Earth Odyssey     A L S O__T O D A Y Can this planet be saved? By Don George Mark Hertsgaard discusses his new book about the human toll of global environmental devastation [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl I By Rob Gurwitt Think Al Gore's "smart growth" plan is a no-brainer? Think again [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl, II By Susan Zakin It's owls against developers in Arizona's Oro Valley   T A B L E_T A L K Will you party like it's 1999? Discuss your upcoming New Year's Eve plans in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk   R E C E N T L Y Sex and fate in Macau By Rolf Potts Inspired by a sidewalk fortuneteller, a traveler tries his luck at an erotic cabaret in this soon-to-be-transferred Portuguese colony (01/20/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance: Part Two By Craig Nelson A mock battle culminates in a transcultural two-step -- and an unexpected gift (01/19/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance By Craig Nelson An adventurer journeys farther than expected into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices (01/17/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/15/99) Beijing's Backingham Palace By Mary Elizabeth Williams From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all (01/14/99)   Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives     Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		earthodyssey   [ E X C E R P T ] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - EARTH ODYSSEY BY MARK HERTSGAARD BROADWAY BOOKS 374 PAGES Editor's note: In the following excerpt, the author is on his way to Asia from Africa, where he has spent four months traveling among starving Dinka tribespeople in war-torn Sudan and retracing parts of Winston Churchill's 1907 journey across Kenya and up the Nile to Cairo. BY MARK HERTSGAARD | It was with ambivalence that I finally made my way to the run-down international airport outside Nairobi one evening in March 1992. My plane ticket said I was taking the midnight flight to Bangkok by way of Bombay and Delhi. But to anyone living with one foot still planted in the nineteenth century -- that is, to most of the people I had been traveling among the previous four months -- this journey would qualify as something very close to magic. I would be seated inside a long metal tube that, despite its enormous weight, would lift off the ground, climb above the clouds and travel thousands of miles, traversing in hours the same ocean that ancient Arab traders used to take weeks to cross in their wind-blown dhows. The Air India jet that would perform this feat epitomized what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the "revolutionary and constantly advancing technology ... which virtually annihilated time and distance" during the twentieth century. Indeed, the main reason time seemed to pass more slowly in Africa was that technologies like the airplane and telephone had not yet touched the daily lives of most Africans. The same could not be said for my destination of Thailand. It was a country in rapid transition, dangling somewhere between the unhurried rhythms of impoverished Africa and the hyperspeed materialism of my American homeland. I had visited Thailand two years before, in 1990, and as the Air India jet headed eastward through the night, I found myself recalling a young man I had met during that visit who personified the contradictions of Thailand's passage to modernity. At age twenty-five, Leno stood poised on the cusp of two utterly different cultures. I met him in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand with a hundred thousand inhabitants and an airport that serviced a lucrative tourist trade. Leno rented his own apartment, drove his own jeep and owned a stereo system and a TV set. He had visited Bangkok numerous times and was fluent in seven languages. Modest, capable and genuinely friendly, he was a born leader who seemed destined for a bright future, perhaps as a diplomat or an entrepreneur within Thailand's booming economy. In his heart, though, Leno remained a child of the forest where he grew up. Leno was the nearest thing I have ever seen to a perfect physical specimen -- sparkling smile, sleek torso, thighs that looked like they could run forever -- and the joy he took in outdoor activity was boundless. A member of the Karen tribe, he had spent his boyhood in a village 120 miles northwest of Bangkok. Despite its relative proximity to the capital, no one in Leno's village had ever seen an airplane or automobile; the villagers were subsistence farmers whose only contact with the outside world came during monthly visits to a nearby trading post. Life was simple, possessions few. Like his eight brothers and sisters, Leno routinely went barefoot as a child. His entire wardrobe consisted of two homemade, hand-me-down cotton smocks, one red, one blue. At night, everyone in the village used to gather around the fire while the elders told stories. Leno's favorite, he told me, was the story of the eagle and the snake. "The elders said that one day a giant snake would appear in the jungle, flash its tail and cut our village in two," he recalled. "This snake would have ten thousand legs. Then a big eagle would appear in the sky. The eagle would land on the ground, swallow people into its belly and fly away." No one knew what the story meant, not even the elders who told it. They had heard the tale from their elders, who heard it from their elders, and so on into the past for more generations than anyone could remember. Not until the late-1970s, when Leno was a teenager and the first paved road was built through his village, did the meaning finally become clear. This must be the giant snake, the villagers decided. For had not the ribbon of asphalt come flashing out of the jungle in a burst of noise and dust and cut the village in two? And the travelers and vehicles that began appearing on this road, were they not the ten thousand legs of the snake? Soon after, one villager traveled on the new road to Bangkok, where he saw an airplane land and take off at the airport. When the man described this sight back in the village, everyone agreed it must be the prophesied giant eagle, swooping out of the sky to gobble people up and fly off again. Recounting the story to me years later, Leno seemed certain his ancestors had foretold the coming of the airplane and the automobile. "I don't know how they did it, but they did it," he said earnestly. "They saw the future." Leno had no trouble maintaining this belief, even as he spoke in the next breath of boarding one of the giant eagles soon to visit Europe, a plan that terrified his peasant mother. Such incongruities are perhaps to be expected in a culture that is fast-forwarding from traditional isolation to high-tech overdrive. By 1990, the airplane, the automobile and other modern marvels had revolutionized not only Leno's village but all Thailand, opening it to the tourists, technologies, investments and ideas of the relentlessly expanding industrial world. In less than two decades, Bangkok was catapulted from an easygoing, Buddhist-flavored tropical capital to a bustling, global business center. Talk about magic! N E X T+P A G E | Automobiles, tuk-tuks and traffic