"Oh what a circus, what a show" a Luxor Travel Page by TheLongTone

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This is an extraordinary place. I suppose I have either been lucky or careful, but I have never encountered a place as totally corrupted by tourism as Luxor. So, what do you get?
Start with the Nile, start with all those ghastly the-architecture-of-oppression temples and such. Luxor is situated on the East bank of the Nile and is centered round one of these depressing monuments to human vanity: a few kilometres downstream there is another, now totally surrounded by a wall of tacky tourist infrastructre. Meals with bacon, forsooth. On the other side of the river are a number of other monuments and of course the Valley of the Kings. And there's all the attendant hoopla, ways for the people to get the tourist dollar. Caleche caleche, taxi, felucca ride you want felucca ride sssssssss hey friend what you want? Come in my shop, my uncle's shop, just look. This is a town where you have to bargain for your mazbout in the cafes. This is a town where you really have to keep eyes front and be prepared to blank someone every thirty seconds.
Mister what you want? I want to be left alone.

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In order to cater to the sensibilities of tourists, Luxor enjoys a street-cleaning service which must be the pride of Egypt. The main square has been paved in polished stone and an Stalinist policy of homogenisation has been ruthlessly applied to the tourist suq, where virtually all the signboards above the individual shops have been replaced by uniform modern ones in what I can only describe as Luxor's 'corporate style'. Every one of white plastic with a picture of some pharonic pile each side and the name of the shop and the name of the shop in Arabic and Roman scripts. Needless to say the effect is even more numbing to the eye than an average Western high street. In the suq I noticed only one refusnik, and the blight is spreading to shops on Station Street. A scheme is afoot to make property owners paint their buildings a uniform shade of Naples yellow.

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Of course the iceburg principle applies, probably more so than anywhere else I've been. For every hustler or grifter there are a hundred honest citizens, many of whom are disgusted by the antics of their compatriots. Walk around the backstreets of Luxor and you can find a pleasant provincial town, with people who greet you out of friendliness rather than rapacity.