But suddenly, the paradise becomes a nightmare. You become surrounded by police, who separate you out from those around you. You have done nothing wrong, but you can go nowhere unless under guard. Anywhere you go, and anyone you meet, has to be arranged beforehand, lest something terrible happen.
And anyone who comes into contact with you is a suspect, and may be insulted, ordered around or inconvenienced. And all of this, like in some Kafkaesque novel, is for your benefit--to protect you from terrorism.
It is a mistake to think that terrorism only affects an unlucky few who happen to get in the way of a bomb or attack. As with other forms of crime, to be a victim is something we fear, but generally those actually affected directly in this way are a small minority.
Many more people are affected indirectly, by the very measures that governments and businesses take against the threat of terrorism. This threat is used by governments all over the world to justify both brutal and banal forms of civil rights abuses, such as the rounding up of Chechens in Moscow, or the imprisonment and torture of "suspects" in hundreds of nations.
Defensive mechanisms, however, are equally costly. Protection requires us to block ourselves off from the world, implying both the direct cost of creating barriers and screening procedures, as well as the indirect costs that such barriers imply by creating limits on our activity.
This is all the more true as terrorist groups change their strategy. Rather than going directly after those seen as their oppressors--officials or local elites--more and more groups are trying to undermine the economic systems of their society, and they have found the perfect soft target--tourists.
Tourists are unarmed, unguarded, and they have the habit of "flocking" in predictable patterns, or of being easily spotted when off the beaten path.
And they are also easily scared. Attacks on tourists are rapidly rewarded by the mass cancellation of packet tours, or by the decision of potential tourists to seek alternative areas.
"Tourist terrorism" also tends to be most effective precisely in those societies which are most dependent on tourism and where the government or society is seen with more suspicion by middle-class western tourists. The deaths of hundreds of European and Asian tourists at the hands of US muggers has had some effect on the tourist trade in key cities, but nowhere near the effect of a single attack on a tourist in more exotic areas, such as Egypt.
For example, a number of friends and colleagues have declined to visit my family in Cairo because they consider it too dangerous. These are people who live in Los Angeles, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. These are also people who think nothing of visiting Israel which, despite its "western" appearance is possibly one of the most terrorist prone countries in the world.
In contrast, the real effect of terrorism in Egypt, when measured against the high crime rates in the US or, increasingly, in Mexico, is minimal.
Fewer than 100 tourists have been killed in Egypt over the last five years--far less than in either the US or Mexico. But still, the economic effect has been enormous, as the Egyptian economy has been deprived of billions of dollars and millions of tourists a year decide to go elsewhere.
The result has been that the Egyptian government has taken extraordinary precautions to protect foreigners-- precautions that not only violate the civil rights of Egyptians, as hundreds are rounded up after every incident and thousands await trials, but also affect the freedom of tourists themselves.
More importantly for the future, perhaps, is that these precautions may in fact increase the resentment of locals against tourists and foreigners as a whole, as it becomes more than obvious that the government considers the safety of foreigners to be far more important than the civil rights of its own citizens.
On a recent trip to the Egyptian city of Minya, the site of a number of Middle Kingdom Pharonic tombs and cities dating back 4,000 years, this was made patently obvious to me. Traveling under a contract with an American development organization, I was unaware that the night before I left Cairo an American researcher had been stabbed to death outside a downtown hotel.
Security was tightened nationwide, even though the attack was described by both the American embassy and Egyptian officials as an isolated attack by a mentally disturbed individual. And authorities in Minya, a small and friendly city that, however, had been affected by terrorist activities centered in the neighboring province of Assyuit, took it very seriously.
The first inkling that my research assistant--Rawya Mansour, an American University in Cairo anthropology student--and I had was when we were escorted to our hotel by a galabeya wearing undercover police officer. Our belief that this was simply a quaint, but slightly bothersome, local custom was broken when we wanted to leave the hotel later that night and were told that we would have to wait for another police escort to take us wherever we wanted to go.
Unaccustomed to such attention, I was able to leave the hotel early in the morning undetected and spent two hours wandering through the fields and villages on the opposite side of the Nile from Minya. I declined an invitation for breakfast with a peasant farmer and watched another as he hunted for pigeons along the cliffs lining the eastern side of the Nile valley with an air rifle. If any locals were surprised to see me, they covered it up well with friendly greetings as I passed.
But when we left the hotel together later that morning, a very different story emerged. Impatient after waiting half and hour for our escort, I simply walked out the door, followed quickly by my assistant.
Apparently the hotel personnel alerted the police. Before we got more than five blocks from the hotel a police car full of heavily armed police was following us. After another two blocks, the car was joined by another and a plain clothes officials carrying a walkie-talkie who insisted that we ride with them to our destination. As we got into the proffered pick-up truck, another two police cars arrived and created a mini- traffic jam of police cars that took at least five minutes to resolve.
But the most extraordinary incident occurred the following day when we decided to go to the tombs of Beni Hassan dating back to the 11th Dynasty (2000 BC) with a young French couple that were staying at our hotel. Located 25 kilometers from Minya, it required passing through Abu Qurqas, a village that last year was the site of an attack on a train in which two tourists were wounded.
Blissfully unaware of the significance of these events, we decided to take a local mini-van to that village and there transfer to another mini-van that would take us to the ferry boat that would transfer us to Beni Hassan. While our escort tried to persuade us to take a private taxi, we preferred to take the mini-van in order to be closer in touch with the locals.
Events, however, were to prove otherwise.
Initially all went according to plan. The escort took us to the mini-van stand where we boarded along with locals who were going to Abu Qurqas, and then went to talk to a squad of uniformed police who appeared to have a set up a guard post across the street with two pickup trucks. But when our mini-van left the stand, the guard post became a mobile escort, with one truck filled with automatic- rifle toting police in front of us and one behind. As the other passengers noticed, their initial alarm turned to sarcasm.
"Not even the President gets this kind of protection" one commented to his wife, unaware that my assistant was Egyptian and could understand him.
Half-way to Abu Qurqas the pick-up trucks were replaced by an armored car staffed by a motley looking crew of soldiers and led by a plain clothes officer. Soon enough, he told the driver to pull over. After checking over the passengers, he told the driver that it had been decided that they could not risk dropping us off in the village. He would have to drive straight through without stopping and take us directly to the ferry. The passengers would be dropped off a half- kilometer before the village, which would require them to walk or pay another fare if there was space on the next van.
None of the passengers complained. To question an armed police officer was, apparently, not part of their repertoire. At least not when a 50 millimeter cannon turret was trained on us by the officer's crew. I would have complained about the absurdity of inconveniencing 10 people, some carrying babies, in order to facilitate the travel requirements of four tourists who were too cheap to spring for a taxi. But Mansour's selective translation of what was going to was, probably for the best, designed to limit the substantial capacity for my mouth to get me into trouble.
Just before we reached the village the officer pulled us over again and ordered the passengers out--except for us. Looking bewildered and perhaps a bit resentful, they got out. Some started the half-kilometer walk to the village. The others waited patiently on the road. The officer then reminded the driver to go straight through the village without stopping.
This the driver did. At the center of the village the armored car that had followed us stopped and we passed another armored car, which was apparently supposed to escort us to the ferry. It occurred to me that they were radioing our intentions and progress back and forth constantly to coordinate such complicated, and remarkably efficient, cooperation between a number of adjacent security zones. At the same time, it seemed to me that if the police knew exactly where we were and where we were going, so should any potential terrorist organization in the area that had access to a police radio.
But a problem emerged just at this point. The new armored car didn't follow us at first. Perhaps they had problems starting their engine. But after five minutes, it suddenly pulled up next to us and another plain-clothes police officer started screaming through the window for our driver to stop. Once done, the officer continued screaming obscenities at the poor man and ordered him to step down from the van.
Perhaps the officer had meant to hit the man, or just to degrade him. He certainly achieved the latter. After heaping abuses on his mother, father, children and any other possible relatives, he ordered the driver back into the van, and we took off again.
Unfortunately, the ferry did not work as efficiently as the police. After waiting 40 minutes, it finally arrived and took us--its only passengers--across the Nile to where another four armed galabeya police were waiting to escort us to the tombs. More for the convenience of the police than ourselves, we took another mini-van for the 1 minute drive to the causeway leading up to the tomb area.
The police did not join us on the grueling climb up to the tombs, but after viewing the four open tombs we found them waiting for us. We decided to spend the extra hour available to us before the ferry returned to tour the ruins of the old village of Beni Hassan, deserted but in surprisingly good shape considering its mud-brick construction and the shelling it received at the hands of Mohammed Ali, which prematurely ended its life 200 years ago.
But this idea put the police into paroxysms of concern, since in their view the ruins might be hiding bands of terrorists waiting for the chance to take a pot shot at the occasional tourist that passed through the area. Since it seemed clear that we were the only tourists to visit the tombs that day, such a possibility seemed remote.
As much to prevent them from having heart attacks as for any other reason, we turned back after a partial exploration of the area and took the van back to the ferry landing, where we spent the next hour dosing in the heat waiting for the ferry.
As we waited, the mid-day call for prayers could be heard across the waters. Being a Friday--the moslem holy day, one member of our escort complained about missing the prayer on our account. But another cut off his complaint by quoting from the Koran: "Work is a form of worship." Faced with such logic, the complainer was forced to agree.
But when the ferry finally arrived, this did not stop the officer in charge from shouting at the ferry captain for being late. Higher in status than a mere mini-van passenger, he replied that he had arrived at the previously arranged time, and paid no further attention to the officer, who then asked us for the tenth time where we were going so that he could radio the information back.
We were alone on the way back to Minya. The mini-van, against our instructions, had waited for us, and was told to pick up no passengers on the way. The same armored cars waited for us at the ferry landing and, later, in the village. The occasional pedestrian who waved us down was ignored as we sped past. I guess the police thought that a terrorist may get on and kill us all.
For our part, the whole experience convinced us not to try any more trips outside the city--not because of any perceived danger, but just to prevent embarrassment over the fate of peasants and villagers who might get caught up in the dragnet surrounding us.
Personally, the whole experience filled me with a variety of feelings. Certainly, it is flattering to be provided with such a high level of protection that was, except for the delays in waiting for escorts to arrive at the hotel, efficient and professional with regards to ourselves.
On the other hand, it certainly limits the enjoyment one might have in walking around without a police officer telling us what we cannot or should not do. The inhibition one faces in thinking that the escort surely had a family to return to and perhaps did not enjoy walking all over the city also resulted in us returning to the hotel on many occasions long before we otherwise would have done so.
Certainly, there are many cities in the United States where such an escort service for tourists would be a wonderful idea that might help to rebuild confidence in the tourist industry, although at a substantial cost.
I have always felt far securer in Egypt than in most of those cities. And the obvious friendliness of the majority of Minyans only adds to the absurdity of protecting tourists in such a city when in their hometowns they are constantly threatened with violence of all sorts.
But at the same time, the callous treatment of the local population, who after all pay the salaries of the police through their taxes, makes the whole project seem paradoxical and self-defeating. To what extent does this policy increase negative feelings towards tourists? To what extent does it increase the impression that the government is less concerned about their own interests than those of foreigners? To what extent does it create the impression that we, who are guests of the people of Egypt, are lording it over them and pushing them around?
Obviously, what is logical is not what is correct. Egypt is concerned about the very real, albeit irrational, reaction of Americans and Europeans to any news of violence to their citizens in any part of Egypt. If an American professor and two French tourists were to be attacked by an angry street vendor, the result would be an immediate international incident and the local officials from the provincial governor on down would be in very serious trouble.
Added to the previous attack on an American in Cairo, it would become the latest talk-show circuit crowd-pleaser as pundits vie to interpret the situation as a coordinated attack on American/French/Foreign interests that demands strong action--perhaps against "terrorism", or perhaps against the government of Egypt, already under severe attack for its stand against the Israeli nuclear arsenal. It would become a way to grind axes and perhaps even to begin wielding them, further undercutting the stability of the region.
Thus the irrationality of my insignificant situation can only be explained by appealing to the irrationality of international politics. In order to prevent any possibility of some foreigner such us ourselves from getting into trouble, the local security personnel were compelled to restrict our movement and mistreat their citizens not for our sakes but for their own.