Shimiankuang is the saddest little bird in China. The entire world, maybe.

She’s not the saddest because of her location at the top of the windswept Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The town lies at nearly ten-thousand feet of elevation, northeast of the twenty-thousand-plus foot Kunlun Mountains, east of the ferocious Taklamakan desert, and south of a gebi, a dry, pebble-and-scree filled expanse. A dusty wind regularly whips in from the west, leaving Shimiankuang chilly in summer and outright frigid in the winter. The surrounding landscape is a uniform brown, with no grass, no trees, no birds, no animals; desert dust regularly obscures the sun even at midday, casting an apoplectic pallor across the sky.

But many hamlets lay in such a desolate landscape.

She’s not the saddest because of her isolation. Only one road runs through town, west to east. To the east, it scrambles in serpentine arcs for a hundred kilometers to the mining town of Huatugou, new-yet-old concrete apartment buildings, trucker restaurants, hookers, then another day’s journey to Xining, the only town of size in western Qinghai, a region with twice the area of Texas. Xining has grown since the 1950s to become the de facto capital of an immense jail for political prisoners. Particularly from 1949 to the 1970s, and to some extent today, enormous numbers of political prisoners were deposited in the province to harvest minerals, to make deserts bloom, to break rocks.

Compared to the east, the road heading west is truly desolate. Unpaved, it forces hardy vehicles to bounce their way across wide canyons, dry except for the summer snowmelt, an empty landscape of boulders and broad vistas. A half day from Shimiankuang is the first village, on the border of Qinghai and Xinjiang, named Work Regiment 36. The few people scattered here are the descendants of prisoners sent half a century before, in an impossible effort to create farms in a land without water. There is one gas station, a few drips of petrol available, and a tiny general store, nothing more.

Two hours drive west of Work Regiment 36 is the town of Ruoqiang, pleasant enough, a sometimes-base for Xinjiang’s oil workers and government functionaries. The roads to Ruoqiang are now nearly all paved, but as recently as the late 1960s, reaching this site involved a thirty-day overland journey, camels and headdresses and Silk Road regalia; it has never been confused for accessible. For good reason, China’s main nuclear test site is located not far from Ruoqiang. The town’s one moment of fame came with the discovery of the Loulan Beauty, a fair-skinned, light-haired mummy from second millenium B.C. that is generally considered to represent the easternmost prehistoric settlement of Caucasians. The archaeologists wonder how she and her compatriots arrived in such an inhospitable environment, so far from the orchards of the Caucasus, leaving no trace of great cities.

But many towns are isolated.

Shimiankuang is not the saddest because her people, her town center, are the saddest, though these claims are true. The residential precinct consists of one hotel – no electricity, a mud-floored kitchen – a police station, and a series of dirt-walled, one-story buildings running down two streets. A basketball court, unpaved, with rims lying many degrees off the level plane, is at the north end. Litter peppers the open spaces. The grocery store is a dark, damp grouping of three shelves, covered at intervals with dusty packaged goods: no fruit, no chocolate, few colors.

And the people. There is a great Chinese character, tu, technically meaning “earth”, which has no precise translation in English when applied to a person. Uncultured or uncouth, perhaps, though tu specifically refers to peasants. Maybe the adjective “country” - as in, that boy right there is country! - but country might have a positive connotation - them country boys sure are polite – whereas tu is rarely positive. If someone asks you whether you were raised in a barn, then you’ve done something tu.

Everyone is Shimiankuang seems a bit tu.

Mopeds with the mufflers removed. Oversized army camo. Greasy mullets. An overreliance on honor, on this woman is mine, glaring eyes distrustful of strangers, ten-year-olds with cigarettes, unfiltered, brother, spewing black smoke like a steam engine with each puff, self-important police, bad music bumping from handhelds with the volume way up, thump, thump, oh yeah.

But many towns are too dusty, with people too dusty. Shimiankuang is not the saddest solely for these faults.

No, the real reason Shimiankuang is China’s saddest lies in its name. Shimian means asbestos. A kuang is an open-air mine. The town is actually named open-air asbestos mine, and it’s not some clever poetic allusion.

From a distance, the town looks to be backed by enormous, white, mountain peaks. These are not mountains of rock, but mountains of asbestos. Heading south from the residential district, the locals all with flimsy facemasks, the landscape, for miles on end, has the appearance of a snowglobe, roofs and power lines covered in early-winter white, missing only a few notes of Bing Crosby.

The roadside slowly shifts from houses to machines, great demonic machines, steampunk machines, fragments of Industrial Revolution dreams. These are gorgeous, giant machines, the type that give proof to human progress, the type that pronate through a series of gears with unnatural speed, that lift with superhuman strength, that look powerful even when they languor, a set of modern day dinosaurs. These machines, all likewise covered in their carcinogenic snow, are well scattered across white moguls, waiting patiently for the next shift. Machines wait for production, not for smiles, not for laughs; they are not romantics.

There can be no redemption for Open-Air Asbestos Mine. It is not the type of town that will slowly develop green parks and statues of founders, red-bricked schools and avant-garde authors and Rotary clubs. Its purpose will someday be complete, all its rocks removed and shipped off, and its population slowly moved away, its houses returned back to dirt, its machines rusted, relics of another age, to become Beauties for future archaeologists, its open mines covered again with sand and snow, its peaks a newer, purer white. For history remembers its great lions, not its saddest birds.

Just South of Shimiankuang

1.
The divided nation has been unified for 34 years, but travelers are still asked whether they’re headed to North or South Vietnam. I say I’m headed to Hanoi since us Americans still don’t like flying young men into Saigon. I got good mileage out of that joke.

2.
But here’s the thing: these Asian tigers change so quickly as to make our mental impressions irrelevant. Vietnam has, like China, implemented a market economy, but I figured the country was still Red Brigades and Slogans with perhaps a textile export factory thrown in for spice, like chillies in the stock of a bowl of pho.

I flew in from Luang Prabang, that old French base in the North of Laos, on Vietnam Air, and indeed saw slogans as I walked through the Hanoi airport terminal. The surprise was that the terminal was modern and the slogans were for HSBC, Your Local Bank.

Hanoi itself is perfectly pleasant, with leafy boulevards, temple-strewn lakes, and many French restaurants serving proper coffee and crème caramel. The largest lake – West – features an Intercontinental and a Sheraton, as well as stores selling Scandinavian design, imported wines and giant flat-screen televisions.

Indeed, the development is so striking that I began to hunt for any reflection whatsoever that Vietnam was run by a Communist Party, descendants of Uncle Ho and his toppling Dominoes, which threatened to spread its Black Heart across Asia and then the World in the manner of an ideological oil spill. Vietnam the King Cong wasn’t solely a mental fiction of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon; her human rights record during the war (the massacre at Hue, for instance) and after (the infamous ‘boat people’) is appalling, and both the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge were originally branches of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Certainly memory of the war and the Red Menace exists for tourists, who tromp daily up to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. But what evidence can be found beyond the tourist sites? I saw only two, and the first is a stretch: a hammer and sickle graced the main gate of, incongruously, the Hanoi Stock Exchange.

The second was a faded old poster on a side street south of the Old City. A black bomber, labeled “B52” and “USA” on the two wings, soars over a white, pinnacled, Soviet-style building capped with the Vietnam flag. The plane is aflame, its cockpit lit with a red toupee. The contrails of the Vietnam missile, however, soar past the plane itself, ending at a gold missile fired far into a cerulean sky. I like to think this is a metaphor for Vietnam’s recent history – the war and the darkest days of communism lie below, while prosperity in the future means moving past both.

3.
But if Vietnam has changed greatly over thirty years, what must be said of China? I studied and worked in China in 2005, only four years ago. As the Chinese economy continues to hum, however, the percentage increase in the average Chinese worker’s income from 2005 to 2009 is greater than than of an average American from 1965 to today. I returned to Beijing to see what had changed.

Little differences were apparent even before I reached Beijing. Yuan and Jiao bills had largely been replaced with coins, Cokes were sold in cans rather than in glass bottles, and smoke-filled, rickety buses were now leather-seat, bottled-water affairs. Pirated everything was tougher to find as more Chinese demanded the genuine article. Trains are quicker, prices are higher, buildings are larger, cities are busier.

But a voyage to my old neighborhood, just south of the zoo and west of the communist-era Moscow Restaurant and Soviet Exhibition Center, made the scale of changes clear.

4.
The University I studied at was previously flanked by two tiny convenience stores, or xiaomaibu: little sales offices. The one to the right was manned by a portly, twenty-something hunched over a Playstation controller, a stack of one-dollar bootleg games stacked on the black machine. He was known for collecting rare Western compact discs; a slice of British punk, classic rock, or underground hip-hop could be parlayed into free snacks. I don’t know how he fared in the MP3 Era, but his former storefront now sells ladies’ garments.

The other xiaomaibu, my regular, – overseas, one has more ‘regulars’ than at home, the fruit boy, the laundry wallah, the tailor, et cetera – was run by a woman recently emigrated from a rural province to the southwest. She had two young kids, for which schooling was always a problem. In China, the identity card system, or hukou, limits urbanization by refusing city services to those with a rural hukou. A place at school, therefore, is a matter of personal connections or bribes.

Her store wasn’t more than ten square feet, with snacks piled floor to ceiling, and a solitary freezer to the left. Every Friday morning, she knew to empty the waters and green teas and lychee mixes from the freezer, to be replaced with a case of Tsingtao tallboys, the lot of which would in due turn be purchased by one of the neighborhood Americans that afternoon for the grand price of twenty-five cents per bottle. Her store has now merged with the neighboring shack to become a computer training center; rumor was that her daughter had gotten pregnant, but otherwise nothing was known about what happened.

Up the alley toward the bus station, at one point, was an enormous, chaotic wholesale clothing market. Chinese knockoffs of every brand you could imagine were available for next to nothing – D&G T-shirts for a buck, spring leather jackets for five – and the World’s Busiest McDonald’s served as the edifice capstone. Chinese love McDonald’s Ice Cream, you see. I had my regular girl at McD’s as well – if I showed up in my suit fresh from the embassy when she was working, the nuggets, fries, Fanta and two packets of ketchup would be prepared even before I arrived at the counter. Chinese McDonald’s pays twice the hourly wage of a standard neighborhood restaurant, so the staff was always a cheery group.

The McDonald’s has now moved across the square – the old Soviet square where elderly Chinese would dance the waltz on weekend evenings – and the wholesale market is nothing but an empty lot. The small vendors have all been moved inside a gleaming, soulless skyscraper next door, a glass canyon.

My regular restaurant a block away served the Central Asian Moslem cuisine of Xinjiang’s Uighurs. The Uighurs serve for Han Chinese the role of Indians in America, and the restaurant went all out with stuffed animal heads mounted above, a giant shisha against the bar, and pictures of smiling ethnic minorities on the walls. A circle of naan from the brick oven or a lamb kebab could be had for twelve cents a pop, and dapanji, literally a Big Plate of Chicken, was a dollar. The storefront has now been replaced by a branch of the rapidly growing dumpling chain Qing Feng Steamed Stuffed Bun Shop: their translation, not mine.

The old DVD shop? Now socks and underwear. The hairdresser, who included two shampoos and a shoulder massage with each cut, and who was rumored to provide further, more illicit, benefits for the right price, is now a spare parts dealer. The only recognizable store from 2005 on the whole block was Dead Fish, our play on words of the restaurant’s Chinese name.

5.
The rapid growth, and resultant change, in East Asia over the past thirty years is completely anomalous in world history. This form of progress has unquestionably improved the lives of untold numbers of people. But something goes missing when the good of the past disappears so quickly, or when the bad of the past is ignored so totally. Is it not everyone’s experience that the old things are the best?

New photos from SE Asia, Hong Kong and Macao uploaded. Click on Images to the left, or on the photo below. It’s not that I didn’t want to upload these earlier, but rather that China banned Flickr for two weeks around the anniversary of what is supposedly the unimportant date of June 4, 1989! But don’t worry, I’ve been doing my best to rile up the Chinese police. Oh, you want stories? Don’t worry - three new ones coming soon, the first of which hopefully tomorrow.

She looked around the cafe suspiciously, eyes darting left, right, her back to the wall, before scribbling a few more letters on the corner of the back page of her notebook. I ask, What’s that. No response, but I notice the waiter has hovered toward our direction. The table to one side is a young couple, the man in a collared shirt and sunglasses, though we’re indoors. To the other side, a group of four, smoking, not talking.

The waiter leaves, and she begins scribbling once more, not looking down at the paper, but staring straight ahead.

I’d met her that morning, at a small shop near the big lake in Yangon, the capital of Burma. It was early April, that sweltering season that so perturbed British colonials stationed along the Irrawaddy, among them Orwell, and I’d stopped for a Star, the local version of Coke. She was carrying an English textbook, and as we left the shop, she mentioned that she had just begun studying English at a local college. Her spoken English was not good, though the written lessons in the book were quite complex. She was named, and you don’t forget a name like this one, Zin Mar Thet.

We stopped at a roadside juice bar, which seemed to be run by her parents, or at the least, an aunt and uncle; the relation between young and old was of that type that only exist among families. The Burmese enjoy their juices sickly-sweet, but it would be impolite not to have at least one glass. This roadside bar was not just on any road, however. It was on the corner of the lake and University, the street home to both the US Embassy and the home/prison of The Lady, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and freely-elected President of Burma, at least until the junta decided to nullify the results and put her under house arrest. That was nearly twenty years ago.

I told the girl I needed to go to the US Embassy, which just happened to be further down the road than Suu Kyi’s house. Heavy police presence lined the street, and we were two of only a very small group of people walking down the broad, shady avenue. As we pass the run-down compound with NLD – National League for Democracy – banners fluttering, the girl moves close and whispers, This house, Is where Aung Suu lives, you know? Many of her sentences end with that interrogative, you know?, expectantly. I did know, but I feigned surprise. Oh really, I asked. Can we go pay a visit? She shushes me, no, no, police, police, and grabs my arm. We walk a hundred yards further, and she says, ok, we can go back now. She knew the embassy story was a pretext as well. As we cross the compound again, she looks down at the ground. I look straight at the compound, and the policeman walking past it.

Later than evening, at the cafe, she finishes scribbling, and glances around nervously. It is a practiced glance, a quick dart of the eyes in every direction without the head needing to turn, an inconspicuous glance. She reaches for a napkin, and in so doing, slides the page across the table into my hand. I hold it beneath the table. In block letters, the penmanship of someone whose native script is different from that of English, is the following:

No. 2

Saw Mail

Sport Camp

ALONE tsp

Burma is a proper totalitarian state. Freedom of speech does not exist. Assembling in large groups can lead to arrest. Staying overnight in another house requires registering with the police; as a young Burmese man told me, this is why young Burmese pretend to enjoy hiking in the hills so much. Traveling between towns requires a permit for locals, and foreigners are simply banned outright from traveling to most of the country. Along the border regions, the Muslims in the west and the Christian Karen and Mizo tribes have it particularly bad. Reports of whole villages being massacred are not uncommon, and the army to this day recruits child soldiers. Heroin production is rife in the mountains, and the government is said to have its hands in the pot. This wouldn’t be surprising: in a desperately poor country, the capital is lined with enormous mansions said to be owned by top government officials.

Nonetheless, the Burmese remain an impossibly cheerful lot. A guide of mine, in the north of the country, was the fifth of ten siblings, five sons and five daughters, born to a lower-class family. She is not yet 30, but four of her brothers have already died, all from drinking particularly vile local moonshine. One sister is retarded and cannot care for herself. One has married an importer-exporter in Mandalay and reached the middle class, and the rest work backbreaking hours as fieldhands.

When my guide was 17, she was forced to leave her secret boyfriend, a peasant, and was placed in an arranged marriage with a relatively wealthy man from the city. She was considered the beauty of the town, with a broad, infectious smile, and had the rare opportunity to reach a better life. Nonetheless, she wanted to marry her peasant boyfriend, but given his status, it was impossible; she hasn’t seen him in years, and only knows that he now works at the airport in Yangon, 18 hours by bus from her home.

After conceiving a daughter at 19, she heard word that her abusive husband had a woman on the side. She confronted him, and he apologized. Soon after, while washing his clothes, she found a portrait shot of yet another mistress. By now, ten years later, they live ten hours from each other, and are for all practical purposes divorced, though this is legally impossible, and therefore she will never remarry. He has a bevy of women in Mandalay, and she is forced to support her daughter, as well as an orphaned niece and a grandmother, on her own.

A week before I’d met her, she had totaled her moped, which was her most valuable possession.

And yet, she laughed so much during our three day hike that we all but named her Giggles. When she saw me reading a book by Aung Sun Suu Kyi, with the lady’s picture on the cover, she grinned and mentioned that everyone in Burma loves this lady. It was not, as far as I know, a problem for me to have the book, but a local with such a banned book would face five years in a prison camp. Despite the risk, a democratic underground exists, and most people are able to see through the government media controls to understand the true political situation in their homeland.

Back to the cafe: I tried to interpret the paper. ALONE tsp? Am I supposed to appear alone somewhere? But when? My dreams of breaking into the underground, of passing samizdat, of knocking on forlorn factory doors in a certain pattern, sliding through the door when it opens a crack, and appearing in a smoke-filled room of poets in turtlenecks, and elderly educated figures from the colonial era, and foolhardy but idealistic students, all bantering back and forth in discussion of Mill and Locke and Paine and their Relevance to Our Present Situation, while an antique printing press noisily churns – gah, kah-WUMP, gah, kah-WUMP - in the corner, operated by a stone-faced gentleman with ink-covered fingers, spits out the latest monthly newsletter, and a reticent old woman circles the room with a tray of tea and snacks: perhaps, if only I could decode the message, this could be my chance. She had taken me past Suu Kyi’s house, had she not? And befriended the solitary foreigner, which is not an everyday occurrence in Burma. And her family, or “family”, happened to pick that corner to run their juice stand?

Saw Mail. Sport Park. ALONE Tsp. Perhaps there is a large sports park in Yangon, and Saw Mail is an apartment block, or a factory, within? I could get a map and check. As I puzzle over the code, she sits back with her drink and a blank look on her face. But Tsp? Perhaps I’m misreading her handwriting! I write on the corner of a bill, “Tsp?”, and slide it towards her.

She is puzzled. I don’t understand, I say. Oh, oh, Tsp, it is township, she whispers. Alone Township, in the west part of Yangon. This is my house. You will send me a postcard after you leave Burma?

Ah, right. Dreams dashed.

But no worry, because the next time I visit the totalitarian world…

Photos from Japan, Thailand and Burma are now posted; click the photo below or look under “Images’.

New Japan story is also posted below, and Burma story is coming soon. I’m in Hanoi now, and am amazed that there are only 12 weeks left! It’s about time to get to China - the monsoon is beginning, and it rains so hard that I was literally trapped in my hotel until noon today because of the floodwater!

When, on arrival at Tokyo Narita, you run to the john, you’re bound to be confused. For one, the toilet seats are heated, the greatest bathroom invention since indoor plumbing. Beyond the heating, though, things begin heading into a decidedly strange direction. A control panel, looking a bit like an old Nintendo controller, offers a dizzying area of options. These are all incomprehensible, however, since the Japanese infatuation with childhood means that instead of words or Japanese symbols, the functions are explained with cartoon characters. The bear with a flower, perhaps, implies a fragrance released should the top button be pressed. There is also an option to provide the sound of a babbling brook; for privacy, you see. On exiting, every caution is taken to ensure that you never actually touch anything: auto soap dispenser, auto faucet, auto hand dryer that resembles a toaster for one’s hands, minus the ding at the end. Incredibly, it is effective in drying a set of hands, which must be a first for the auto hand dryer industry.

The point is, things work in Japan, but man, it is the weirdest place on Earth.

Your hesitation in accepting that claim in understandable. What about deepest Africa and its cannibalizing, bongo-drumming tribes? Or India, of the raj and tiger and immolating widow? What of them? There is, I’m afraid, a problem with this argument, which we will discuss in short order. But first, let’s establish that, like the third quark, Japan actually is strange. Shall we make like it’s 1789 and start enumerating?

1) The Sphere
The Japanese absolutely love perfectly spherical fruit. A melon is, for instance, graded on its Platonic perfection. A suitably unbruised orange makes a fine gift for a visiting mother-in-law. And the price of such rotund groceries is quite something. A thousand yen, or ten dollar, orange can be found at any local supermarket. In a particularly elite department store, I spotted a melon on offer at three hundred dollars. Though some fruits will never be fully round, despite the best efforts of Japanese science, they too can partake in this mad pricing scheme – I spotted a single strawberry, coddled in a foam package, for sale at six dollars.

2) Mr. Roboto
Japan is the center of world robotics, but the robotic secretary currently at Tokyo University of Science might still be a bit too creepy. “She” follows you with her eyes and greets you when you walk in the reception. And she has fake skin to look more human-like. If only she would giggle uncomfortably every time you asked a question she didn’t know the answer to, she would be a perfectly replacement for any Japanese secretary.

3) Letterman Jackets
All over Japan, there are stores selling used American clothing. Imagine the coolest, most expensive Goodwill in the country on every other block. The current fad is for high school letterman jackets, which are bringing a hundred bucks or more in Tokyo.

4) The Sickness
I was in Japan before swine flu broke, and yet a sizable percentage of Japanese on the streets were wearing face masks as they walked around the city. Was there some SARS/Bird Flu/Ebola outbreak which I missed? No. Apparently, when the Japanese have even the slightest cough, they feel the only polite thing to do is to wear a face mask all day so that no one else will get sick. Honorable, it’s true, but this doesn’t explain why I saw many of them wearing the masks while driving alone in their cars.

5) Restaurants, Part I
In Tokyo, there is a restaurant called Ninja. The entrance is just a tiny, empty lobby, but if you stand there for a couple minutes, a man dressed like a ninja will sneak out of a hidden compartment, surprise you, and hand you a menu. Throughout the meal, they’ll continue to sneak the food in through secret compartments. An entertaining kids’ restaurant? Not in Japan. Ninja runs near to a hundred dollars per person.

6) Restaurants, Part II
I saw a skyscraper advertising a top-floor restaurant called “Oregon”. What a coincidence, he wonders, and what could Oregon mean in Japanese? It means the state on the West Coast, and the restaurant is decorated like a Soviet version of said state, including a large portrait of the sitting governor at the entrance.

7) Restaurants, Part III
And then there are the maid cafes. Young girls dress up like cartoon housemaids, address diners as Master, mention how nice it is that Master is Home, and ask how the Day has Been. I call them maid cafes because there are dozens of different ones.

8 ) “Restaurants”, Part IV
The rage in Tokyo today is the crepe stand. You order, say, a strawberry, cheesecake and ice cream crepe, and they lay out a giant crepe, stick an actual slice of cake in the middle, cover it with berries and a scoop of ice cream, then roll it up like a gyro for you to eat on the go. You know how Japanese people live forever and are all slim, while Americans generally feel that what a stuffed-crust, double sausage pizza needs is more grease? I have a feeling the rest of the world is headed America’s way. I also think that crepe stands would be absolutely massive if they existed in the upper Midwest.

Intermission: Where Japan is not weird is in its quality of local government. The efficient trains you’ve heard about? I passed on the bullet train, and tried to go from Kyoto, in the south of Honshu, to Sendai, in the north, solely on local trains. This involved 13 connections over 17 hours, many of which scheduled with only minutes to spare; a single missed connection would mean an overnight delay. And, it goes without saying, every train was right on time. The streets are all immaculately clean, the intracity public transit is all supremely convenient, the crime rate is basically zero, and slums of any kind are essentially nonexistent. Visiting Japan, like visiting Switzerland, will make you upset at the poor quality of your city’s governance. Let’s get back to the oddities:

9) Cosplay
Cosplay means: dress up like a sci-fi/cartoon/comic book character, and then walk around as if nothing is amiss. Nothing out of the ordinary to see on the streets of Japan a grown man dressed up a blue cat.

10) Speaking of Comic Books…
I’ll leave aside details, but it’s a fact that the seemingly-quiet Japanese read some downright shocking comic books. It’s the internet era, right? The line between everyday and shocking is already pretty shocking, right? Well, your everyday Japanese corner store sells comic books that are way, way past that line. It’s no joke that many – if not the majority – of Japanese comic books would be illegal in the US.

11) Dogs in Pants
Dogs wearing sweaters is nothing for the Japanese. Many dogs are decked out in two pieces, one of which is pants for dogs.

12) Unbowleggedness
Every Westerner immediately notices that teenage Japanese girls appear to be knock-kneed – their legs curve inward from ankle to knee, then outward up to the hips. It looks utterly ridiculous. I spent approximately 743 hours trying to figure out what was going on. Is it that sitting Indian-style on the tatami mats makes your needs go backward? Apparently, the answer, courtesy my friend who teaches in Japanese junior high, is that the girls all think that walking pigeon-toed is attractive, and this causes your knees to look completely bizarre.

13) The Advertisements
The advertisements, whether in print, on TV, or in the shop, are from another planet. An upscale seafood restaurant advertising itself with a giant, robotic crab? Sure. A store, the exact nature of which I never figured out, whose door featured a giant man’s face, only with a chicken’s legs, and holding a fish in one hand? Of course.

Nowhere in the third world is this weird, I claimed at the beginning of this story. Here’s the hypothesis: weirdness requires a diverse and modern culture, which requires wealth and some reason not simply to import Western culture. In the very poor world – think New Guinea or Congo – the majority of the people are no longer totally isolated, and are quite aware of the Western World. They wear western clothes, watch English soccer, and have hip-hop on the radio. Their weirdest native traditions have been discarded, for better or worse, as archaic, and there is not yet enough wealth for new traditions to develop. Japan, on the other hand, was the first non-Western nation to get rich in the modern era, and also one of the few nations with no former colonial ruler. These two factors have allowed idiosyncrasies to develop, in a way that they haven’t in Africa or India or Latin America.

But, hey, you can’t argue with a process that gives you cheesecake and ice cream crepes.

Wherever you have planned for your next vacation, you need to cancel. Beg the airline to let you off with a small fee, cajole the hotel into canceling your booking, and let the yacht captain know you won’t be requiring the engagement (listen, I know how you jetsetters live; don’t deny it). The reason? Your next trip needs to be Brazil. Nowhere else you could go will top it.

Now – and I hear you bleacher bums and back-row hecklers – it may be the case that I’m biased. It may be that single, twenty-five year-old men like Brazil with a particular fervor, and that these girls who are tall and tan and young and lovely, who when they walk sway so gentle, have clouded my faculties, and that therefore you, gentle reader, will perhaps not enjoy Brazil as much as I did. On the first count, I plead guilty (though with hope for a sympathetic jury), but the second argument is wrong. The Brazilian women are but the bikinis, as it were, on the national character: distinctive, yes, and hard to look away from, but no more enthralling that the rest of the country.

That said, ought we tackle the women first, like a child eating dessert before his salad, lest he salivate throughout the meal wondering just how good the brownie will be? Otherwise, I fear I will be describing the roar of the incomparable Iguazu Falls, and you will comprehend nothing as you mind is fully dedicated to awaiting the description of the bathing costume whose Portuguese name translates literally as “the dental floss”.

So dental floss then. True. The Brazilians have managed to create the Platonic form of tiny female swimsuits. A standard bikini on some Brazilians beaches appears as prudish and archaic as one of those Victorian-era suits which reveal less than a Saudi niqab. And wearing the dental floss leads to a certain vanity on the part of some practitioners; Brazil is said to be the world leader in, to put it politely, rear-end enhancement via the plastic surgeon.

The irony, however, is that the Brazilian girls do not need it. They are naturally better looking that the girls anywhere else. This seems strange given Brazil’s demographics. You can say, Ah, the Swedes are a good-looking lot, and by this everyone understands that you mean the prototypical Swedish face, the height, the flowing blonde locks. But Brazil ranges from 90 percent white in the states East of Uruguay, to black as night in Natal, with every combination between them making up the balance. Indeed, Sao Paolo has the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. And they all, white, black, Asian, Indian, jagunco, mulatto, and every other combination, they all are more attractive than in their pre-Brazilian form.

But you say, Kev, the Brazilian men are also tall and tan and young and lovely, and further dress in that effeminate Latin style that women inexplicably love, so therefore you and I must appear, to the gatina brasilera, as a leper, or at best, a disfigured hunchback. This is where supply and demand come to bear. Due to an oversupply of good-looking, fit, well-dressed, tanned young men, the Brazilian girl puts very low value on meeting such a Fabio. On the other hand, the paucity of out-of-shape, porcelain-colored, homeless-looking guys means that Brazilian girls seek them out! Oh, wonderful circumstance!, he exclaims. This disconnect between value and price is, and this really goes without saying, precisely Walras’ 1871 solution to the water-diamond paradox.

OK, enough about the women. What about Carnival, that raucous celebration which is more than just the samba girls (whoops, there it is again, I’m afraid). Imagine the most ridiculous hour-long parade you’ve ever seen, with dancing supermodels, fire-breathing 30-foot-tall robots, five thousand dancers and musicians and actors, culminating in a wall of samba drumming which literally leaves you breathless as you sit down after it passes. Now imagine that there are eight different parade teams, performing this hour-long march in succession from 9 at night until sunrise the next morning, and that each team is so well-known that they have fans, so well-known that little Brazilian children beg their parents to let them stay just one more march, since Team Vai-Vai is up next, and one can’t leave before Vai Vai comes out. Further, imagine that this spectacle takes place not on a common road, but in a sambadrome, a purpose-made marching ground over a kilometer long, with stands rising skyward on either side, forming a structure where the Roman chariot-racers would feel at home.

Now that would be some spectacle. But this merely describes the scene on parade day, in Sao Paolo. In Rio, the samba goes on even longer, and is preceded by a week of neighborhood celebrations, outdoor concerts and mini-marches. The true Carnival fan, indeed, claims that festivities extend from New Years’ Day until Carnival proper, near the beginning of Lent!

So the biggest party: check. Prettiest women: check. Do you want the biggest waterfall, Iguazu, which caused a certain First Lady to exclaim “Poor Niagara!” upon seeing it? Iguazu is so big that, when approaching from the Brazilian side, you see a cascade on the level of Niagara or Victoria, and consider yourself satisfied, until you realize that the falls you’re looking at are a mere aftershock, a tributary, indeed, of a set of rapids many times larger than the famous Horseshoe.

How about the greatest wetlands, the Pantanal, which are similar to the Everglades if only the Everglades were bigger than Florida itself? Or the Amazon, so secure in its place as the world’s greatest jungle that the word Amazon is synonymous with jungle itself?

The prettiest urban location, surely, goes to Rio de Janeiro, with The Redeemer gazing down on the city from the West, and Sugarloaf rising in its vertical glory to the East, with Leblon’s nightlife and Santa Teresa’s bohemian alleys and Copacabana’s promenade all made invisible to each other by the lush rolling terrain. The city even provides its own wide-lens view, with Niemeyer’s “spaceship” museum of contemporary art in the suburb of Niteroi providing a vista of the entire Rio coastline from its deck.

The best beaches? There are the famous, Ipanema, the remote, Fernando do Noronha, the glitzy, Florianopolis, and the beautiful, near Fortaleza.

The culture? Uncontacted tribes still exist throughout the interior, knowing no more about the modern world than the American Indian of 1491. Brasilia, the capital, is a dystopia of urban life in its fully-planned collection of 1960s modernist and brutalist structures, among them the wonderful Dom Bosco Sanctuary, which positively glows blue during evening mass. The cowboys of the backlands are the equals of any in America, Argentina or Spain. In Bahia state, religious and cultural traditions are perhaps more African than in modern Africa itself. The music is Gilberto Gil and Sergio Mendes, bossa nova, samba, and the modern sounds of favela rap, DJ Marky’s d&b, or glitchy CSS and Bonde do Role. The sport is soccer, of course, with stadiums seating up to 200,000, but also lesser known games like futvolei, a version of volleyball with no hands allowed.

Yeah, I’m biased, but Brazil deserves its accolades. Its supermodel accolades, without a doubt, but also all the others.

1) South America photos are at Flickr now.

2) I posted a new story below that is, at least nominally, about Venezuela. New stories from Brazil and Japan coming soon. I’ve now made it down to Thailand, and wow, it is hot.

3) I finally know where I’m living when I get home! I somehow managed to get a grad school offer from Northwestern Kellogg, so I’ll be headed out to Chicago come August. Definitely pay a visit if you’re going to be out there!

(An introductory note: You could argue that the following story is fiction, but isn’t any story part fiction and part non-fiction? The small details, or rather the heart of any essay, are often constructed by the imagination of the writer in works of so-called nonfiction, and the movements and emotions and styles of characters and places in so-called fiction are surely informed by true events; human imagination is not capable of inventing something from nothing, but rather is creative only by combining true events in a novel order.)

The following clippings were recently found in the papers of the late journalist Don Pedro Rodriguez of San Fernando, and are as yet unpublished:

Rainbows don’t disappear all at once; they first rise. This is a little-known fact. In places where the shifting of tectonic plates, the slow recession of glaciers, the cumulative weathering of rains and rivers and winds and tides have given the land hills and valleys, limiting human vision of the horizon from its spherical maximum, thereby reducing the size of the sky, some final percent of a rainbow is truncated as far as the observer is concerned. It is in that truncation that the rise of rainbows shows itself most clearly. Viewed from a broad plain, a rainbow making its exit lifts its colors from the ground at both ends, slowly at first, with the appearance of the tattered end of an old striped flag. Once the process begins, its speed only increases, a slide into blue sky with such velocity at higher altitudes that, had only the central portion of the rainbow been viewed, it would appear to fade instantaneously.

Plains-dwellers understand this natural phenomenon better than others. The emptiness of their habitat allows a more thorough comprehension of natural events, those terrestrial rogue waves and Saint Elmo’s fires. Nature understands the vigilance of the plains-dwellers, and satiates these lonely watchmen by conducting her great wonders in barren strips of land.

1.
The Llanos of South America differ in an important regard from the planet’s other great steppes. Falling to the east of the cordilleras of the northernmost Andes, and northwest of that greatest of jungles, the Amazon, the Llanos form a plan of near perfect flatness, bisected by the broad Orinoco. Unlike the breadbasket steppe of Ukraine, or America’s Great Plains, or that vast Mongolian expanse east of the Tian Shan, the Llanos are an unfortunate recipient of a monsoon-style rain pattern. During the Dry, the land hollows out such as to be worthless for agriculture. During the Wet, unending rains cause small creeks to overflow their banks and form great regions of temporary swamp.

For this reason, these plains have always been thinly populated, even in the era before Columbus. Today, the region is largely made up of vast cattle ranches, as well as those lonely outposts in which the most interesting people tend to reside.

2.
In a region which had no name – only it was their section of the Llanos, with their trails and their fences and their quarrels, and everywhere else was simply elsewhere – there has lived for some years a man known as The German. Unlike most of the ranchers, whose complexions have been darkened by mestizo blood and by the weathering of tropical labor, The German remained fair-skinned. He arrived with rudimentary Spanish and even less knowledge of ranching, and rented a tiny plot, no more than two or three acres of barren land, from the one they call The Cat.

The Cat was rumored to be the eldest son of a well-known landowning family in Brazilian Baia, who rejected his expected inheritance and moved to the Llanos while still a young man. He was distinguished by the foreign lilt to his Spanish and the educated nature of his speech. He was also distinguished by his love of strangers, a scarce characteristic in the backlands, and the reason he was willing to let a small portion of land to an eccentric foreigner. The precise reason why he left his native Baia is unknown, but as the ocelot and the jaguar hide from the light of day, The Cat’s flight led to his nickname.

Before proceeding, it should be mentioned that The German was not, in fact, German at all. Rather, he was born in a small village along the Russian Volga, son of a literary family that generations before had held a seat in the court of the Czar. The heady days at the turn of the twentieth century found the family rather removed from such heights, and the zeitgeist of urban Russia was one of scientific application to all the humanities. The German was able, through his academic precociousness, to study literature at the finest academies of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but had been marked a failure by his masters for his strange approach to the subject. Rather than induce any latent, native creativity, he wrote only by combining word-for-word the writings of his predecessors, as a chemist might with various solutions. His longest work, “On Truth”, opened with a paragraph that was nothing more than a combination of sentences from Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka”, Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”, a short poem by Pushkin and a translation of a revolutionary work by Luxembourg. Though the combinations occasionally appeared sensible, the essay lacked the natural togetherness, the progression of emotion combined with logic, which distinguishes both the human thought process and the core of great art.

The same month The German submitted that essay, he disappeared from his university, leaving only one brief note of explanation scribbled on an old notebook atop his desk. The note read: “I can see what is missing. The material is too complex for my mind to combine. It must rise spontaneously.”

Two months later, The German had arrived in the Llanos.

3.
The first couple years, everyone assumed The German was nothing but a harmless simpleton. His small fields laid fallow, not that much of anything could grow in such soil anyway. He owned no cattle. In order to eat, he borrowed scraps from his neighbors, or else caught guinea pig and small birds. He caused little trouble, but also caused little excitement, spending most of each day shut up inside his cabin.

The fifth year was different. During a week in early Spring, it was noticed that The German had begun constructing simple wooden sculptures in his garden. On either side of the house, short posts were laid out in a quincunx. An awning constructed of common reeds connected the posts, hiding whatever had been planted below. What was strange, though, were the ripped sections of books which had begun floating away from this homestead whenever the wind blew down from the west. Three different ranchers had brought such scraps to The Cat during that week, his erudition being well-known, and proposed he discover what his tenant was up to.

4.

The German was working in the field when The Cat arrived early the next morning, though late enough that the more abnormal palette of the dawn sky had already faded to a more natural blue.

- Morning, called The Cat
- Morning.
- Hard at work this week? Can’t say I’ve seen you outside more than five minutes at a go since you arrived here.
- Preparation, sir, preparation. You can’t buy the seeds of ideas at a corner store.
- Ideas? Seems a strange thing to plant.
- But isn’t doing strange things the reason man lives in a place like this? The definition of freedom is the ability to do strange things, and the backlands are full of nothing if not freedom. It’s well known that both great writers and great dictators come from land such as this.

The Cat paused, and The German resumed fiddling with his shovel.

- Dictators?
- It’s simple really. Living in density makes you respect the need for liberty. The countryside doesn’t press the mind toward such a conclusion. And the mind needs to be pressed – man is not so creative to dream out of thin air. Leaders from the countryside, arriving in society with grandiose dreams, see no reason to temper those dreams with respect for the preferences of others. Napoleon was from Corsica, was he not?
- Hmm. Well, tell me, other than ideas, what are you planning to plant?
- Literature. Culture.
- How’s that?

The German reached into a small cloth bag, the type one expects to contain seeds of yucca or wheat or yam, and pulled out a handful of scraps of paper.

- Here in the back, I’m growing rows of Romanticism, but I’m going to put some verse here by the red post, and hopefully hybridize some new work in the style of Eugene Onegin.

The Cat stepped over the low fence around the garden and looked at the scraps of paper. They all contained bits of printed writing, as if they had been torn from books, the same as those scraps found by the other ranchers. The German took a piece - “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came up from the stairhead…” -, scooped a hole in the earth in the manner of a potter opening the top of a vase, and set the scrap inside. The Cat laughed.

-I imagine, my friend, that you would have more luck with something a bit more organic. Apples, perhaps?
- “Apples of gold in pictures of silver”, precisely.
- I’m sorry?
- A proverb. No matter, replied The German. Come harvest time, it will be clear.

5.
The following weeks passed quickly, with the hot spring blooming into a scorching Latin summer. Stormclouds came, paused, and left. With lingering curiosity, The Cat paid another visit to his tenant’s plot. By this point, the type of handwritten notes common to country gardens had appeared there, bearing titles like “Avant-garde”, “Folk Tale” and “Haiku/Tanka”. The German himself was at the back of the yard, pacing while holding a book aloft in the manner of a water diviner with a rod. The Cat laughed again, and called to his friend.

- Eh, how come the seedlings?
- Well, well, we’re close, he said, looking up.
- Close to what?
- The works being finished, of course. I’m hoping for a good crop of novels, but have no worry, I’ve not neglected novellas and poetry, though I fear the environment here isn’t right for plays, monologues notwithstanding.
- So this planting is some sort of inspiration for your writing, then?
- No, no, this IS the writing. I realized some years ago that the human mind has three fundamental limits when it comes to creativity. We are able to, at best, combine our personal experiences with the tiniest sliver of novelty, but we are unable invent out of clean cloth new experiences, to separate our memories into parts, or to imagine events which we have not personally experienced. Though what I mean by experience is different from what you must be imagining.
- How so?
- Most of us are under the illusion that our mind stores all of our memories, and that our difficulty in remembering small details, or the distant past, is because those memories lie in what is metaphorically called the back of the mind. This is not the case. In fact, memories don’t fade, but rather they rise wholeheartedly from the mind if they are not refreshed. And when we think about an old memory, what we then remember is not the old memory, but our remembering of the old memory! So thinking of an old personal experience is precisely the same, in terms of the memory, as being told about an experience by another. My “personal experience” includes those events you’ve been told about. But, in any case, a person can only think about or be told about so many things in a given span of time, and therefore our ability to work creatively will be limited by that small subset of ideas.
- And what of the “separation of memory into parts”?
- Do you know what the Milky Way looks like in the sky?, asked the German.
- Sure – a gray band from horizon to horizon. It’s a clear as can be out here.
- But do they know it in your Salvador, or in any of the other great cities?
- The streetlights are too bright. They also see fewer stars. But I’m afraid I don’t see the point.
- Well, the idea of “the night sky” differs between us and our old friends in the cities. We imagine an incredible number of stars and the silk of the galaxy, and they imagine their few bright stars and perhaps some version of the moon. We’ve both combined the sky itself with the environment from which we perceive it, without realizing that we’ve removed our ability to consider the sky in isolation. Every idea in the human mind is a combination of event and environment, and we are not able to separate the two.

The German held up a finger, stepped inside, and returned with two mugs of water, passing one to his companion. The Cat sipped slowly, and spoke once again:

- But I still don’t understand what this digression into epistemology has to do with your planting.
- Ah! Nature, history, they are not so limited as you and I. Before I came here, I tried to write by permutating the words of others, assuming that their mental biases varied, and that in combination these writers might divulge some wisdom. But the inability of any man to separate a Platonic idea from the environment in which it is seen is insurmountable. The conclusion, then, is to grow the words in the environment itself, for who could know better what comes from within and what comes from outside?
- The Cat parried: But you know that words do not grow. In six months, you’ll have the same scraps of paper if you’re lucky, and compost if you’re not.
- Why do you believe that?
- Who ever heard of words growing in the ground? It’s impossible.
- An improper deduction, countered The German. What would Hume say?
- That I can’t prove it?
- I can prove that words can grow by doing it once. You can never prove they can’t grow, no matter how many times you observe them failing to grow.
- But surely you agree that it’s improbable.
- Surely I don’t. Have you ever tried to grow words? Or known anyone who has.
- Of course not.
- Then your reason for doubting the possibility must not even rely on observing them failing to grow, which as noted, is insufficient proof in and of itself. The human mind is limited, my friend, very limited. In order to process an enormous amount of information, it must use heuristics to decide what it within the realm of possibility and what is not, and these heuristics often have very little logical grounding. Do you know the sailor’s tale about rogue waves?
- Towering waves?, questioned The Cat. I’ve heard tales about them back in Baia. Two hundred feet tall, appearing out of nowhere perpendicular to the prevailing the current. But what proof is there? No photographs. No theory of waves which would explain such an odd distribution of wave sizes. When you ruffle a bathtub, you do not produce the occasional giant wave sweeping across the bathroom floor.
- But, but, these waves do exist. Science is finding them. And they are even more common than the old sailors had claimed. Come back this fall and we’ll check for more waves.

The German waved his goodbye, slid back upon his horse, and returned home. Better to have interesting tenants than smart ones, isn’t it?

6.
Fall arrived, though the arrival of seasons other than Wet and Dry at such equatorial climes is less striking as in the temperate latitudes of the planet. The anaconda, perhaps, smiles more as it slithers across dirt roads, since the rains have increased its natural wetland habitat. The ibis shows its red and black and white pageantry less often than in the spring. The Cat returned to his neighbor, whose garden was as much a garden of dirt and nothing else as it had been three months earlier.

- Have you realized your claim is not true? No words appear to be growing. The whole premise is false.
- False. True. But maybe neither true nor false. I remain open to all three possibilities.
- This is too much, exasperated The Cat. A belief in words springing from thin air – well, it might be a possibility – but a rejection of the duality of true and false? Either the words will grow or they won’t. There can be no neither.
- Not true! What of Heisenberg’s particles and Hilbert’s continuum? There are some conjectures that are neither true nor false, but rather undecidable! “I am a liar.” How to evaluate this statement? If true, the statement contradicts itself, since I have then told a truth. If false, then I am not a liar, and therefore the statement must be true! There is no truth and no falsehood in the statement. The state of a particle is even worse. It’s not that the particle doesn’t have a position and a velocity, it’s simply that there is no possible way to learn what those two states might be! What if it’s undecidable whether the great novel of human history will be created through my experiment? Perhaps it is being created right now, and we simply will never know what happened?
- But how? In a few weeks, the growing season, such that it is, will be over, and we’ll know for sure?
- What if, the instant the novel is finished, this plot of land were to rise into the sky and slowly disappear, like a rainbow, taking all evidence along with it?

7.
October dawned, and curiosity returned. At this stage, history contorts itself. As the events are recorded nowhere except in the memory of The Cat, and further that the original imprint of the event on his mind has surely risen and faded away, to be replaced by recollections of recollections of that same memory, the following account should not be taken as anything more than what it is.

Nonetheless, the claim is as follows: As The Cat approached The German’s house, it appeared, from a distance, as if it had risen some inches above its foundation, and that it was surrounded by dirt as in the dust storms that occasionally strike this terrain. Over the next few minutes, the house appeared to rise higher, but the image became a series of lightly-shaded waves, as happens to distant objects in the heat of day. The Cat rubbed his eyes, and looked again: no floating house existed anymore.

What was strange was that, as The Cat approached nearer to the site of the plot, the house continued its failure to appear. At the site where The German once lived, and The Cat swears on this point, there remained nothing but dirt and small bushes. No foundation was marked on the ground, and no planted rows of soil presented themselves. What evidence there was would have literally risen and disappeared.

I would suggest further research, but it appears that no such work would prove what is true and what is false.

(Apologies for the long delay since the last story. I’ve been trying to revise this story, which I’m still not satisfied with. A couple of South American stories, which I’m excited about, and photos are coming soon.)

Downbeat stories are not like mysteries; it’s best to make their gloomy nature clear from the beginning, lest the reader pin hopes on a turnaround not to come. So it’s here that I offer Mozambique as the worst place I’ve ever traveled. You may object; perhaps it was I who, to Mozambique, was one of the worst travelers yet received, and therefore the state ought not be blamed? Or perhaps both propositions are true, even objectively, and it was the combined mistakes that led to such melancholic resignation both from the author and from the country.

But anger and disappointment are not genres. Tragedy is, and one of the oldest, for with the downfall of its characters comes a moral uplift, a message, for the reader. As the takeaway of this story, I’ll spoil it here, is that you shouldn’t waste your time going to the forsaken Interior of Mozambique, and as that statement contains no moral content whatsoever, no semblance of tragedy will be found in this story.

So let the following device be proposed: a self-belief among the author, and feigned belief among the reader, that the pains recounted below make up only the setting, and not the content. With that contract in place, an anti-Panglossian search for Mozambique’s virtues, and for the meaning of adventure itself, will be said to make up the main. Indeed, perhaps during this search I’ll realize that I shouldn’t give Mozambique such a hard time (the less gentle side of the mind, called the ego, self-indulgence, hubris, this less gentle side is shaking his head and declaring that Mozambique should not have given me such a hard time, and that it deserves what comeuppance it gets). It is, after all, famously one of Bob Dylan’s favorite places, and I deliberately leave that modifier dangling. Let’s press ahead.

“I like to spend some time in Mozambique
The sunny sky is aqua blue
And all the couples dancing cheek to cheek
It’s very nice to stay a week or two
And fall in love just me and you.”

Aqua blue! And dancing cheek to cheek! Not some of the couples, but all of them. Bob, you wily salesman, you.

“Mozambique” was released in 1974, just before Portugal’s dictatorship fell and its foreign colonies were liquidated, leaving Mozambique itself released in 1975. Though Portugal ran a good competition with Belgium and Japan for the title of Worst Colonial Ruler, it did leave Mozambique stable by the early 1970s, with such heavy Latin influence that even today forty percent of the country speak Portuguese as a first language. The rest of Mozambique’s success in Dylan’s day is clear from a glance at a map, which shows a two thousand kilometer long, tropical, beach-strewn coastline stretching from the last of the Arab slavetrading colonies down to the border of South Africa, whose white residents then and now are the most common tourists.

With independence, power fell to FRELIMO, a group of young, heavily-armed Marxists who supported the dictum that “revolution is not a dinner party” with such vigor that they placed an AK-47 right in the center the flag, instead of a peaceful globe with “Ordem e Progresso” spilt across its girth. Given the next twenty years, the machine gun was fitting. As a newly-founded, one-party state, Mozambique began hosting Mugabe’s Rhodesia-fighting guerrillas as well as more extreme elements of the ANC, who were pestering the Apartheid government with their predilection for pyrotechnics. Rhodesia and South Africa countered by funding a group called RENAMO which was less an opposition party than a group of anarchists paid to foment mayhem in Mozambique. Civil War and Socialist Economics reigned for the next sixteen years.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, FRELIMO moved Mozambique toward a market economy, and began holding multiparty elections. The country, though still desperately poor, has held two free and fair elections, and the current government is considered one of the most effective in the third world. These facts have done nothing to improve its distinction as a tourist destination.

“There’s a lot of pretty girls in Mozambique
And plenty time for good romance
And everybody likes to stop and speak
To give the special one you seek a chance
Or maybe say hello with just a glance.”

In general: I reckon the reason everyone likes to stop and speak is that they sure aren’t going to be going anywhere. Any public transport in the forsaken country sallies toward its destination with a deliberate lack of speed. At every village, the minibuses pull over so that passengers can buy mangoes and pineapples and dried fish and mealie-meal and - never buy African meat without checking its origin! - rat on a stick. The products available at each stop are without question the exact same that were available at the previous stop.

If the onboard shopping weren’t odious enough, farmers throughout the verdant country also use minibuses to transport their giant bags of grain, baskets filled with low-quality Chinese electronics, and live chickens. They are not carried in the hold, which does not exist. Rather, they are almost always carried directly where your feet were previously sitting. On occasion, they are carried on your lap. Particularly when thirty people are shoveled into a van that seats fourteen, the Newtonian dictum that no two objects can occupy the same space seems to be violated.

The roads do not help. It is in Mozambique that the mighty Zambezi forms its prodigious delta, splitting the country between North and South. As of yet, there still exists no bridge across the Zambezi delta, but only a ferry running for a few hours in midday. This means that nearly any trip from South to North requires a two day bus journey. My two day journey was spent on the floor of the center aisle, which by some semantic construction constitutes a seat.

In specific: Tarmac, pavement, cement; these things are foreign concepts in the North of Mozambique. For some reason, the relative emptiness of that portion of the country enticed me to travel overland from the charming ex-colony of Ilha de Mocambique across to Malawi. Empty, Darkest Africa! Stanley and Livingstone! Stiff Upper Lips! A map shows a railroad crossing nearly the entire distance, running three times a week, which seems pleasant enough. Who could say no to twelve hours spent gazing at boababs and bicolored flame trees set among native villages and terraced mountains, whilst enjoying a fine cocktail delivered by a white-gloved African in some fulfillment of a Cecil Rhodes dream?

Only not. When a cockroach runs across the floor of the first-class cabin before the train even leaves, you know you’re in for a tough ride. Six hours from our origin, Nampula, the train came to a halt. In mid-day. In the middle of the bush. It turns out that the monsoon rains have knocked out a bridge on the main line; this later is augmented to three bridges thusly removed. That night, we’re back in Nampula, and told we would leave any moment, so best to sleep in your train cabin. Twenty-four hours pass. We’ve still not moved. I’m unconvinced that the well-known Mozambican work ethic will have these bridges fixed “any hour now.”

Mozambicans (and Africans in general) are surprisingly stoic in situations such as these. This may be admirable in some circumstances, but it is also a trait that allows a people to be taken advantage of. Your correspondent is not at all stoic in these situations, and the Africans in my cabin were a bit surprised when I began the “Bring the Chief or We Riot!” chant, which rhymes nicely in the vernacular Portuguese (Chefe ou Greve! Chefe ou Greve!).

I managed to badger my way to a meeting with the station chief. He admitted the bridges would be down at least three weeks. I asked him what we should do. He said we should wait on the train. I am not that stoic.

The problem with not waiting is that there is no road across the North of Malawi. A dirt path, yes, but dirt turns into mud during the monsoon. Twelve of us hired a four-by-four for the journey. A standard minivan arrived, and added another 12 people. I can tell you that twenty-four people in a minivan for fifteen hours on a road of foot-deep mud is not a fun adventure. I can also tell you that the destination of this trip, reached after sliding off the road on three occasions, was Cuamba, the single worst town in the world. It is literally not possible to eat there without guarding your food with a free arm because of the incredible population of flies. Flies that bite.

“Lying next to her by the ocean
Reaching out and touching her hand
Whispering your secret emotion
Magic in a magical land.”

Bob, she’s already touching my hand, but only because we’re twenty-four deep in a minivan meant for twelve, and she can’t help but do it. My secret emotion is hatred.

I see three potential differences between terrible adventures of the forty-eight hours to go three hundred kilometers kind, and great adventures of the Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush kind.

The first is purely subjective. The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes a mental state called “flow”. When experiencing flow, a person is so involved in an activity that their sense of time is distorted, their sensory perception of stimulus outside the activity becomes dulled, and the choice of subsequent action seems to come faster than choices normally associated with conscious thought. Flow is common in sports (being “in the zone”), but also to good adventures, is it not? A mountain climber in a truly dangerous situation is able to ignore anything except that which is necessary to get off the mountain. Flow is a feeling common to all great human accomplishment - great art, great music - and is utterly missing from “bad adventures”.

The second difference lies deeper in one’s sense of motivation. Plato gives a portion of the soul to thymos, that human desire to be recognized by others. Indeed, Nietzsche believes that this lust for recognition, this desire to be considered superior to others, is the essence of humanity; in his mind, human achievement of the highest level is neutered when the desire to rise above other people is rejected. A good adventure provides satisfaction to the thymotic soul - it provides envy-provoking stories that bad adventure cannot provide.

The third difference is in the reason the adventure occurred in the first place. The French pilot-philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes self-sacrificing danger, danger encountered while performing some task for the greater good, as heroic, while danger encountered solely in order to live dangerously, or to impress others, is simply foolhardy. It is that first danger, in adventure taken with a sense of duty, whether duty to the advancement of human knowledge, or duty to help fellow man, that is noteworthy. When bad adventures happen to the fool, no advance in the human condition is recorded.

Run-down trains and oft-crashing minivans lead to no flow, satisfy no thymos, and advance no sense of duty.

“And when it’s time for leaving Mozambique
To say goodbye to sand and sea
You turn around to take a final peek
And you see why it’s so unique to be
Among the lovely people living free
Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.”

Bob is more prescient that he may have realized. That final look at Mozambique should not be taken far from the coast.