Please go away now

I have recently been rereading the late Pete McCarthy's hilarious travel book, The Road to MacCarthy. I have just finished the chapter where his attempts to travel around Tangier are dogged by the determined, though self-appointed, guide, Mohammed. Mohammed is there whenever he leaves the hotel. Mohammed is there if he pops out for a coffee. When he thinks he has given him the slip and let's down his guard, Mohammed pops out from some previously unnoticed side alley and ambushes him. Mohammed is ubiquitous.
I know the feeling. I've been on the receiving end of far too many such "guided tours" to even think that there is a slight sense of exaggeration in the description.
Without doubt though, the country where, for me, the problem reached its very zenith (and correspondingly my moral, its very nadir) was Egypt.
I don't know if it's a cultural difference, or if it's my lack of tolerance, or if it's just a few extremely overzealous locals but I do know that walking around in Egypt is not a terribly enjoyable experience for the tourist. I'll go further. It can be a downright unpleasant experience. Now I'd expected it when we visited the pyramids and similarly when we visited Luxor they are tourist sites and as such we are fair game but it really was everywhere.
At the pyramids the would-be guides were, at least, a slight distraction from the constant official fleecing of the tourists. Besides the site entry fee they charge an entry fee to each pyramid, a further fee simply for carrying a camera, whether you use it or not (which, as there is nowhere to safely leave a camera, is effectively mandatory, a further camera fee if you wish to carry your camera inside any particular pyramid and a fee to visit the museum. I'm sure there were other fees that I missed. The constant entreaties from unofficial guides, souvenir salesmen, camel and donkey owners and the like are a mild irritation by comparison.

Anyway, as I say, it wasn't just at the tourist sites that there was a problem. When we camped at a site outside Luxor I ran into it again. The group I had been travelling with for a couple of months had become divided into cliques and I wasn't actually in any of them, though occasionally I hovered around on the periphery of a couple. When I awoke on the morning after we arrived I found that most of them had departed for various parts before I was even awake so I shared a taxi out to Karnak with the one remaining person in camp from the group, who was unfortunately also the one person that I actually didn't like. At the site I did my very best to lose her but sharing a taxi seemed, in her mind at least, to mean that we would also share the sight-seeing. Even in a place the size of Karnak it proved to be impossible to shake her, though I consoled myself with the thought that at least it would halve the taxi fare back to camp. She had enough dogged persistence to be suspected of being at least part-Egyptian herself.
Karnak is a large complex of temples which were once the most important in Egypt and was built over a period of 1500 years more than four thousand years ago. For several hours I explored its maze-like byways - poking into one temple after another, taking endless photographs and discovering the mysterious secret of how such ruins were constructed when I happened across an extremely large crane hoisting blocks onto the top of an as yet unfinished section. Or possibly this was reconstruction work, I’d hate to be dogmatic about my archaeological theories.

It was in the afternoon that things got more than a little annoying.
Back at camp, I decided to take a walk down into the town of Luxor - at a moderate ambling pace it was about half an hour away. This proved to be harder than you might expect. The concept of ‘taking a walk’ appears not to exist at all in Egypt. For the entire two kilometres my footsteps were dogged by an apparently endless succession of taxi drivers and carriage drivers who were completely unable to comprehend that when I said ‘no’ what I meant was ‘no’. The word, such as they acknowledged it at all, was only ever interpreted as being an initial bargaining ploy. The idea that my walk might be an end in itself and that riding would defeat the whole object simply could not be communicated to them. A typical conversation was along these lines.
“Mister, you want carriage.”
“No thank you.”
“I make very good price. Where you go ?”
“Nowhere special, just taking a walk.”
“Five pounds anywhere. I give you one hour ride.”
“No thanks I’m enjoying walking.”
“Is very good price.”
“I’m sure it is but I’m going for a walk.”
“Good. Good. You go for walk in my carriage.”

I realise that they are trying to earn a living but I find it wears me down.
Eventually, still dogged by these nuisances I reached town and started to look around. Luxor temple was much smaller and a good deal less interesting than Karnak so I photographed it as I passed and didn’t bother with a visit. In town I discovered that there was still no respite from the hassles. It wasn’t long before I was heartily sick of being dragged this way and that as a succession of persistent salesmen tried to get me into their shops. Whether it was carpets or jewellery or shirts or belts or jackets or hats or souvenirs or any one of a thousand other things I didn't want or need I was pulled, pushed, prodded, harangued, inveigled and generally bothered at every step. The one thing that I could have used, a nerve tonic, wasn't offered.
Even when I was between shops, at a sufficient distance that they felt their entreaties would be better addressed to closer tourists, there was still no break. Here the touts for various shops fell in beside me as I walked and neither ignoring them nor curtly acknowledging them had any discernible effect.

I confess that I was briefly amused at a carpet shop to see a large and intricately woven carpet in the pattern of the cover of the previous year’s Explore brochure, complete with the name and address of the company, but my smile at the sight was a mistake as yet another salesman mistook it for interest providing yet another
“I make you good price”
“I don’t want a carpet.”
dialogue before I could make good my escape. In the end I dodged into an Internet cafe, had a cup of coffee and checked my e-mail before giving up and taking a carriage back to camp. Even then I couldn’t escape. The whole journey was a battle of wills as I tried to convince the driver to take me where I wanted to go instead of on a tour and that I didn’t want a tour tomorrow either. Only by getting out of the moving vehicle as he attempted for the third or fourth time to turn off the correct route and threatening not to pay hi at all did I eventually succeed in making it home. Once back in the camp I vowed that I would be moving from it with the whole group or not at all, and I stuck to it, spending the remaining day reading in my tent or sitting by the pool - though, to be fair, a rather unpleasant bout of stomach trouble was probably as much of an incentive as the unappealing prospect of a repeat of yesterday.

What surprises me about all of this is that my reaction can't be that uncommon. Surely other tourists get as sick of it all as quickly as I did. If the taxi drivers, carriage owners and shopkeepers had adopted a more low key approach I would have spent a couple of hours in town, almost certainly bought a few souvenirs and they'd have been richer and I'd have been happier and this blog would never have been written. I cannot understand why they seem totally unable to grasp that the last way to get an Englishman to buy something is to try, so persistently, to sell it to him. Whether this is a comment on Englishmen or Egyptians I'm really not sure.