
As part of our work in Africa we were lucky enough to host a briefing session in Cairo. I’d never been to Egypt before but my curiosity was aroused when I watched the recent “Walking the Nile” TV program. I hadn’t realised the extent that tourism had been impacted by the two uprisings in Egypt but at a lecture, given by Levison Wood (the man who did the walking in the named program) last week, he underlined the impact the estimated 400,000 lost jobs in tourism has had. One of his slides showed a cruise liner that, before the problems, used to take many tourists up and down the Nile. Now, beached and rotting, it served as a symbolic representation of the state of the industry and, perhaps, a modern monument to those jobs that have been lost.
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