I hold so many images and impressions in my mind of my two days in Egypt. I’ve struggled with how to share them with you in some kind of cohesive way, and I’ve decided it’s best to present brief descriptions (and a few photos) and reactions to what I experienced there. Overall, it struck me as a place of such past greatness and future potential, with its people presently struggling to balance respect for traditional culture and faith and the desire to take advantage of the benefits of a modern economy and 21st-century innovations. And so, a more-or-less chronological journal of my impressions:

Thursday, 6:30 a.m., Port Said. The tour buses pull out of the port and roll through the city (traffic stopped to ease passage of our caravan), passing intersections patrolled by soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles, machine guns menacing behind sandbags (there have been recent demonstrations against Mursi’s government). The grey, gritty city seems even more bleak in the early light; trash is everywhere.

7:30 a.m., on the Ismailia Desert Road. Vast and flat, the Sinai lies to the east. We spotted the superstructure of a container ship, passing through the Suez Canal, rising above a dike. People appear along the highway (women in hijabs) to catch buses into the cities. Little vegetation here, except shaggy heaps of harvested grass drying on the flat roofs of concrete block and mud brick houses. Canals, muddy fields, brown and gray, hazy, bleak.

8:30 a.m. We pass through a fertile area with acres of fruit orchards. Trucks loaded with watermelons, vegetables, peaches share the road; roadside stands offer heaps of orange-pink-gold peaches. Sun is shining, there is a bustle and optimism missing in Port Said.

9:30 a.m. Still an hour from the center of Cairo, but we begin to see immense gated communities (palm trees and bouganvillea) with modern mansions draped across the hills and dunes on either side of the highway. Many inhabited, others with homes all at about the same stage of near-completion; ghost towns.

10:30 a.m., Cairo. Mind-boggling. Miles and miles of unfinished, multistory brick apartment buildings, rebar sticking up into the hazy sky sharing rooftops with satellite dishes (which means people are living here nevertheless). A tax dodge? Dried-up building funds? Lots of different explanations. Verdant fields and gardens even in the middle of the city. Herds of goats on city streets; donkeys and horses pull rubber-tired carts and wagons in midtown; roadside vendors selling watermelon, butchered meat (goat? poultry), juices. Garbage in the streets, floating on canals (an animal carcass?!). Grit. Poverty. People everywhere.

11:00 a.m., Egyptian Museum of Antiquities on Tahrir Square. A 45-minute jog through key exhibits (Tut’s mask, sarcophogi, mummies) — I sympathize with our university-educated guide having to pare these treasures down to this even while muttering my frustration at the pace. On the bus heading to lunch, he points out the burned-out shell of Mubarek’s party headquarters building — a monument to the most recent revolution.

Noon, Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino in Zamalek. Gorgeous gardens; hotel based on the 1869 Palace Al Gezirah, built as a guest “house” for the Suez Canal inaugural celebrations, with two modern towers. Extensive and delicious buffet lunch; jarring contrast to most of what we’ve seen here today.

Mid-afternoon, Giza, Pyramids and Sphinx. Great Pyramid: oldest of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World and the most intact. Completed around 2500 B.C., each stone block immense, the entire structure truly awe-inspiring. Lines from “Ozymandias” run through my mind. All the intrusions of the modern world (those half-finished, half-occupied buildings crowding right up to this site), the tourists and the souvenir hawkers seem so petty and puny compared to this, yet the  civilization that created it is long gone.

8:00 p.m., approaching Port Said. Darkness has closed down over the desert. Half the drivers on the 4-lane highway don’t have their headlights on. The long ride back to the ship has given me plenty of time to think, but I am no closer to resolving the contradictions and contrasts I’ve witnessed today. I doubt I’ll ever return to Egypt, but I know it will be with me for the rest of my life.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor