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.

Budget, Reading List and Photos all updated. The Africa photos can be found by clicking on “images” to the left or by clicking on the image below.

(To be on the safe side, I’ve changed some of the names in this story.)

1.
The middle-aged man in the all-orange suit and the dark sunglasses left soon after we’d finished our Cokes outside the shebeen in a migrant district of Bujumbura. I’d been staying in the Burundian capital with a friend of a friend, and was planning to head to Rwanda the next day.

A few minutes later: “John, I meant to mention that the outfit your friend was wearing is hilarious. In America, only prisoners wear orange jumpsuits. Everyone would assume you’d just escaped if you showed up in town looking like that!”

“Ah! No, here, prisoners they wear a color…like that one over there.” He points to a shawl exactly the same color as American doctor’s scrubs. “Oh, did I tell you that guy is my brother-in-law? I haven’t seen him in fifteen years! That’s why we had to stop for a drink with him.”

“Fifteen years! Why so long?”

“Well, he’s been living in the forest near the border.” Bujumbura is located on the tip of Lake Tanganyika, fifteen kilometers from the border with DR Congo. The terrain in the Tanganyika region is forested mountains, with regular, jagged valleys of the Great African Rift separating each range. North toward the Rwanda border, the mountains soar well above 10,000 feet. It is from this mountainous jungle that humanity first emerged, beginning to walk upright in order to lessen the amount of the body exposed to sunlight as they moved to the vast East African savanna. Today, this region is home to more Great Apes - gorilla, chimpanzee - than any other place on Earth.

“What was your brother-in-law doing in the forest?”

“Well, he’s the leader of a Hutu rebel group. They’re the only ones who haven’t finished their peace agreement with the government now that the war is over.” He pauses. “Actually, it’s too bad you’re leaving tomorrow morning. His camp is not very far from here; we could have went for a visit.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yeah, they’re in ceasefire. Anyway, he’s the commander for this region” - this region being Bujumbura-Rurale, the most pro-Hutu militia area in the whole country - “so for sure it’s safe.”

“Umm, don’t worry then, I can stay an extra day.” Thanks to modern technology, you can reach forest-dwelling rebels by cell phone now. We call Rebel Commander’s people and make a date for the next morning. Word is a couple of the boys will meet us on the road to Congo, near the place where the cyclists gather cassava and bananas from local farmers for sale in the capital. And that’s how I ended up in a Burundi forest holding a machine gun.

2.
The places now known as Rwanda and Burundi were, until less than 2000 years ago, populated only by thinly-scattered pygmy tribes, known locally as Twa. Sometime between 1500 and 2000 years ago, groups of people known as the Bantu migrated into the region from present-day Nigeria and Cameroon. The Bantu possessed metalworking and farming techniques unknown to the hunter-gatherer pygmies, who quickly were overrun in population all across East and Southern Africa. Though exact dates are uncertain, it is generally assumed that a second group, Tutsis, arrived from somewhere in East Africa in the fifteenth century. Though intermarriage means that Hutu and Tutsi are not sharp distinctions, and though post-genocide Rwanda does its best to claim that the extent of the difference was magnified by colonial policy, the level of intermixing may have been overstated; there are obviously Somali/Ethiopian people in Rwanda and Burundi, tall with long noses and paler skin, that everyone identifies as Tutsi.

Regardless of the exact history, it is known that Tutsis served as kings in present-day Burundi from at least the 18th century, and that the Germans and Belgians who ruled colonial Burundi after 1899 largely kept that power structure in place. Throughout this time, no more than 15 to 20 percent of the region considered themselves Tutsi. After independence, Tutsis maintained control, increasingly worried about the violent Hutu nationalism regularly showing its head in neighboring Rwanda. In both the 1970s and 1980s, army repression of Hutu rebel groups and their supporters led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Burundi Hutus. Finally, in 1993, the nation held democratic elections, which were won by a Hutu. The new President was soon killed. In 1994, his replacement was killed in a suspicious plane crash alongside the President of Rwanda, triggering a genocide of Tutsis by extremist Hutus in that nation. A third Hutu leader in Burundi was overthrown by a Tutsi general in 1996, and civil war continued in the nation until 2004. At least seventeen different Hutu rebel groups were involved in the fighting, and by 2008, all by the Palipehutu-FLM had finished peace negotiations with the government.

Palipehutu, among the largest Hutu groups, was infamous for slaughtering civilians, including those in refugee camps. They were led by extremist Christians, and are known to have sung Christmas songs as they went about the killing. In an infamous massacre in 2001, a busload of people including a British aid worker were shot in cold blood on a road outside of Bujumbura by caroling Palipehutu robbers. More recently, Palipehutu has been seen as a safe haven for Hutu murderers from Rwanda and as a source of armed men for Hutu rebels in the east of DR Congo.

Burundi, poor before the Civil War, today battles with DR Congo, Zimbabwe and Liberia for the rank of world’s poorest country.

3.
The moto taxis dropped me and John on the side of the main road to Congo. Our moto route passed through the common Third World urban gradation: downtown, shantytown, tiny rural plots. Middlemen prepared hands of bananas, bundles of coffee beans and collections of cassava for transport into the capital. The women nearly universally had a baby bundled in colorful cloth on their backs, an unsurprising fact in a part of the world where six to seven children per woman is the norm. One kid in the hills alongside the road began yelling a Western-sounding name, the name of a priest who had done aid work in that village years before. John told me they were sure that I was the old priest’s son.

Our contacts from the rebel group met us at the stop, and began guiding us up a ruddy path into the mountains. The particular hill we were ascending possessed a fine view of Bujumbura and Lake Tanganyika, the type of city view that commends high prices across the developed world. Here in Burundi, a view simply meant that you were further from the city, and on steeper, harder-to-till ground, so the area was populated only by relatively poor peasants. Most houses held only one or two rooms enclosed by wood and mud walls with roofs made of thatching or corrugated metal.

Higher and higher we walked, and the village houses began to fade into forest as the path narrowed to single-file width. A small creek was bisected by a rickety wood-slat bridge, an appropriate barrier on a walk to a rebel camp. Fifteen minutes later, the path opened into a clearing surrounded by a few small houses, from where the Rebel Commander and his English translator came to meet us.

4.
The Commander, like many of his troops, is very short, likely a result of malnutrition during the war. He walks past his armory of dilapidated machine guns and sits on a plastic chair in the shade of the banana trees, inviting us to do the same.

Though the rebels had been living in the bush during the Civil War, the encampment we visited had been their home for the past year as they negotiated with the UN and the Burundi government.

Ending a civil war is more difficult that it seems. At the beginning of a war, each faction has its own goals and demands, and in the case of Palipehutu, the demands for majority government had been met since 2004. Palipehutu was also in complete agreement with the central government on the need to reorganize itself on a non-Hutu-exclusive party, and to renounce violence. These facts do not mean that the rebels simply return home to their villages and go on with their lives, however. The actual process of the war itself creates new goals and demands on each side.

“I’ve been fifteen years living in the mountains. Look at my eye” - the Commander lowers his sunglasses - “from which I can no longer see. See how I can no longer walk without a slight limp.” He pauses.

“My wife and my children: I’ve not seen them since I came to this camp. By now, she must be remarried. I have no land and no house to return to. This is the case for many of my men.”

“The government has taken some of our troops into the regular army, but they won’t take anyone with a disability. After fighting for so long, all of our oldest troops have suffered war injuries. What are we supposed to do? We have no education, no skills except military skills.”

The reason victory for a given faction in a civil conflict is so important is that it allows the victor to control the reins of government and to dole out patronage jobs for its troops. A unified government or a democratic government owes no loyalty to rebels, particularly to those who committed unspeakable acts against other members of a society. Unskilled troops from factions that don’t seize power often find themselves unemployable.

Further, when wars are particularly brutal, such as in Burundi, Rwanda, or the Former Yugoslavia, there is a justifiable urge among the mistreated to punish those responsible. The problem is that, during brutal wars, war crimes are committed not by the few, but by the many. The precedent from Nuremberg is to punish only the highest ranking officials, and to forgive and forget when it comes to the foot soldiers. If this is to be the case, a government needs some credible way to ensure that, following a peace deal, they don’t simply change their minds and round up the old rebels or, most easily, allow unofficial revenge attacks to go on unhindered.

Our Commander is ready for peace. He has no desire to return to the jungle. He also, without a doubt, led an army that committed incredible war crimes. But how can the central government or the UN return him to peaceful society? He can’t join the army. He can’t sustain himself farming. If he is given a cushy nonmilitary government job, what message does that give to future generations? And so negotiations go on. The translator says that he hopes a deal will come this year, but they can wait.

5.
The Commander walks with us back to the main road. The local kids seem to genuinely like him, and run out of every house to be greeted. His charisma is undeniable, and it’s clear how he was able to raise his guerrilla band.

But this scene is worrying as well. Even after the Rwanda genocide, after the two Congolese civil wars, after Burundi’s long and brutal conflict, a racialist militant remains the most popular man in the region? Should not the kids look up the entrepreneur with the phone shack down on the main road? Or the educated and literate man who went into the clergy? The Tanzanian postcolonial leader Julius Nyerere and the Rwandan head Paul Kagame both put full stock in the idea that societies with tribal divisions will have a difficult time developing. This strikes me to be an undeniable truth.

At Hutu rebel camp, Burundi

New set of photos from the Middle East posted here.

I’m out in the middle of nowhere. Evidence: the site where Stanley said “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” after finding him in the jungle is only a mile away from here.

(Merry Christmas, everyone! Let’s go to the Holy Land for this story…)

It’s only five miles from the Old City of Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and if going by foot was good enough for Joe and Mary, it’s good enough for me. And what better site of a Christmas story than the site of the Christmas Story?

They, of course, went all the way from Nazareth, which, if you consult your map, is a very long way from Bethlehem indeed. In fact, the whole deal seems rather inefficient, from the point of view of the Romans. If Joseph and the rest of the itinerant carpenters - I’m speculating here, but like father, like son - had to return to their ancestral home to be counted and to pay taxes, wouldn’t it have been straightforward to just duck out of Galilee for a few days, never having remitted the taxes and leaving the Nazarene and Bethlehem Revenue Authorities none the wiser? But I digress.

The geography around Jerusalem is striking. First, both the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives disappoint in their lack of mountain-ness. (The Holy Land is not alone in grandiose claims of soaring mounts - Louisiana’s highest point, Driscoll Mountain, is only five hundred feet high!) Second, the native terrain, preserved in a park east of Jerusalem, is so dry and brambly that one wonders how Moses knew he’d left the desert at all. Third, there’s what appears to be a giant wall in the middle of one of the valleys on the road to Bethlehem.

Ah. The Wall. The Security Fence. The Perimeter. Apartheid Two. The West Bank Barrier. Ich bin ein Berliner. Depends on your politics, of course. No matter how you view it, you can’t help but view it, as the wall, thick and double-thick again, concrete extending more than five hundred miles, curls through a nation nowhere near that long. The arguments for and against are straightforward. Proponents rightfully point out that over 700 Israeli citizens were killed by Palestinian bombers in the al-Aqsa intifada before the wall was put up, and that today suicide bombings are essentially unheard of in Israel. Opponents convicingly note that most of the Wall lies in territory which is nominally part of the future Palestinian state, and that besides invoking degrading treatment on Palestinians who are simply traveling to work, the wall appears to be an attempt to establish “facts on the ground” which will allow Israel to grab more land than the 1967 borders when a final peace settlement is negotiated.

For our purposes, let’s just note the existence of the wall, and the fact that would Joseph and Mary have made their trek today, they would have needed to pass through security.

Leaving the Israeli side is straightforward. Arabs show an ID, swipe their finger into a biometric reader, and cross through. With an American passport, I was waved through with nary a question. The concept of the passport, whether domestic or not, is interesting, isn’t it? Everyone worldwide more or less accepts the passport as a given, but historically, the document served only two purposes. First, it identified the holder as being linked to a strong government who would protect their citizens - flip open your modern passport and you’ll still find words to the effect of “grant the bearer safe passage.” Second, and more disturbing, the passport was used by totalitarian and illiberal states to control the flow of their own citizens domestically and overseas. Many of the more disagreeable nations worldwide still restrict passport access to control their peoples’ movement. Even liberal states do this from time to time - some legal scholars remain unconvinced that the US can constitutionally restrict the travel of Americans to states such as Cuba, and certainly I’m unclear what principle of liberality would allow such an prohibition.

The most evident difference between the Palestinian side of the wall and the Israeli side is that the grafitti is much more interesting on the Palestinian side. The Palestinian cause, like the Tibetan cause, is one that draws an international crowd, and the International Crowd tend to like a good piece of wall grafitti. I’ve never figured out why these crowds associate with Palestine and Tibet and Darfur but not with Eastern Congo or Burma or Xinjiang, to choose just three examples of peoples who have suffered at least as much.

Particularly interesting is that the grafitti comes in three flavors. First is the Witty International Art. These are obviously drawn by foreigners - one can’t imagine that Arabs and Jews would draw in English as a first choice - but are generally salient. I enjoyed the giant “Do unto others as it WAS done unto you?” and the herd of rhinos crashing through the wall.

Much worse is the Uninformed International Art. This is by far the most common species, and is populated primarily by airy-fairy quotations from either leftist philosophers or bad musicians. Zach de la Rocha, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein and Mao Zedong appear to be this movement’s leading lights. I would have imagined that Reagan could have gotten a namecheck - “Tear down this wall” and all that - but I fear the graffers in the Uninformed Group may be too young to know who Reagan is, and, to the extend that they know him, completely unwilling to invoke the name of That Guy.

The third group, Obviously Local, is a favorite. I identified this group by selecting all the grafitti that actually featured Arabic. What’s interesting is that this group consisted primarily of advertisements; more Security Billboard that Security Barrier. There were ads for concerts and restaurants and tire stores. For all the talk about the Two State Solution and political reconciliation, I imagine that Palestinians, like people all over the world, simply want the opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their children, and economic status is far more important than political status when it comes to this question. Had Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt become centers of Palestinian prosperity rather than the site of refugee camps with arguably worse conditions than the Israel-controlled West Bank, would not Palestinians be less concerned with 1948?

But the camps outside of Israel are poor, and the Palestinian condition within Israel is poor, and that makes slights like the one I witnessed crossing back from Bethlehem all the more damaging. Directly ahead of me in line was a Palestinian man and his wife. For some reason, she was selected for extra screening, meaning a more invasive search of some kind. When the man was not allowed to accompany her, he went absolutely ballistic, ranting and raving to the point that another Arab in line with me said that even he was a bit scared. The Israeli guards, generally young people doing mandatory service who are unable to speak Arabic, made things no better by yelling back with equal vigor.

If you want some Christmas good news at this juncture, some anecdote about how a moderate Jew or a Palestinian businessman intervened to calm the situation, proving that peace is indeed possible, you’re not going to get it here. The situation in the Middle East is as muddled as ever. Everyone knows that Palestinians will never accept the Orthodox settlements in the West Bank, which now hold half a million Jews. Everyone knows that Israel will never allow full right of return for Palestinians, since this would mean the end of the Jewish state. Everyone has known these things for decades, but Arab and Israeli politicians who acknowledge these truths wind up dead like Sadat and Rabin, and foreign mediators have all been unable to convince the extremist factions on either side to moderate.

When Joseph and Mary left Bethlehem, they went to Egypt for decades to avoid the intransigence of the government in Judea, but at least they could return to peace after the tyrannical incumbent died. Is there even that much hope in Israel and Palestine today?

1.

Risks when traveling overseas are often terribly misunderstood. Most people worry about terrorism, about the mustachioed, kaffiyeh-bandying, rock-throwing, ultra-swarthy young man who eagerly spends his days sipping tea and playing backgammon while hoping, nay dreaming, for an Unwitting Westerner to traipse by the storefront, at which point our Arab or Colombian or Russian or Brownian leaps into action having already selected an appropriately sedate basket, or perhaps platter if our terrorist is a student of the arts, in which to deposit the soon-removed head of the traveler.

But it is really the car that presents the most danger when abroad. Do you know how many people die in car accidents worldwide every year? Go ahead, guess; I’ll wait.

It’s one point two million, according to the WHO. One point two million, every year! And that’s even though broad swaths of the world population still live in villages and slums where autos are near nonexistent. If 9/11 happened every day, there would still be more people dying on the roads than dying at the hands of terrorists. The nations with the worst drivers have death rates per mile that are orders of magnitude higher than the US.

You might find it interesting, then, to combine the two possibilities. Just how dangerous would it be, for instance, to be banging turns at ninety miles per hour while in an Iraqi taxi? Well, since you asked…

2.

The thing with Iraq 2008 is that you’ve really got three countries. Region one is comprised of the highway between Mosul and Baghdad, and its surrounding provinces. Here, they don’t even have the decency to make a video for al-Jazeera of your head in a basket after showing you holding today’s newspaper; they just chop it off straightaway. Region two is the very far south, former home of Thesiger’s Marsh Arabs. It’s reasonably quiet down here; informed opinion suggests that an unarmed tourist could probably walk through the market unscathed here for at least a few days. Region three, though, is home to the Kurds, arcing across the North and Northeast from just north of Mosul to just north of Kirkuk and on over to Iran.

It might be a technicality to consider Kurdistan / Northern Iraq / the Kurdish Administered Region of Iraq (depending on your politics) a part of Iraq at all. They run their own customs from Turkey and Iraq. The Kurdish flag, a red, white and green affair with a joyful sun in the middle, flies everywhere while the Iraqi flag, properly bland and dour with Allahu Akbar written across, makes only rare appearances. Along every road that intersects with the Kurdish region, troops in the employ of the Kurdish parties enforce checkpoints; any Arab-looking fellow who does not speak perfect Kurdish is searched heavily. This isn’t a new state of affairs; the North has been de facto autonomous since the US began enforcing a no-fly zone in the 1990s. As a result, there have only been a handful of isolated, minor bombings in the Kurdish region since 2003.

The North is also different because nearly everybody there supports the 2003 Iraq War. American troops are known to head to the bars of Zakho or Erbil for a spell of R&R. And American tourists? I counted eleven things acquired for free over seven days, among them taxi rides, meals and miniature Iraq flags. I saw more than one person wearing US Army surplus clothing. Kurdistan is, I reckon, slightly more pro-American than an average Rotary Club in Oklahoma on July 4 during a visit from a Wounded Veteran.

Not only that, but Kurdistan is a visa-at-the-border jump away from Eastern Turkey, where I happened to be in late October. So, along with a similarly-inclined English surgeon – I’m sure she could reattach a head if need be - an Iraq trip was in the cards.

3.

The difference between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq shouldn’t be completely overstated, however.

Sulemania is a lovely city, the second largest in the region, located an hour north of Bitterly Divided Kirkuk, more on which to come. The city souq is among the best in the region, and as a souq connoisseur who has visited those wonderfully evocative markets in Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, Dubai, Jerusalem, Muscat, Sana’a and Cairo, I speak with some authority on the matter. The city lies at the edge of a mountain range stretching toward Turkey and Tehran, and is filled with broad boulevards and newly-built mosques. Suly – what the cool kids call it these days – is also booming economically, and is home to a smattering of perfectly decent Italian restaurants, a bowling alley, and the campus of a nascent American University in Iraq.

A pair of Americans, Ryan and Peter, teaching English at the University invited us to class on our last day in the city. AUI is an English-only institution, and inside the campus walls, it looks like nothing but a typical American high school. There are girls in skirts, and guys in ballcaps, and a basketball court behind the classroom building.

Ryan is trying his best to put together a girls’ basketball team. A few weeks ago, he took the girls on a run through a local park during practice. Afterwards, one of the girls told him it would be better if they didn’t go running off the campus again. The men who were yelling in Kurdish out there, she said, weren’t cheering us on.

Interesting fact: Sulemania has something of a reputation as the Honor Killing Capital of the World. It’s not much the town for independent women.

Not long after the basketball was the beginning-of-term party held at the Sulemania Social Club – anyone who’s anyone, darling, and all that. Only half the class made it for a night of buffet, dull speeches, and relatively conservative Kurdish line dancing. One of the fathers had asked whether there would be dancing. Yes, there would be, but just traditional Kurdish dances. But, and surely this must have been said in hush-hush tones, is it not possible that a knee would be exposed in a moment of gamboling hullabaloo? A knee! Well, I suppose its possible, and in that case, she won’t be able to come.

4.

Perhaps, though, the difference between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq is pretty huge.

A traveling English circus that we bumped into in Erbil – and really, these occurrences are so common as to not even be noteworthy, right? - is known in the Middle East for giving shows to the sad sacks all the region over. Palestinian refugee camps are a common haunt, but they also played Baghdad and surrounding in 2004. Indeed, they were on the (re-)opening bill of the National Theatre. What was that trip like?

It went well, I’m told. They played to big crowds, and the kids, especially the refugees, and especially the orphan refugees, really had a good time seeing the clowns and the fire-breathing and the Three Stooges stunts. And further, they were able to help a domestic Iraqi group that brings in young people for a children’s theatre.

One of the British group was kidnapped after the end of the tour, but she was returned safe and sound after not too long. No harm, no foul, innit?

But, oh yeah, the Iraqi children’s theatre. They’d received threatening messages nearly from the start, warning them against performing such non-Islamic entertainment. The missive likely suggested replacing Shakespeare with something like A Verbatim Recitation of Muhammed’s Account of Receiving Messages from the Angel Gabriel: The Musical. Only with no music. In any case, the messages grew more threating, including calls to have the theatre itself blown up.

Luckily, it didn’t get that far. The directors of the theatre were ambushed coming out of a rehearsal and were all killed in 2005.

5.

The taxi drivers may be lunatics at the wheel, but at least they provide interesting conversation. One driver wanted to know how many wives I had. I told him, none, but the standard in the US is just to have the one. He had two wives, and thought that every guy should have at least that many.

Mathematic talent must have fallen in Iraq since the golden era when they were inventing the number zero and al-gibra.

6.

I reckon the Kurds are calm now because they went through too much during the Saddam Era. The end of the Iraq-Iran war, in 1987 and 1988, and the period following the Gulf War in 1991 were particularly bad.

Sulemania has a whole museum devoted to 1991: the Red State Security Museum. The compound used to enclose Saddam’s mukhabarat jail. Following the Gulf War, southern Shi’ites and northern Kurds were tacitly encouraged to rise up against Saddam’s rule. Unfortunately, neither the US nor anyone else assisted. Historians generally believe that Bush was torn over whether to send troops far across the Kuwait border, but was warned by allied Arab governments that it would not look good if the US used troops based in Saudi Arabia to overthrow an Arab leader, no matter how odious. In any case, the uprising failed, and Saddam’s troops retaliated mercilessly against suspected plotters.

Thousands of Kurds were killed. The women and children of political prisoners were brought along to tiny cells along with the accused. The Museum will play you a tape of a torture in the very room where the torture took place – I passed. And to be honest, the worst of what happened in Sulemania can’t really compare to events like the chemical bombing of Halabja in Iraq’s far east, where thousands died in the unbearably painful way that is chemical warfare’s trademark. Spots along the Iraq-Iran border represent the only widespread use of chemical warfare since the trenches of World War I.

7.

Though the US has been involved in Kurdistan since 1991, through the patrol of a no-fly zone, there are very few troops on active duty in this part of Iraq. One guess puts the total at less than four hundred.

And those four hundred are not hard to find. We were walking through the Christian Quarter of Erbil – yes, Kurdistan has many Christians, as well as Yezidis and other minority religions –
when our road was blocked by a concrete car barrier and a guardpost. In the middle of the block stood a large house surrounded by barbed wire. The President of Kurdistan, perhaps? A local drug running billionaire? We asked the heavily-armed guard in a combination of Arabic, Kurdish and Pantomime who lived at the house. He said, No. We waited. He picked up a phone, and waved us in past the concrete barrier. A second guard appeared in front of the house itself, where we waited while he knocked on the outside gate. I suppose they assumed that White Folks Like Us are probably not the terrorist-types they should be looking out for.

A confused Asian-American came out.

“Err, Hello?”

Hey, man. What’s goin’ on? We were just wondering, is this like the Iraq President’s house or somethin’?

“Umm, no.” Another guy walks out of the house. I thought he was Iraqi, but he was named Jose and talked with Asian Guy in an American accent. Iraqis and Mexicans are easily confused by their similar taste in walrus mustaches.

So what do you guys do here?

“Well, I’m not really allowed to say.”

Could I take a picture of the house, asks my surgeon friend.

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

Well, OK, bye, guys!

Down at the end of the street, we popped into a convenience store, and asked them what the deal was with all the security on the street. Oh yeah, they said – the US Army live there. They weren’t the most inconspicuous guys in the world. Except for Jose, of course.

8.

But once more with the taxis.

Kurdistan isn’t so much a country as a region sliced off from the rest of Iraq. Because of that, the main, tarmac roads don’t confine themselves to the Kurdish perimeter. The main road from Turkey to Erbil, Kurdistan’s largest city, passes an ominous “Mosul – 24km” sign before veering hard to the left. Mosul! Twenty four kilometers!

The route from Sulemania to Erbil is even worse, as it actually passes through the northern suburbs of Kirkuk. This is no problem for the Kurds – they think of Kirkuk as part of their territory. Unfortunately, the Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs disagree, having their own native populations and their own claims on Kirkuk’s massive oil fields.

If you knew nothing about Kirkuk - and make no mistake, it’s not the type of city you should stroll around for fun – then you would immediately assume it was a crazy place if your taxi pulled in late in the evening. Instead of glass and steel skyscrapers alight in your first glimpse of the distant metropolis, there are giant, black-smoke and blue-fire flames soaring into the sky as if foreshadowing the violent conflict that Kirkuk’s oilfield has caused and will cause.

So when the shared taxi driver and our two fellow passengers wanted to stop for dinner – stop for dinner on a two and a half hour ride! - on the outskirts of Kirkuk – the outskirts of Kirkuk! - we were less than enthused. Driving down the safe roads in these taxis is dangerous enough, right?