Egyptian escapades

I had initially been invited to celebrate New Year’s in the desert with the Doctor and his Bedouin friends, and although I confess to pangs of disappointment when I found out that our Bedouin host had been summoned to the desert early and we were heading to his hotel instead, the interaction between tourists and Bedouins at the hotel was undoubtedly a more ‘authentic’ experience of the essence of ‘Sharm’. A show had been arranged for the eccentric bunch who had decided to spend their New Year ‘the Egyptian way’ which, it soon became apparent, was the way Egyptians imagine Western tourists like to enjoy themselves.

The most colourful of the visitors were undoubtedly a group of Dutch and English, who had decided to ‘go native’ with drunken impersonations of Lawrence of Arabia, decked out in the tob and kefiyeh held in place by an egal. A buffet was followed by three rounds of orientalist entertainment comprised of a fire juggler and glass walker, a snake charmer and a belly dancer. Aside from observing the skill of the first two artists, the most interesting point to observe was the gender relations between the local men, and the string of white European women who were pulled out to press glass into the back of one, or be decorated with a becalmed cobra by the other. With the final performance, things took an even greater turn for the burlesque. A competent and professional (by Western standards) belly dance is performed with much aplomb by an Egyptian woman perhaps in her mid-twenties, who also attempts to involve the audience in her routine, closely observed by a watchful boyfriend. Yet the Dutch tourists appear not to know the rules of the game, and become increasingly boisterous, much to the amusement of the Bedouin, who fall about in fits of laughter. The hyper-sexualised routines of the Dutch are crude and demeaning to the dancer, who seems to feel her professionalism undermined and is unsure how to continue. She skillfully negotiates drunken fumbles and avoids attempts to be placed between the Dutch men, often seeking refuge behind her Bedouin hosts. Eventually, she abandons the stage altogether, leaving it to the Dutch, who continue with much drunken malarkey including the beginnings of a strip tease and Klinsmann dives across a grit floor. Roles are reversed – now the tourists are providing the entertainment for a majority Arab crowd, who delight in observing how these drunken buffoons bring in the New Year.

There is no one single emotion here, no lesson to take away; warmth mixes with disdain, embarrassment with inhibition. One thing is for sure however: there is a sense of relief that at least some tourists are still in Sharm, otherwise the cooks, managers and entertainers would be joining the hundreds of others who in recent months have been laid off work due to the declining fortunes of the tourist industry. The sight of Sharm teeming with drunken, abrasive and sunburnt tourists might not be a pretty one, but seeing the huge tourist industry and workforce idle is positively tragic, and apparently one of the unseen consequences of the revolution, the only indication of which in ‘the Shark’ is the 25th January branding on a box of tissues on our New Year’s table. The revolution will not be commercialized?