I hate to leave a negative comment, but this take is little more than privileged white people complaining about being confronted with brutal poverty. I know the author kept proving their stance, saying Egypt is different/worse than poverty stricken places they had been "like Kathmandu," yet the whole time, this essay has zero empathy for the people of Egypt and what they have been through: suffering through revolutions and regime changes for the past 10 years, with crumbling social infrastructure and a massive brain drain into Europe.

Egyptians are in your face to get you a taxi because their fucking kids are starving.

Your host should have told you to hire a local guide who will keep hecklers off your back and help you negotiate prices. Yes, Egyptians, like most people who work in tourism in previously colonized countries, will want you to pay more for everything. Because you have more. You have so much fucking more and they have less. Egypt isn't worse to you. Other countries are just letting themselves get run over by your expectation of low prices.

And yes, people will keep going to Egypt because they have a dreamy idea of what seeing the pyramids will be like. And that's a bad reason to go to Egypt.

A good reason to go to Egypt is the coffee houses, the art, the jazz, the hookah, the Nile, the 20th century history. Go to Egypt to follow some pharaoh fantasy and you'll be disappointed.

But this article didn't say that. It just said "Egyptians suck." This is a really low empathy take from Western tourists.