one other point about the Pyramids area

Readers of this blog know that I’m generally fond of Egyptians and enjoy interacting with them.

The major exception to this rule concerns those Egyptians who sell goods and services near the Pyramids. They are bad people. They are an all-star team of the most horrible humans that Egypt has to offer. Their only purpose in being in that area is not fair business, but organized cons, traps, and rip-offs.

This starts with the jerks who hang out near the ticket line and pretend to be official guides. (They don’t wear fake badges or anything; they simply try to con you with their authoritative tones of voice.) Worse yet are the camel guys, who have a dozen or more tricks to extort outrageous sums from visitors, including pretending to be angry at even an obscenely generous tip, grabbing your shirt and yelling in your face.

For these reasons, I have a rule of thumb that no Cairo visitor for whom I feel even remote human sympathy is allowed to visit the Pyramids without me. I go along with them to be the “bad cop”, and such a level of badcopness is required that I can almost guarantee you I’ll be in an ugly shouting match with one of those bums today.

Part of being the bad cop is that you never mount a camel out there. Why? Because one of their famous tricks is to get everyone in a group up on a camel and then claim that the requested fee was only a mounting fee, which needs the supplement of an equal or higher dismounting fee. One member of the party needs to be on the ground in order to call their bluff on that con and threaten to fetch a soldier. You can’t just jump off a camel; you’re much too high in the air for that.

Another of their tricks is to pretend that the price they had quoted in Pounds was in British rather than Egyptian Pounds, which is something like a ninefold increase.

I hate all of those people. Most tourists are plenty generous when visiting this country, and don’t need to be exploited by professional con artists on top of that. These are not Robin Hood figures, but merely the worst face of international capitalism.

However, Agra in India (home of the Taj Mahal) is even worse. I had mobs of taxi and rickshaw drivers hassling me in Agra. Even the hotel desk clerk was hassling me there to hire his cousin.