Touts fight push for hassle-free Egypt tourism

The Age

IT IS early morning and the alleyways of Nazlet al-Saman, the mini-suburb of horse and camel stables below the Giza plateau, look like the Wild West. The sunlight, which is just beginning to cut through Cairo's haze, creates searchlights in the dust kicked up by hundreds of horses and camels being ridden, often at breakneck pace, by young, whooping Arab tourists.

Quietly and patiently, Saeed Abu Saleeb leads his three horses through the pandemonium, avoiding the four-wheeled-motorbikes and the honking Hummers. Mr Abu Saleeb is an Egyptian tout, one of a small army of notorious, largely loathed, hawkers who scrape together a living offering rides around the pyramids for about $4 an hour. To most people, he is an annoyance — he routinely gets the finger and a curt order to "f--- off". To his wife and three children he is the source of a meagre family income. To the Egyptian economy, he is one little cog in a giant machine of tips, bribes and kickbacks — the infamous baksheesh — that makes the nation tick.

And in his eyes, he is a kind of anachronism whose livelihood is under constant pressure in a growing and changing city.

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