Kathy Lally and husband a lonely pair in Egypt

Former BJ staffer Kathy Lally reports on the drastic economic costs of Egypt's revolution. While in Cairo with her husband, Kathy writes:

On a short four-night trip to Cairo, we found ourselves walking blissfully alone around attractions usually surrounded by fleets of buses, overrun by long lines of tourists and immersed in a din of languages. The revolution here, with its attendant uncertainties, has made tourists keep their distance, to the profound regret of a nation that depends on them.

Paula and I were in Cairo only a few weeks before the protests began that led to the February 2011 ouster of long-time dictator Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak. Popular sightseeing sites were crowded with buses filled with tourists, which unleashed hundreds of people traveling to the Great Pyramids, King Tut's golden artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, the Aswan Dam, the Valley of the Kings, etc.

Egypt is a desperately poor country that depended heavily on tourists to keep it afloat financially. We saw hundreds of dilapidated buildings and horrid sanitary conditions.

Kathy left the BJ in the mid-1970s for the Baltimore Sun and rose to Moscow correspondent and deputy foreign editor. Kathy left the Sun for the Washington Post about seven years ago, where she is deputy business editor. Her husband, Will Englund. won a Pulitzer in 1998 for an investigative reporting series on shipbreaking.

They have two daughters: Kate, who is a photo editor for Getty Images in New York, and Molly, who graduated from Emerson in theater.

If you want to read Kathy's tale of the financial penalty of political unrest, click on the headline.