When I was 60 (November 2010), I got to see a little of Egypt. It was part of a Holy Land cruise, and I’ll admit that the Cairo stop was the big draw for me on the itinerary and, perhaps partly because of that, the big disappointment of the trip.

I knew ahead of time that we’d spend half the day on a bus. Port Said is a 3½ hour drive from Cairo/Giza. That wasn’t the problem, really. When we boarded the coach that morning, our guide advised us to use the toilet in the vehicle. In her perfect English, Yasmin told us we wouldn’t have many chances at other facilities. The bus toilet was by the rear stairs. It stayed dark unless you got the door closed right, and it had a shifting thin scrap of carpet and the smell of urine. Maybe I got the stink stuck in my nose but most of that day, inside or outside the bus, smelled like the same piss to me.

Yasmin was lovely. A young, willowy Muslim woman, she embodied everything I ever imagined about innocent female beauty in Arabia. She wore her head scarf so well I almost wanted one myself. Her facial features were perfect. Her hands were balletically graceful. Those of course were the only parts of her that showed.

She was also an encyclopedia of Egyptian facts and a proud representative of her tourism bureau. She seemed to have all dates and statistics in her brain and was able to answer our every question as well as the Internet could.

But here’s the circumstance I want to note. While our bus traveled those hours from the Med to Cairo and back, while Yasmin regaled us with glorious facts about 94% of the kids finishing college, about equal pay for women, about the impossibility of rape, I was looking out the window at sights that contradicted her sentences. I was seeing poverty and garbage, window-less, roofless occupied buildings, vermin-encrusted children who tried to sell us bad postcards for “one dollah.” I saw crudeness and no evidence of health or intelligence.

Meanwhile, Yasmin answered “What’s your opinion about Sharia?” with “I’m a good Muslim. Of course I’m for Sharia. As a matter of fact. I think if four individuals testify against a thief, the proper action is to remove one of the thief’s hands; that’ll stop him stealing.” And when a fellow traveler asked her about Egypt’s government, our young guide waxed almost worshipful about Mubarak: how much he’s loved, how wonderful a job he has been doing, how after 30 years no one wants anyone else as President …

I have never experienced such a profound disconnect between what I heard and what I witnessed.