After finishing a leisurely breakfast, we strolled down to Deck 4, with a piece of luggage each, to disembark. It was fully bright by now.

It did not take us long to find Nile Blue’s minivan parked on the right hand side of the street; it had “Nile Blue” painted on its side panels and a cleanly shaven young man standing by its passenger side door. He looked in his late 20s, with a thick build and a budding beer belly. All smiles, he was sporting a loosely fitting black hoodie and a pair of denim jeans, and was holding up a cardboard sign saying “Nile Blue”.

“My name is Mo’men”, the young man was saying to us as we gathered around him. “It sounds like “moment” in English, so you can call me Moment. It’ll be a while yet before the convoy can leave.” I was just about to tune him out and step away to look around the harbor when he said something that alarmed me: “The drive to Cairo will take a bit over three hours, and we won’t be able to make stops on the way as the convoy must stay together at all times.” More than three hours without stops?! Well, that’s going to be a problem, I thought to myself, a big problem, for my bladder! “So, what if we need to go to the bathroom”? I asked. “Well, you’ll just have to hold your pee”, Mo’men replied matter-of-factly. Here is a bit of hindsight I had after we got to Cairo: if he hadn’t told us there were no planned stops on the way, I might probably have been just fine; now that he had put us on notice, however, I couldn’t help but start dreading what to do when nature called. As a matter of fact, I immediately felt the need to take a leak upon hearing Mo’men’s unpleasant announcement.

Truth be told, I felt a bit put off by Mo’men’s reply. We’ve been to places around the world. No matter where we are, we invariably find people to be accommodating when it comes to tourists’ reasonable, expected needs. It is not uncommon either for people to even go out of their way to offer help. I was taken aback by Mo’men’s response because, just a moment before I popped the question, he had been saying how happy he was to see us and how his personal living as well as the health of the Egyptian economy both heavily depended on tourism. I can’t even chalk it up to inexperience, as Mo’men later revealed that he had been employed in the tourism industry for years, ever since graduation from college. In my urge to rationalize everything, I did manage to find an excuse for Mo’men: our vehicle needed to stay with the convoy at all times for security reasons. But this does not explain why arrangements couldn’t have been made for the entire convoy to make at least one stop somewhere along the way.

Long story short, I went to the bathroom three times during the one hour we waited for departure at the harbor just so I wouldn’t have to cause some embarrassing international incident because I needed to pee.

I did manage to survey the harbor a bit in between. The street the Nile Blue van was parked on was flanked on one side by an endless row of nondescript one-storey buildings housing what looked like warehouses and waterfront stores and on the other side by apartment buildings of different heights and sizes. At the end of the street stood a glistening mosque topped with light green domes, reminding us unequivocally we were in a land of Muslims.

Indeed, most conspicuous amid an assortment of constructions lining the opposite side of the harbor was another majestic mosque, its twin minarets, meticulously sculptured, towering in sharp contrast next to a crowd of colossal portal cranes of ruthless functional design, a mesmerizing ode to history in symphony with a barbarian shout of modernity, beauty and the beast, the two sides of a coin called Egypt. All that’s there left to do is figure out which is the heads' side, and which the tails' side.

The long convoy of buses and vans finally stirred into motion. It was some more time yet before it came our turn to merge into the procession and start the trip through Port Said toward Cairo and the pyramids.

The highway we were traveling on traversed on the eastern edge of the Nile Delta. The surrounding terrain reminded me of the time when we visited Fort Lauderdale, where I stood in awe at the vast and totally flat southern Florida coastal plain, uninterrupted for miles and endless miles, stretching in all directions to the horizon. Unlike the Florida plain, though, the land here was heavily cultivated. Farming communities, all cowering around their own mosques with towering minarets, dotted the right hand side of the highway. A mysterious grayish wall could be seen stretching endlessly along, and keeping a good distance from, the highway on the left side. We drove for the most part on the highway, which was of okay quality at first, but gradually deteriorated to a somewhat rundown condition as we got closer to Cairo’s much heavier traffic. Occasionally, our van veered onto local roads, either for shortcuts or to circumvent pay stations.

It became immediately clear that Mo’men was a well trained tour guide. No sooner had the van started moving than he launched into a nonstop offering of facts and explanations about Egypt in general and about what our van was passing by at any given moment. His narration kept us from nodding off during a few boring stretches of the trip. Of all the information he generously doled out to us, I found most interesting the part about the Suez Canal, which ran side-by-side with our road for the first one-third of our journey.

Suez and Port Said are both coastal towns in Egypt; Suez is on the Red Sea, Port Said overlooks the Mediterranean. While the distance on land between the two is only about 150 km, to travel from one to the other by sea, without the benefit of the canal, one would have to skirt the entire African continent. The first waterway linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean was created by ancient Egyptians around 2,000 B.C., who dug a canal connecting the Red Sea with the Nile which enters into the Mediterranean. The canal allowed the passage of light sail boats, either pulled along by horses or camels or rowed. Though poorly constructed by today’s standards, it was kept in use for more than a thousand years before it dried out and was silted up by the sand constantly swept around by the great desert winds.

A new canal was contemplated in the 18th century, but the idea was nipped in the bud because there was thought to be a 30-foot difference between the levels of the Red and Mediterranean Seas, which would require the construction of large and costly locks.

Interest in a waterway was rekindled in the 19^th century by some Frenchmen. Chief among them was Linant de Bellefonds, who had become chief engineer of Egypt's Public Works. He and Mougel, a hydraulics engineer, surveyed the Isthmus of Suez and planned out a direct line from Suez to Peluse, crossing Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes, totaling 147Km in length. For his part, Bourdaloue established that the difference in levels between the two seas was so small as to be negligible.

A French diplomat and engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, then convinced the Egyptian viceroy Said Pasha to support the building of a canal. In 1858, the Universal Suez Ship Canal Company was formed and given the right to begin construction of the canal and operate it for 99 years. Construction of the Suez Canal officially began on April 25, 1859. It opened ten years later on November 17, 1869 at a cost of $100 million. Some sources estimate that over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period, that altogether more than 1.5 million people from various countries were employed, and that thousands of laborers died on the project. Forced labor of Egyptian workers was even used for a period of time, and this practice of slavery was stopped only due to British objection. One should not be so quick to interpret the British opposition as purely based on humanitarian concerns, though. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Britain was in competition, and frequently in conflict, with France in the eastern Mediterranean. The British feared the alterations in the status quo that the Canal apparently would bring. They specifically feared that a canal open to everyone might interfere with its India trade and, therefore, preferred, and eventually built, a connection by train from Alexandria via Cairo to Suez. In truth, the British could not be blamed for being paranoid; Napoleon, after all, had conquered Egypt for exactly that purpose: to undermine Britain's access to its trade interests in India and to establish a French presence in the Middle East, with the ultimate dream of linking with a Muslim enemy of the British in India.

Once Mo’men started his history presentation on the Canal I couldn’t wait to hear him talk about Nasser. Nasser led the 1952 revolution in overthrowing King Farouk. He also led Egypt in resisting the invasion by Britain, France and Israel in 1956 and restoring sole control of the Suez Canal to Egypt, a victory considered to have erased a mark of national humiliation. He adopted many a socialist measure. He practiced authoritarianism. It shouldn’t be hard, therefore, to see a similarity between Nasser and Mao. In a sense, Nasser was to the Egyptians as Mao was to the Chinese during their respective times. Nasser died in 1970. Mo’men is only in his 20s. I thought it would be interesting to see how young people like Mo’men viewed Nasser. A comparative study of some sort may help shed light on why, despite the disasters Mao brought about, he is still worshiped by so many in today’s China.

Mo’men did not disappoint. “Nasser was a hero,” he gushed. “He made mistakes, but he was a hero. He got us back the Canal, if nothing else”, Mo’men continued. It was obvious that Mo’men’s adoration for Nasser was first and foremost based on patriotism. He also compared the Mubarak period with that of Nasser’s, insisting that there wasn’t nearly as much corruption during the latter’s reign.

These, of course, are familiar refrains one hears in connection with Mao. Mao was the one who drove imperialist influence out of China. He was the one who rid the country of corruption. But what about the millions who starved to death due to his brazen communist experiment with agriculture? What about the millions more who perished during his numerous political power plays?

People can debate about Mao till the end of time. To me, the debate is largely fruitless, as a Cartesian pursuit anyway, as the two sides to the debate are fundamentally expressing their diametrically opposed beliefs about human nature. Those who sing sincere praises of George Washington tend to believe human beings can come together by overcoming their prejudices in adopting a set of universal values. Surely we human beings, because of our empathetic nature, are capable of extending our love across racial and national lines. Lauding Mao are those who poo-poo the idea of universal values because of their belief that self-preserving instincts inevitably drive people apart. Even if old George was himself a real saint, most of those who advertise him do so out of selfish nationalistic motives, they figure. These people feel the need for a Chinese hero to go tit for tat versus George worshippers. There is, alas, not one of George’s ilk in the entire history of China. So Mao will have to do. In a struggle over nationalistic interests, Mao’s being Chinese trumps all of his sins, imagined or real.

The pro-Mao and anti-Mao debate is akin to religious debates; triumphs take not rational persuasion but a leap of faith. However, it is much more complicated than religious debates. Empathy and self-preservation are two sides of the coin of human survivability. One can’t exist without the other as each is the extension of the other. The line in between is not only blurred, but it also differs from person to person. When the pro-Mao and anti-Mao debate is viewed as based on this dichotomy of human nature, our animal side versus the human side, dark against bright, it becomes clear that, as much pain as it causes on both sides, the war of words will rage on. But I digress.

Mo’men’s explanation for the mysterious grayish wall finally came when our van passed a monument made out of an old Mig-21 fighter jet standing guard in front of a gate in the wall. “Those are the barracks of the Second Army”, he said simply. “Where is the Third Army?” I asked, half expecting Mo’men to pick up a topic about that army unit, infamous for getting surrounded by the Israelis at Suez during the October War of 1973 but famous for allegedly refusing Mubarak’s order to fire on demonstrators in Tahrir Square. “They are stationed further to the east, more on the Red Sea side”, said Mo’men. “We would have scored a much bigger victory during the Ramadan War but for U.S. support of the Israelis, you know. The Americans are just way too pro-Israel”, Mo’men, head shaking, went on to say. Maybe because we were from the States and were his guests at the moment, and maybe because hatred for American foreign policy in that part of the world is always tinged with a love for American culture and technology, a complex the jeans on Mo’men and the i-Phone in his hands testified loudly to, he did not launch into an anti-US rant, as one might have expected.

Three and a half hours and a dearth of attractive view offered Mo’men the opportunity to cover many topics. We found ourselves in Egypt just when the newly elected Egyptian president, Morsi, was being challenged for being too much of a Islamist in his policies. Mo’men opined that Morsi was a good man and should be given more time to straighten out the country’s affairs. If Mo’men’s narration about Egypt gave us broad hints at his political inclination, his comments on world affairs confirmed our inklings. He announced to us, for example, that 9/11 was no more than a CIA conspiracy and that Obama’s Middle East policies were solely geared toward protecting Israeli interests. I would not explain Mo’men’s being so loose-tongued by our group’s being all Chinese; he knew we all presently lived in the States. In fact, I’m convinced that, intentionally or unintentionally, Mo’men said what he said to influence us, to do a bit of brainwashing, if you will. This was made especially clear when, later on, he gave us a most adulating version of Muhammad Ali’s love life during our visit to the latter’s grand namesake mosque.

Remember Mo’men’s announcement that there wouldn’t be any stop on the way had sent me to the bathroom three times？ Well, it turned out that Mo’men wasn’t being truthful: we made a stop on our way to Cairo at a fully functional rest area, when both the driver and Mo’men felt the need to go take a leak. What about the security concerns, about the convoy, you ask? I’ll say more about the traffic condition on Egyptian highways later on; let’s just say for now that the traffic was such that our long snake of a procession was soon dissected and slaughtered by wildly driven beasts of vehicles so that the buses and the vans so neatly woven into the convoy soon had to survive on their own. No sooner did the tour vehicles left the harbor than their drivers started concentrating on threading their own way out of Port Said and stopped paying any attention to keeping the convoy in formation.