is written by those who are making a living out of running desert safaris from Bahariya and Farafra.  Here’s a summary of what they have been saying.

Apparently next season new rules are to be introduced that will confine foreign tourists to traveling through the desert with licensed tour companies.   The license to operate in the desert will be expensive and must be signed off by the Minister for Tourism.   The thread says that a fine of LE400 will be imposed on any drivers carrying foreign travelers into the deserts.  That’s a hefty 72 US dollars or 48 UKP.  That would be a massive fine for a local driver.

The guys at Sahara Safaris are worried that, if implemented, this will put independent tour operators out of business, killing local enterprise and competition and giving all revenue to the already cash-rich national scale tour operator.  This would leave many oasis dwellers who have invested heavily in four-wheel drive vehicles without income and without any obvious way of paying off their loans.

If this is actually the case, and it remains to be confirmed, this seems to me to be a really dreadful shame.  Egypt has for a long time been encouraging people to seek work outside Cairo.  The development of the New Valley (the crescent of oases from Cairo down to Luxor) was to be the foundation of a new semi rural economic model.  And now that the oasis inhabitants have found a way to make tourism work for them and have used their creativity and enterprise to pull it off, they are having the rug pulled from under them.  And it’s crazy. The people who live in the oases and invest in the local economy will put their wealth back into the local economy by spending and developing their businesses and employing local people.

Obviously nothing is clear cut or straight forward.  Some of the inhabitants of Bahariya miss the peaceful pre-tourism rural days when the streets weren’t buzzing with four-by-fours.  But it’s one thing to fear change and quite another to cut it off with an axe.

The conversation on Sahara Safaris asks the obvious question – why?  Why are these licenses being imposed?  Is it for “security” reasons.  I don’t know the answer but I suspect that it has much to do with criticism about how the White Desert is being managed, the amount of litter that is being left there by tourists and the amount of damage that is being done.   I have often thought that the way to manage tourists in these out of the way places is to impose responsibility on the tour companies.  But I never had a vision of the little guys being put out of business.  I never imagined excluding local people from their own landscape or indeed, their own economy.

And it I’m right about the reasons for imposing the new licenses and excluding local people from taking tours, its both an irony and unfair.  Many of the single-person or family run enterprises are the ones who care for the desert and by running very small tours keep the scale of the tourist problem to a level of managing bites of the elephant.  Bigger tours from Cairo are much less easy to control.

Managing the vandalism, theft, careless damage and littering in the Western Desert is a serious problem and so far no-one has come up with a viable solution. Or if they have, nothing has been implemented.  If this is the implementation of a solution to protect the desert by limiting access only to licensed operators who can offer certain guarantees about managing their tour members then I can see the benefits. And if the cost of the licenses are there to fund desert clean-ups that too I understand (but doubt).  But there is no reason why private oases tour organizers should not be able to offer the same guarantees and be offered a more reasonable fee for the licenses as some recompense for the invasion of their villages and recognition of  their local expertise, creativity and the investment they have already made.

I think that if I was a small tour business working in the oases I would look to my fellow operators and  form something of a collective – a trade association of sorts – with a charter of responsible behaviour and a set of agreements for managing both tourists and the use of the desert. That might be something with which to negotiate.   There is no reason why training on heritage and environmental management and care shouldn’t be arranged by the SCA or the Ministry of Tourism for such a group.

There needs to be a more subtle solution that the one being debated, and it needs to include those who live and work in the oases, not exclude them.  I sincerely hope that matters are not really unfolding as they have been described.

Desert ecotourism – Bahairya and the White Desert

Jon Jensen reports on the need to balance tourism with the needs of both environment and community  in an article on the Global Post. about tourism in Egypt’s Bahariya oasis, popular launch pad for visits to the hills around Bahariya and for tours into the remarkable White Desert.   The White Desert is part of Farafra oasis to the south of Bahariya oasis, but Bahariya is much closer to Cairo and has become a center for desert “safaris”.    Jensen says that one third of the 40,000 inhabitants of Bahariya are now employed in tourism.   He adds that 10% of all of Egypt’s tourists head for the deserts.  Desert tourism is becoming increasingly popoular.

An annual clean-up organized in the White Desert by a local tour guide is a terrible reflection on the habits of tourists who leave litter that amounts to tons of waste.

The article says that last year a ticket office was set up and that fixed routes for vehicles were laid down for the protection of the White Desert, but that estimates suggest that only a third of visitors pass through the ticket office and instead use back routes into the area.

This is a perennial problem for the deserts of Egypt.  There are too few measures taken to protect them and some of the tour operators who should know better are adding to the problem.  Local people need the income provided by tourists, but the cost is high to both local communities who are changed forever by the influx, and to the environment which is victimized by the abandonment of rubbish and by the removal of souvenirs – both natural and archaeological.

There are some very attractive photographs accompanying the article.   the one at the top of the page is one of mine from 2002.

Tourist trash (3 tons of it) in the White Desert

This article  by Andrew Stelzer in the Seattle Times made me feel very cold. The White Desert is a remarkable place and I was only talking with a group of people the other day about the benefits or otherwise that tourism would have in terms of its total impact on the oases in the vicinity of the White Desert and on the White Desert itself.

Stelzer was part of a week-long operation to clean up the White Desert.  After arriving from Cairo he and his colleagues settled into the task.  One of his paragraphs is worth quoting in full:

“The next day, a six-hour van ride brought us into a vast sea of sand, seemingly empty except for its curious eruptions of white rock, scattered around like so many Martian toys. A twisted pillar over here, a giant mushroom shape over there. Surely, some speculated, people who come to this place must be environmental types. They wouldn’t be chucking a lot of litter everywhere.
Two days later, we compared notes on some of the junk we’d found buried in the sand. The most unusual was definitely the fishing twine, but also on the list were a couple pairs of pants, one Birkenstock, a set of plastic silverware, a broken watch, a few used condoms and a toothbrush.
My finds: lots of cans and bottles, including some that once contained British pear cider, several packs of cheese from Greenland, a bunch of cigarette cartons (“Cleopatra” being the favored brand in Egypt) and an endless stream of toilet paper.”

Stelzer says that 80,000 people visit the White Desert annually. They come to see the marvellous white limestone shapes that sprout out of the desert floor, and they leave their trash behind to deface it.  Three tons of it.  Three tons!

Three tons of rubbish was far more horrific than I had speculated upon. There have often been critical comments about the way in which Egypt manages her heritage, but here we have a case of the boot being firmly on the other foot, and it dismays me utterly that as visitors any of us should treat this very special place with such disrespect.

And it is being cleaned up by the locals.  Work parties composed of well meaning outsiders is a good gesture, but the real burden falls on those who live in the oasis towns and villages.  It’s a disgrace that tourists should behave in this way.  Although the White Desert is, in theory, a protected zone in Egypt, there are insufficient resources to make this matter although Stelzer says that a tour guide training course significantly improved the management of tourists and their unpleasent habits.  As both a tour guide and a tourist I am truly ashamed of the way in which tourists behave.