What you really want is a week to decompress, recover from an untethered year studying Chinese and a man who chose his dissertation over you. You yearn for a palm-fringed escape, somewhere that won’t require too much thought. Vietnam is within reach: a three-hour flight, and you know the food will be good. You book a week in June and wait for confirmation to arrive by scooter, in the thick of Taiwan’s plum rains.

The Quiet American has left you with romantic notions of Vietnam: Whirring ceiling fans at the Hotel Metropole, wide, tree-lined avenues and crumbling colonial villas, ochre paint peeling in lazy drifts. You look forward to real croissants (unavailable in the Chinese-speaking world), thick, cinnamoned coffee and young women swanning through the heat in split-sided ao dais.

You arrive and it’s all there, like Graham Greene promised, but that isn’t the story of your trip. You figure out pretty quickly that Vietnam wants a piece of you.

On earlier trips, to Prague and Chiang Mai, you knew what was expected of a woman alone, the stereotypes locals preferred to paint you with, out of pity or curiosity or naked self-interest. You played them to your advantage, to smooth things over, but Vietnam won’t let you off so easily. Right away, it asks more: six degrees of you as a traveler, six ways to see yourself moving through the world.

The Damsel in Distress

There’s always that pregnant moment, just off the plane, when the acrid smell of unfamiliar earth hits the back of your throat, and you wonder how you’ll manage the next leg of your trip. The uncertainty brings an adrenaline rush: Your ride might not show; your visa might be rejected; the ATMs might be out of cash. But in truth, nine times out of 10, your entry comes off without a hitch.

Hanoi is the one time it doesn’t.

You’re five minutes down the highway when you realize the taxi driver doesn’t speak a word of English, and your guidebook’s locked in the trunk. You try a little Chinese to direct him to the hotel, but he looks nonplussed, so you motion that you need the book. Soon the problem presents itself: The trunk is jammed shut and there’s no help at hand, only a cell phone to call for advice. You gaze out over flat green fields—expecting to see water buffalo and tiny women harvesting rice, but finding none-- and wonder if it’s an omen. The driver sucks the air through his teeth, shrugs, and signals that we’re reversing course.

His sidekicks back at the garage are equally flummoxed. When you pull in, they smile embarrassedly, kick off their flip-flops, climb onto the back of the car, and jump. You watch, open-mouthed, and when nothing gives, they pull out the tool box of last resort, go in like surgeons through the back seat, and deliver your pack as if by cesarean birth.

You’re relieved that the driver now understands where you’re headed, but on arrival, he wants a bigger tip than you’ve offered, for rescuing you from your unfortunate mistake. In Vietnam, you learn, there’s a price for princely conduct.

The Easy Mark

The first day, you’re approached four times around Hoan Kiem Lake and at the war museum, and the line is always the same: I’m a poor student from the country. But before that, there’s the buttering up. They sidle up, fresh-faced and speaking perfect English, to tell you how much they admire America. They want to know what you think of their city, whether you’ve been to see Ho Chi Minh, and recommend hiking with the hill tribes in Sapa.

You are polite at first, but underestimate their tenacity. They follow you for blocks, having figured there’s no husband around to intervene. You resent this, so on the fifth try, you turn to the smiling young woman in the pink baseball hat and Western logo T-shirt and ask, “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that same story today?”

She gets it, and cuts her losses with cool efficiency. Her demeanor melts into a scowl; she turns on a dime and evaporates amid a cloud of motorbikes. She’s practiced at this, you think—gauges her marks carefully. But you’ve caught her off guard with your cynicism, a first-time souvenir.

The Mystery

What you need is to get out of Hanoi, away from the death-wish traffic and the unsmiling hotel receptionist who is baffled by your frequent internet use. You decide on a two-day cruise on Ha Long Bay, hoping that a glide over jade waters will remind you why you wanted to come. Thuy is your escort to the coast. He stands at the front of the tour bus and makes bad jokes, a new graduate in a freshly pressed polo shirt and eager to please. He says things will go well for him if you compliment his service on the post-cruise evaluation.

Later, in the blue hour, he sees you sitting alone on deck with a beer and figures you need company. He recognizes you as a woman of a certain age, lines etched around your mouth like insistent parentheses. You wonder what he’d think if he knew how they got there: betrayal at the hands of a diplomat’s son and the loss of a loved one.

Thuy settles into the chair opposite and asks, unexpectedly, if you’ve heard of Arthur Conan Doyle.

“Sure—he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories,” you say.

“Do you also know he wrote a book called ... ‘The Woman Who Travels Alone’?”

He utters the last word, “alone,” in a lower register, raises one eyebrow and gives you a sidelong glance, making it clear he thinks there’s more to your story. The limestone karsts loom over windless water, and you feel not unlike an Agatha Christie heroine. You let the unsaid dangle in midair and vow to make the “woman with a past” thing work for you in future travels.

The Confidante

Here’s one thing you didn’t know before Vietnam: “Sex sells in the Halloween business.” The lithe Californian, sitting cross-legged on the aft deck, should know. She tells you she’s rediscovered herself, having opened a costume store in the wake of a failed marriage to an older man who stifled her spirit, in business and in mind. Now she teaches yoga on the side and has the freedom to travel in summer when business is slow. Soon she’ll spend her days stocking the black-cat bustiers that are the lifeblood of her trade.

She, too, is ambivalent about Vietnam. Her dad was a GI and her mom is from Saigon, so she’s got a history here, but she says the people aren’t any friendlier in the South. Her sister got flattened by a motorbike on their first day and ended up with six stitches in her scalp. The trip didn’t get much better from there.

What she really wants to know is why you struck out on your own and are you single by choice? “Unattached is the way to go,” she sighs, and you imagine she has no problem finding lovers with the yoga body and the long, dark hair, and maybe an item or two borrowed from the shop. She figures you for a quasi-academic—not a likely purchaser of bustiers—but that’s OK: Out here, what’s a lack of lingerie between two women who refuse to be boxed in?

The Comrade in Arms

Back in the city, you draw on a strawberry smoothie at a backpacker café and recover from a rain-streaked afternoon jostling through the narrow lanes. You lean back on oversized saffron and magenta pillows and wonder what percentage of the clientele is Australian. They’re everywhere, but you strike up a conversation with a group of Canadians, recently out of grad school and winding through Southeast Asia.

The girl with the mud-caked sandals tells you they’ve come from Cambodia, where the poverty depressed her, but they were in for a greater shock once they hit the train station in Hanoi. The warnings were right there in the Lonely Planet guidebook: Beware of touts offering illegal guest houses. They ignored the advice, and got dropped off at a flophouse; then the manager screamed for money when they refused to check in. “You can’t trust them,” she says. “You need to be on guard at all times.”

You think, first, you’re glad you’re not in your 20s anymore, and second, you usually bristle at this kind of thing, but in Hanoi it’s been truer than not. So you tell her you’ve had run-ins, too—those motorbike taxi guys ("Madame, where are you going, Madame?") have hounded you from day one—and agree that Vietnam is not for the travel naif.

The Love Interest

Jean-Marc is at least a breath of fresh air. He’s 10 years younger and not really your type, but still, he’s sweet and speaks some Mandarin, so you have that in common. You meet on the Ha Long boat, where he studies you through a haze of blue smoke, bats his dark eyelashes and asks, incredulously, “Why do you not have a boyfriend?”

“It’s complicated ...” you hedge, but admire him for being unintimidated and think, yes, the French do appreciate their women.

A silence swells between you as the boat heads for port. Then he says, “We should go out,” as if it’s been decided.

You arrange to meet for lunch near the cathedral, at a Western café with granite tabletops and high ceilings, a place that could have been lifted from Amelie’s Montmartre, and one that reminds him of home. The conversation is easy. You exchange your Chinese names in traditional characters and discuss the wonderful economy of the language, how it compounds words like “good” and “eat” to make “delicious.”

He tells you that Vietnam isn’t easy for a Western man, either: The staff at his budget hotel have spent the week trying to sell the delights of local women, irritated by his rebuffs.

The afternoon doesn’t take a romantic turn—you knew it wouldn’t—yet he can’t help but kiss you on both cheeks and email you a photo from the lunch three weeks later, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten.

When you open the photo back in your flat in Taipei, the night market roiling below, you see that you are smiling and unwary, and wonder if perhaps you were too hard on Vietnam. Perhaps six days in the land of a thousand come-ons restored something—a small, grudging something—in you after all.

Julia Ross is a frequent contributor to World Hum and a former Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. Her last essay for the site was Talking Trash in Taiwan.

Vi usually worked the afternoon and evening shifts at the cafe. A Catholic born and raised in the south-central coastal city of Nha Trang, she was quieter than her coworkers and more conscientious, too. Because seven-day work weeks are standard for many Vietnamese employed in the travel industry, I saw her each day. I was drawn to the way she treated people—attentively, respectfully, with gentleness.

It was the week of Tet, the Chinese New Year. Specifically, we were entering the Year of the Monkey—the same year in which, in 1968, communist forces launched their stunning offensive against South Vietnamese and American targets. The Tet Offensive was a tactical defeat for the communists, but it rattled the American public who watched it play out on television screens, contributing to the erosion of public support for the war.

Thirty-six years later, Tet brought to mind anything but that violent year. Instead, a decidedly festive atmosphere filled the city of 300,000 people. Crews stretched celebratory banners across streets. Men prepared the fireworks that would be fired from the roof of city hall. And so many motorbikes were hauling kumquat trees to set up in family homes—a Tet tradition—that the city’s traffic circles looked like gardens run amok.

I was thinking about doing something to mark the new year, as well, something that would take a little bit of courage. Throughout most of my life, I have tended to be—what is the word?—“cautious” in my approach to women. I remember the evening during my sophomore year of college when I asked Paula, a curly-haired blonde from Alabama, out on a date. It did violence to my cardiovascular system. The pounding in my chest verged on breaking a rib, and my face turned red from the strain of it all, which is why several years would pass before I tried that again. Though by now my sophomore year was very much a thing of the past, it still wasn’t my nature to ask out a near stranger.

But travel is about change. And if you throw on top of that the advent of a new year, the traveler may be thoroughly inclined to stretch himself. All this to say: One afternoon after I had been served my banana pancake, I took a deep breath, rose from my chair, and turned toward the counter behind which sat the conscientious waitress, Vi. What I was now doing I likely would have done anyway, but it helped that the two Israelis with whom I had just eaten—a man I had met earlier in the week and a woman I had been traveling with for the past month—were nudging me forward. They too thought highly of Vi. How was it, we had sometimes wondered aloud, that a country so steeped in the ravages of war could still produce such refined beauty?

With my stomach a little in knots, I reached the counter and looked on as Vi turned to face me, probably thinking all I would ask for was a plate of fresh fruit. Then I did it.

I asked if I could treat her to dinner.

Vi looked worried—not mildly worried, but worried like I had just set a grenade on the table and held the pin in my teeth. Crushed by how worried she appeared, I wished there were a grenade on the table, for instead of feeling like a moron I could have attempted chivalry, grabbing the grenade and running until it exploded. Instead, I explained what dinner was—“only eating and talking”—and assured her that “no” was a perfectly legitimate answer.

“Think about it, and if you decide you would enjoy it, just tell me,” I said. “I’ll be sitting at my table reading for the next hour.”

Then I returned to my seat and waited.

Back at the table, my two Israeli friends inquired how it went. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I think not well. I suspect she’ll never talk to me again, except maybe behind my back as she tells her friends what a frightening experience this was for her.” Feeling deflated yet relieved (at least I had done it), I hoped Vi would recover from the shock I seemed to have given her.

Almost the full hour passed, and I was just about to give up hope and move on when I looked up to see her walking toward us, full of both physical beauty and the poise of one who is well-centered. Her eyes—innocent and uneasy, wanting to trust yet aware of the risk—betrayed how she, too, was stretching herself through the very act of approaching my table. I couldn’t tell if I was more delighted or humbled, but I smiled as softly she said, “Yes.”

The next evening we met outside my hotel. She had borrowed her father’s motorbike and, according to custom, I was the one who would drive us to an elegant Italian restaurant called Cyclo. Only once had I driven a motorbike in Vietnam, and never with a passenger on the back. This is why the five minutes to Cyclo would be the most nerve-racking of the date. Since the previous night, the image of Vi being deskinned on lumpy asphalt had put the fear of God in me. All day I had been replaying the quiet determination with which, after saying yes to my request, she had made clear that the male would be responsible for the driving. And now as we stood before the bike and I expressed my concern to Vi, she calmly indicated that what people might think of her driving a man was more a concern than her possibly being shorn of her epidermis (though she didn’t word it this way). And so, with adrenaline pushing through my veins, a profound sense of responsibility dilating my pupils, and Vi’s beautiful black hair occasionally slapping my face, I drove us to Cyclo.

I cannot recall what we spoke of over dinner, but I know that we shared a small pizza and shrimp pasta, and I remember that I drank a Saigon beer while she drank fresh milk. I also remember that at five dollars this was one of the more expensive meals I would pay for in Vietnam, but that it was worth every penny.

We had only two hours together since her father had set a 9:30 p.m. curfew. With 25 minutes left, we went for a walk on the beach. I asked her which way she would like to go, and rather than choosing the route I thought prettier, she chose the one that had the best lighting. I had noticed that even at dinner she was worried that those who saw us together might think she was a prostitute, or at least a woman with little integrity. By walking under the brighter lights, we could avoid feeding people’s suspicions. When we passed several young men loitering on the sidewalk, they said something to her in Vietnamese and laughed.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“It was very dirty,” she said. “The men think very bad things about a girl with a foreign man.”

Vi told me that she had never been asked out before. I was flabbergasted, unable to comprehend how it was that thousands of backpackers had passed through her café without a single one ever doing so. She also said that the night before, when I had asked her to dinner, she wasn’t worried; she was simply confused. She did not trust her English comprehension enough to be certain what I was asking. And even if I were asking her out to dinner, she wondered, why would I want to do that?

The two hours slipped through our fingers as quickly as I knew they would. I would be lying through my teeth if I said I hadn’t gone into this night hoping for even the tiniest kiss. But I was hoping for something even more: to respect her, and to acknowledge her graciousness in saying yes to my invitation for dinner even though it would bring her unwanted attention. And so as we stood beside her motorbike, with the parking attendant just a few feet away, I knew there could be no kiss. I extended my hand instead, even afraid to allow the handshake to linger too long.

Vi offered to drop me off at my hotel, but I knew she was running late and did not wish to delay her any longer. “I will walk,” I said. “It is such a beautiful evening to walk.” And then we smiled at each other in silence, for it is difficult to speak when two people understand that in a moment all they will have left of each other is a memory. Our handshake complete, she climbed onto her motorbike and I backed away.

“Thank you for this evening,” I told her.

“You are a very good man,” she replied.

Early the next morning in a cold rain, my body boarded a bus to leave Nha Trang, but my heart decided to stay behind a while. I knew it would. Rarely does one’s entire being board the bus, train or other vessel that will take him from the person or place he has grown fond of. And so I felt pain as I sat in my seat, watching the palms and rice fields pass by in a blur as the bus carried me farther and farther from Nha Trang. But it was a worthwhile pain, even a cherished pain, the accepted cost of my own little Tet offensive.

Joel Carillet, a Tennessee-based writer and photographer, is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia.

Photo by Joel Carillet. 

The more I travel, or maybe it’s just the longer I live, the more I find elusive the pleasure of novelty, the exhilaration of discovery. I most memorably experienced these feelings on a sunny but cool May morning in 1983, when I stepped off the train from Madrid, where I had been studying during my senior year of college, and walked out into Paris to spend a week. I carried with me little more than postcard notions of the city, but it did not disappoint, bringing to mind, of course, every sort of grandiloquent truism: historic grandeur, aesthetic splendor, romance and haute cuisine. Since then, more than two decades and some 60 countries later, I’ve often thought back on those days and recalled Rimbaud’s words about life, once, “long ago,” being a “feast” at which “all hearts were open,” “all the wines were flowing,” and despaired of ever again feeling so intoxicated with a new place, of tasting anew such bittersweet, yet revivifying, wine.

But recently in Lyon, riding on the open upper deck of a Grand Tour bus, I felt tipsy with discovery once more. Evening’s blue pallor was washing over shiny Citroens and Renaults that scooted around beneath us like giant bejeweled beetles. My bus, amid them, skirted place Bellecour, an expanse of raked beige pebbles dominated by an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and glided down the smoothly paved streets of the Presqu’île (or “Peninsula,” as the commercial center is known) past the glittering gilt shop windows of Praho and Kenzo, Milano and JB Martin. We soon mounted the bridge to Vieux (Old) Lyon, crossing over the river Saône, near where the embankment curved west beneath the labyrinthine hilltop neighborhood of Croix Rousse, the longtime abode of silk weavers.

Above, by the twin belfries of a soaring white basilica atop Fourvière promontory, stood a floodlit golden statue of the Virgin Mary. My audio-tape guide told me that Roman invaders had initiated Lyon’s history up there, founding the military colony of Lugdunum after capturing, in 43 B.C., this part of France in the Gallic wars. But Vieux Lyon, with its mélange of burnt sienna and peach façades, recalls Florence—apt, since Lyon flourished during the Renaissance, following an influx of Italian bankers. It came as no surprise when the tape informed me that, in 1998, UNESCO had designated the arrondissements on both banks of the Saône a World Heritage site—the largest urban environs on Earth so designated, in fact.

An hour and a half later, after having wound up Fourvière’s switchbacks, passed by the basilica (the Notre Dame de Fourvière) and France’s oldest Roman theater, and rolled down to cross a bridge over Lyon’s second river, the Rhône, we pulled back into place Bellecour. I jumped off into the dreamy light, and joined the promenade of elegantly dressed Lyonnais heading toward the outdoor cafés near the Hôtel de Ville.

Though Lyon, with more than 400,000 people, is France’s third-largest city, it has never counted among its most popular tourist destinations. Partly this stems from its reputation as home to a plethora of polluting riverside factories. But also a certain Lyonnais reclusiveness—or bourgeois aloofness, many French would say—has been to blame. Wealthy from its banking, viticulture, printing and silk industries, Lyon, until the 1990s, preferred to repose in relative solitude, doing little to attract tourists.

“Lyon always relied on word-of-mouth advertising,” Blandine Thenet, the press attaché for the municipal Office of Tourism and Congresses, told me the day after my arrival. But, she explained, that changed in the 1990s, with the launching of a campaign to attract visitors, especially business tourists, and the enactment of Plan Rhône and Plan Bleu, development projects that aimed to revive the city’s rives gauches and rives droites, which had suffered damage from now-defunct factories. They succeeded. Tourism, mostly French, has been growing, and (for example) from 2004 to 2005, increased by 7 to 8 percent, bringing in revenues of a billion euros. Among the French, at least, for the first time, Lyon has become branché (cool) or, more colloquially, “in,” to use the English slang they often employ.

What surprised me most, however, was the relative absence of tourists at a time when Paris is full of them. Whatever the stats may be, I found the Lyonnais as unjaded, even solicitous, as the inhabitants of any small town. The driver of my tour bus, a pencil-thin woman in her 50s who looked like a Gallic Pippi Longstocking, in bright red lipstick and candy-stripe stockings, urged me not to buy my day-long tour ticket at such a late hour, and so lose money; my taxi driver spontaneously offered me a free map; and, when I stepped out of the metro holding that map, an old man stopped and asked if he could help me find anything. I have always considered the French reputation for coldness undeserved, but this was all more than I expected.

Wandering through the alleys of the Presqu’île one day, I pored over, with some consternation, the window menus of the bouchons: “fowl poached inside a bladder,” “silk-weaver’s brains,” “death’s fingers” and “tripe gratin.” I hardly knew where to start, what I should start with, or, frankly, whether I wanted to start. But I persevered. Blandine had told me that the bouchons were not just restaurants, but “a Lyonnais way of life.”

I settled on the family-owned Le Garet, a bouchon dating from 1918 that is hidden on a side street of the same name near the opera house. I opened the door on a scene from another time, presided over, of all things, by a reproduction of “The Ricotta Eaters” hanging crookedly between an array of old photos and ancient clocks. In the wainscoted smoky dining hall, patrons sat stuffing themselves, their napkins tucked into their collars, their jaws chomping away. They spoke throaty French through full mouths as they decanted pots (crude greenish demi-bottles) of Beaujolais and Côtes du Rhône into stout glasses, while I sensed an aroma of fricasseeing pork mixed with the bouquet of fresh-cut roses decorating the bar. The spiky-haired hostess, whose orange halter rode up to reveal love handles, seated me at the table d’hôte and urged me, in a squeaky falsetto, to try the quenelle. ("Comment?") She handed me a menu, and my eyes lit on the first line: “A woman who farts is not dead.” Another Lyonnais dictum followed: “At work we do what we must/In bed we do what we can/But at the table we really try.”

Thus began the first of my many meals at Le Garet, under the direction of its flamboyant, if rumpled, owners and hosts, Agniès and Emmaneul Ferra (a renowned chef, it turned out), who ceaselessly circulated among the checker-clothed tables, taking orders and chatting with their clientèle. This time, I started with a simple salade de marché lyonnais (lettuce, egg whites, bacon, and hot croutons) and quenelle de brochet à la lyonnaise, which turned out to be a fluffy pike dumpling not really to my liking. On following days, rather than deal with the bizarre dish names, I just ordered the menu Gnafron—Gnafron being the worldly-wise wino character from Lyon’s Guignol (puppet theater). Every meal opened with a basket of warm pain campagnard (country bread), crusty and rich, and a pot of red Côtes du Rhône.

To the menu Gnafron. I first dug into a pile of cold peas laced with baby onions and doused in vinegar. A bounty of steamed potatoes arrived next. I ate and ate, unable to stop.

“Doucement!” cautioned Emmanuel.

He finally brought me the pièce de résistance—andouillette vin blanc, moutarde—a pair of truncated pig intestines stuffed with charcuterie and drenched in tart wine sauce. I set to work on it, truly unable to resist, not knowing whether I would down the meal and live to return, or expire then and there, fork in hand.

Unable to finish, I sat back in my seat. Emmanuel slipped a fromage blanc crème in front of me. I spooned it in and raised my head. Emmanuel was still standing over me, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Dessert, monsieur?”

“I thought that was dessert.”

“You thought wrong, monsieur. This is not work or the bed. At the table we must make an effort.” He named three or four sweet dishes, but I asked to be excused with a few slivers of vanilla ice cream. Somewhat disappointed in me, he relented.

On one of my last days in Lyon, after lunch in Le Garet, I stopped by Kiosque Bellecour, a café on place Bellecour. For the first time during my stay, it felt like spring. The sun was shining, bright but not hot, and the snow-covered Alps glistened against the azure on the eastern horizon. 

I ordered a glass of Beaujolais from the waitress, a young student with creamy skin and plucked eyebrows, and opened the slim volume of Rimbaud’s poetry I had brought along.“Le Soleil, le foyer de tendresse et de vie/Verse l’amour brûlant à la terre ravie.” (The sun, source of tenderness and life/Pours burning love over the delighted earth.) Rimbaud may have never visited Lyon, but in a city of mostly gray skies and cool and rain, his words fit the moment.

My waitress brought me the Beaujolais and smiled as she set it before me. After a week in Lyon, my life again felt like a feast, and the wine, once more, was flowing.

Jeffrey Tayler is the Moscow correspondent for The Atlantic and a frequent contributor to World Hum. His last story was Black Gold and the Golden Rule. His book Facing the Congo made our list of the top travel books of all time.

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The 7-foot dolls had taken their papier-mâché heads off and were milling around behind the stadium, smoking cigarettes and chatting up the dancing girls from the Ministry of Culture.

You could hardly blame them—the enormous heads were hot and airless, and the guys inside had to peer out from two little eyeholes cut into the mouth. Besides, the dancing girls were cute and had jasmine flowers in their hair, and they weren’t due in the stadium for another 15 minutes, to do their part—along with more than 5,000 other costumed performers—for a massive ceremony to usher in “Visit Myanmar Year.”

It was November 18, 1996, and at 5:30 that morning, Myanmar’s military junta had rounded up the few foreign journalists in town and bussed us to a stadium just outside Rangoon, for what they promised would be the media event of the year. Now, two hours later, most of us had managed to sneak out of our assigned seats and were wandering around on the field, trying to figure out what was going on. I stumbled into a makeshift staging area, where I found the gigantic papier-mâché dolls. One of them offered me a Marlboro.

“What are you, exactly?” I asked him. His head looked ridiculously tiny, poking out of the huge wire-and-cardboard body that hung on his shoulders with a pair of straps. His little white-gloved hands dangled comically at the end of enormous arms, and his costume was a lurid cascade of gold ruffles. On the ground beside him sat his huge head. It was difficult to look at him for very long.

“We’re pageboys,” he told me, as a uniformed marching band filed past. “Back in the time of kings, you know, pageboys would serve the king. Carry messages. Serve tea.”

The dancing girls had danced away to a safe distance, but a crowd of small boys—also dressed up as pageboys but normal-sized—had moved in to see what was going on. There were hundreds of them, all dressed in identical crimson-and-gold costumes, all wearing black polyester wigs tied in two pigtails, all made up disturbingly in bright red lipstick, pink eye shadow and yellow face powder. They were difficult to look at, too.

A nervous-looking woman noticed me, then barked something at the boys and began clapping. The boys began to leap rhythmically up and down, pointing with their index fingers in various directions and grinning like miniature maniacs.

“That’s the pageboy dance,” explained the big doll. “The pageboys would walk ahead of the king and tell people where to go. ‘Go this way! Go that way!’” He stuck his fingers in the air and wagged them like the boys were doing, to show me what he meant. The woman barked again, and the pageboys stopped jumping.

“Impressive,” I said. “How many of them are there?” He looked around at the sea of faces that surrounded us and took a drag on his cigarette.

“About five hundred,” he said, exhaling a long stream of smoke.

Out in the stadium, meanwhile, the ceremony was getting ready to start. From a huge gate at one corner, a marching band burst onto the field playing the national anthem, and from another gate, a battalion of uniformed flag-bearers entered. As they marched around the field in perfect precision, an announcement burst out of the loudspeakers and everyone looked up into the sky. Far above us, a team of parachutists was descending, unfurling a gigantic “Visit Myanmar” banner as they fell. At the moment they hit the ground, the entire audience on the far side of the stadium stood up holding colored cards that spelled out in huge letters, “Enjoy Your Stay in Myanmar.”

Next to me, a Japanese journalist was staring wide-eyed at the spectacle, shaking his head as he searched for the right word. “It’s so ... so ... North Korean,” he said, finally.

The rest of the event came off with, as you’d expect, tight military precision. As a helicopter circled lazily above the stadium and the TV Myanmar film crews beamed footage back for the live broadcast, the Minister for Tourism extolled the joys and natural beauty of the country, adding that the tourism campaign should convince any doubters about “our commitment to open our doors to the world.”

Then there were floats made up as white, winged elephants; flying wedges of pom-pom girls; and troupes of dancing girls who swayed vaguely back and forth to Burmese pop tunes. And, of course, the 10 giant pageboy dolls I’d seen earlier that morning came out and lumbered their way around the stadium, waving blindly at the audience and trying not to knock each other down.

But as the ceremony wore on, one of the photographers noticed something odd. Almost the entire audience seemed to be divided into groups of women dressed in the same bright distinctive colors. Not only that: Each section would periodically empty out and suddenly reappear on the stadium field—as dancers.

“Too much!” the photographer said, when it dawned on us what was happening. “They’re performing for themselves!”

It was true—and it explained the listless, vacant quality of the applause; they’d all seen everything before, in rehearsal. And as we scanned the viewing stands, with their bored enclaves of military officials, diplomats, travel agents and hotel managers, we realized that, for the Grand Opening of Visit Myanmar Year, there were only about 30 actual tourists—bussed in unknowingly, we found out later, as part of a group that happened to be in Rangoon that day.

After the closing song ("We sing of our modern developed country, and we welcome all visitors to this wondrous golden land"), I joined the mass exodus, got a useless quote from the Minister for Tourism ("We had a very good opening to Visit Myanmar Year!") and bumped into Sue Reitz, the smart, sardonic manager of the Strand Hotel.

“Enjoy your stay in Myanmar, Sue,” I urged her, as we walked out into the parking lot.

“Thank you, Stephen, I will,” she replied, with a thin smile. “But then—we don’t really have much choice in the matter, do we?”

Stephen Brookes is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a classical music critic for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, Asia Times, Insight, The Far Eastern Economic Review and Architectural Digest.

Photos by Stephen Brookes.

Colin Kisembo—dairy farmer, poet—wanted to read me a story. He rifled through a weathered accordion file, pulling out two legal pads and reams of wrinkled looseleaf covered with his fastidious handwriting. Outside, the wind gusted, branches thrashing against the windowpane. Colin adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat. He prefaced his story with apologies and asides—nervous, he admitted, what a “real” writer might think of it. His eyes scurried across the page, he shifted in his seat. After a few false starts, he grew frustrated and changed his mind. The story was too much of a work-in-progress, he explained, and he wanted to read me a poem instead.

We were on Colin’s farm in western Uganda, 20 miles from Fort Portal, a languid colonial town near the Rwenzori Mountains. I’d met Colin a few days earlier, squished together in the back row of the Horizon bus from Kampala. We’d struck up a conversation on the outskirts of town, as I’d fiddled with my iPod and waited out the bumpy ride. Curious eyes followed my thumb as it whirled in circles, heads poking over seats and craning into the aisle, when the man by the window—lean, bookish, scratching at his wiry moustache—leaned toward me and cleared his throat. He asked about the storage capacity, and we soon got into a heated discussion about file-sharing and intellectual copyright law. This was not, I suspected, your typical conversation on the Horizon bus from Kampala.

When we arrived in Fort Portal, he ushered me through the crush of cab drivers and helped me to my hotel. Along the way he professed his admiration for Truman Capote. He’d read “In Cold Blood” and had heard stories of the author’s legendary Black and White Ball. Soon he shyly admitted that he was something of a writer himself. We shook hands and parted warmly and made plans to meet later in the week.

Fort Portal slumbers in one of Uganda’s countless backwaters. Once a busy hub for colonial administrators in the West, it now seems content to shuffle along, rubbing its eyes and looking up now and then to wonder what time the British left. It’s a lovely place, with acres of tea plantations sitting in neat parcels on the surrounding hills, and the blue-gray ridges of the Rwenzoris rising on the horizon. I had no plans for my stay—I was only passing through—and was happy to spend a few days strolling down dirt roads and waving to naked kids scooting between the banana plants. Meeting Colin gave me an excuse to stick around, and a few days after our bus ride, he was waiting for me on the steps of the public library.

Colin carried copies of the day’s papers folded under his arm and a canvas shopping bag full of muffins and mango juice. We wedged ourselves onto a motorbike and puttered down the street, soon finding ourselves on a dirt road stitched through the hills. Tea plantations and coffee farms sandwiched the road, goats chewed on grass. We passed a dairy farm and Colin gestured to the plump, handsome cows flicking their tails on the hillside.

“This is, I think, the best dairy farm in the district,” he said, his voice warming with appreciation. “They have very nice cows—pure Friesian. A very nice breed, from Europe.”

A half-hour later we pulled up to his farm. Colin’s cows—lean, scruffy, not-at-all Friesian—buried their faces in a trough. It was a modest bungalow surrounded by bright, flowering plants; by western Ugandan standards, I knew the house suggested some small measure of wealth. Inside we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, picking at the muffins, when Colin offered to read me his poem.

“Let me try to pick the least worst,” he said, again adjusting his glasses, which slid back down the bridge of his nose. Finally he leaned forward, cleared his throat and began to read.

“Deception,” he said.

I saw a spider
perched high up on the ceiling in its web.
It looked down
and saw
flies, on a clear blue surface,
and it said to itself,
“I will let myself down on my thin silky thread
and have a meal.”
And it did.
And it sunk!
For the flies were floating dead
on the surface of water in a blue basin.

Colin continued to the end, sat back, awkward, smiling, lapping up my praise. Gathering confidence, he read another, and then two more. On the table were dozens of poems written in his small, neat hand. He explained he was also working on a handful of stories—even a play—and it dawned on me that Colin Kisembo was, without question, the most prolific writer I knew. But when we talked about publishing his work, he wagged his hands with disapproval. Though a friend in Kampala helped to publish a literary journal, and Colin often thought about submitting his own poems, he still hadn’t worked up the nerve.

“I am afraid,” he said. “What if I am rejected?”

Rejection, I offered, is part of the writing process. In all my years of writing, rejection had been one of the few constants. And while you never get used to those dismal letters and emails—or the attendant feelings of self-doubt—you learn to negotiate them as part of the landscape.

“It will be an act of great courage,” he said, eager to change the subject.

He opened the mango juice and passed a muffin to me and asked about my travels. We talked about my long odyssey since leaving home almost two years ago. He smiled and sighed and shook his head as I described Barcelona and Beirut, London and Damascus. Then he told me about his own journey five years ago, when he quit his job as a lawyer in Kampala to travel through Africa. He went south, through Rwanda and Tanzania, making it as far as Malawi. Soon he was low on money. He grew lonely.

“It is all the same, wherever you go,” he said.

Returning to Uganda, he came west to look after his father’s farm. Life here was hard. Money was scarce; often, he had to ask his sister and an elder brother for help. The neighbors were guarded, suspicious.

“They see this house, and they think we must have so much money,” he said. Even years later, he had few people he could trust. He was bothered to see friends and neighbors hobbled by bitterness and petty grudges.

“We have a saying: nohandika ha maiise,” he said, tapping each syllable on the tabletop. “It means ‘like writing on water.’” He laughed at this, amused and resigned. “You cannot change how people are.”

Outside he showed me around the farm. It was a small plot of land; in just a few minutes we’d crossed through the brown stalks of maize, pausing to stop in the shade of a flowering tree. It was a sunny afternoon, and the heat rose from the dry grass crunching beneath our feet.

“I live alone, and it makes me sad and lonely sometimes,” Colin said, shaking his head. There weren’t many guests, and when he alluded to a few fleeting romances through the years, his voice trailed off. We paused beside a small clearing paved over with concrete, where he gestured to three graves lying side by side. The names of his mother and his father and his father’s father were chiseled into gray tombstones. He stopped briefly and then stepped across the lawn, his strides short and brisk, as if the balm for his loss might be waiting somewhere across the yard. We came to his cows, thin and skittish, nuzzling against each other in the shade. He took a few light-hearted stabs at their meagerness.

“I’m sure you’re used to udders that sweep the floor when the cows walk,” he suggested, though I had to admit that, as a New Yorker, I was not really used to udders at all. He patted a few of the cows with tenderness.

“I watch them feed, I just ...” His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew misty. He frowned. “I feel so ... I don’t know what it is,” he said, resting a hand on his chest. We watched the cows rubbing flanks by the trough, nudging each other out of the way, then scampering off to relieve themselves against a shed. Colin smiled, sighed, shook his head. And then again, turning, leaning forward, he marched back toward the house.

Inside, Colin fidgeted with the antenna on his radio. Sitting at the table each night, with the cows huddled together in their pen and the light from the paraffin lamp casting shadows on the walls, he tunes in to the BBC to hear the news from abroad. Sometimes he opens a Bible, scanning well-remembered verses for hope and consolation. Christianity, like writing, had offered a kind of companionship for him, and he was curious about my own beliefs. He asked about my soul, about salvation and the afterlife. In the story he’d begun to read to me earlier, the main character, Lazaro, was inspired by the biblical Lazarus. Did I believe my own soul would play Lazarus and rise from the grave? Scientists, he pointed out, had found that the body loses 21 grams immediately after death. Could those 21 grams be the weight of one soul? Could any of us be saved?

He adjusted his glasses and looked across the room, where the half-filled cupboards and dusty bookshelves suggested a life still waiting for fulfillment. It was late in the day, and soon we’d have to head back into town. Colin stared out the window. When the silence became unbearable, he leaned forward and folded his hands on the table.

“You have traveled around the world,” he said. “Is there any purpose to this? Or are we just trudging through life, waiting for time to pass?”

The wind shook the banana plants outside, rustling the leaves.

I wasn’t sure what to say, and soon Colin, slightly embarrassed, wagged his hands and got up from the table. We waited on the porch, insects humming over the grass, sunlight falling through the trees. Then an engine puttered up the walkway.

On the back of the motorbike, with the sun dipping toward the horizon, everything was drenched, golden. The wind roared in our ears and we shouted to make ourselves heard over the noise. It was a beautiful ride. I held tightly to Colin’s waist, afraid for every bump and jolt in the road, and thought about our conversation. Nohandika ha maiise. For Colin, it was a simple life lesson on human stubbornness, on the impossibility of changing our ways. But life itself is like writing on water, each of us scribbling our stories across a tide that will bear no trace of our passing. Maybe there’s no purpose to any of this, maybe the collected heartbreaks, rejections and sorrows are all we get. But we’re still here, passing the time as best we can, and taking comfort in the people we find to share the ride.

Christopher Vourlias’s last story for World Hum was The Gift of the Nile.

Photo by Christopher Vourlias.

Related on World Hum:
* Where in the World Are You, Chris Vourlias?

Stretching my legs after a cramped bus ride from M’bour, Senegal, I waited for the porter to throw my backpack down from the roof. I had a bus transfer in the small village of Samba Dia on my way to the Sine Saloum Delta. I was in search of ripe mangoes and lush mangroves, or things that would help me forget how far I was from my family back home in Wisconsin.

I looked around the village bus depot, a dusty field lined with boutiques and filled with groups of juice sellers waiting for the next bus arrival. I strolled up and down aisles of vendors who were squatting next to their goods. Faded second-hand T-shirts folded in piles three feet high. Banana bunches reaching from the vendors’ mats like hands with dozens of edible yellow fingers. Multicolored plastic buckets and tea kettles. Sticky pyramids of red and green mangoes, their leaking nectar glistening in the afternoon sun.

Finally, I found what I was looking for: an old woman sitting on an overturned wooden crate selling peanuts. She had about 40 plastic bags, each holding handfuls of either plain or sugarcoated nuts. Her head was wrapped in fluorescent pink fabric, folded like a crown. Grey hair peeked out at her temples. She was chewing on a neem branch, a favorite toothbrush of many rural Senegalese. When we started to talk, she did not take it out but rather pushed it to the corner of her mouth, where it bounced with her every word.

I greeted her in Wolof, eager to practice. Three days of navigating from one small town to the next had improved my language skills more than three months of classroom lessons. 

I asked about her family, asked if she felt at peace, and then we both praised God. Eventually, I got around to asking her how much the peanuts cost.

My Wolof was not native enough to avoid getting quoted the toubab, or foreigner, price. I decided to bargain with her Senegalese-style: taking my time with friendly small talk.

She asked my Senegalese name. 

“Kuumba N’dour,” I replied. By sharing my adopted last name, I was revealing that I belonged to the Sereer, one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Senegal. I knew that if she were also Sereer, I would have no problem negotiating. The Senegalese believe in solidarity. 

“What a terrible name,” she said with a straight face. “You must be very stupid.”

Without flinching, I asked her name. 

“N’daiye Diatta.”

Her last name told me that she was Joola, another of the tribes. In fact, the Joola are considered cousins of the Sereer. 

I looked her straight in the eye. “Joola?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “You are selfish and love to eat rice, you pig. Begg nga cebb.”

The two vendors on either side of her had been listening with disinterest. At that moment, though, they burst out laughing, repeating what I had said. 

”Kuumba N’dour. Begg na cebb.” One of the women slapped her knee as she laughed. 

Other vendors on the periphery strolled over to check out the commotion. As I tried to reassure myself that I’d said the right word for pig, my hands grew clammy, and I became aware of the circle of strangers closing in around me. 

The peanut vendor had not smiled once. She still looked stone cold, the neem stick dangling out of the corner of her mouth.

“Begg na cebb?” she asked. “I like rice? I don’t think so. You,” she said, pointing at me. “You are my slave and I know you spend all day eating peanuts.” At this point, the growing crowd around me erupted in laughter. The woman smiled, and with relief, I started laughing, too.

As members of cousin ethnic groups, the Joola and Seerer, we were “joking cousins.” This means that whenever we meet, as a sign of friendliness, we insult each other without hesitation. Every ethnic group in Senegal has at least one or two joking cousin groups, so meeting one is rare enough to be a delight but common enough that it is protocol. 

Once everyone surrounding us settled down, she sold me the peanuts for half the original asking price.

“Kuumba N’dour,” she said. “Come eat dinner with my family tonight.”

I thanked her and said I would the next time. As I settled into my bus seat and waved goodbye, I felt like I was not so far from family after all. 

Katie Krueger writes from Madison, Wisconsin, and is the author of the book “Give with Gratitude: Lessons in Service.” More of her writing can be found at KatieKrueger.com.

Photo by Katie Krueger. 

Creeping through traffic in the heart of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest slum, our van hesitated beside piles of trash cooking in the sun. I watched a man pick through it. The air was thick with the smells of exhaust and garbage.

As we inched forward, our guide Alfredo told us about the last police operation against the drug gang here a week earlier. There was a shoot-out. Someone threw a grenade. “About six policemen came,” he said, with a slight Brazilian accent, over the microphone in the van, “and one of them ended up being killed.” The tour he was leading that day didn’t visit Rocinha. “Occasionally, we cannot come here,” he added. “It’s too dangerous.”

But today, apparently, was safe enough. I was there, in the van, as a tourist. I had signed up to take a tour of two of Rio’s favelas, part of the controversial travel phenomenon known as slum tourism.

About 20 percent of Rio’s population lives in favelas, and there are about 750 of these slums in this city of six million people. Each one is a distinct community where the overwhelming majority of residents are trying to live their lives: working, going to school, starting families. The favelas are virtually off-limits for all but those who live there or have business there—in some cases, the drug gang in charge decides who enters, and in others, it’s just not safe to wander around—but if you want to visit, you can sign up with one of Rio’s half-a-dozen or so favela tourism companies, which operate with the permission of the communities they visit. The one I used, Favela Tour, charged $39.

In the weeks before, I had talked to several friends, both Brazilian and not, about favela tourism. Most were uneasy with the idea. How excited can one be about a tour that essentially shows relatively wealthy people where poorer people live? I felt uneasy, too, but I sympathized with both sides of the debate. On one hand, it seemed like the worst kind of voyeurism. On the other, I thought the tour might offer some insight into a part of Brazilian society I knew little about. So, with mixed feelings, I signed up.

On a gray morning, Alfredo met me in the lobby of my hotel in Copacabana. I hopped in the van, joining a driver and three couples: one from the U.K., one from Portugal, a third from Italy.

“I have great news for you,” Alfredo said as we motored off. “There are no robberies in favelas. Not at all. Any kind of trouble-making is avoided by the drug dealers.”

As our van bounced down the road towards Rocinha, he continued: “Who is in charge of the security? Well, here in the city we have the police in charge, and the government is pretty much present. In favelas it’s different. Although we see the police presence there, who is really in charge are the drug dealers. They’re the ones controlling the community, although in a way, things are starting to change.”

More on Slum Tourism Also from Rob Verger: * Slideshow: Inside Slum Tourism * Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas: Three Great Films

Alfredo has been leading favela trips for about eight years. The company, Favela Tour, was founded by Brazilian Marcelo Armstrong, who later told me he got the idea while working for Club Med in Senegal, when he began taking guests beyond the resort’s boundaries to hang out with locals.

Slum tourism isn’t new. In the 19th century, touring a New York City slum known as the Five Points (the setting for the movie “Gangs of New York") was popular. Tyler Anbinder writes in his book, “Five Points”: “Touring Five Points became an international attraction, drawing such notables as Charles Dickens, a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln. ... Indeed, the American concept of ‘slumming’ was probably invented there.” Whether or not slum tourism began there, it has taken off around the world in recent years, from Chicago to India to Kenya. In 1992, it arrived in Rio. By all accounts, it has been growing there ever since.

Approaching Rocinha, we climbed the curving streets at the settlement’s edge, then pulled over to take a look at the view of beachfront Rio. There, under cloudy skies, orderly and linear hotels and apartment buildings clustered in the flatlands near the still water of the harbor, and behind them rose dark green, rounded hills.

We bumped up the winding paved roads, past homes packed together in a Picasso-like jumble of angles and lines, until we stopped at an apartment building at the hill’s crest. Hopping out, we climbed a flight of stairs and emerged on a flat rooftop to take in the scene. About 56,000 people live in Rocinha—although that number might be much higher. It’s a city within a city, spilling down and following the contours of the hillsides over more than half a square mile. Our view was striking: red bricks and concrete houses, sheet-metal roofs, blue water-storage tanks, clusters of trees, the steep gray and brown rain-soaked rocks of the mountainside.

Another tour group from the same company joined us on the rooftop, and there we all were, like tourists anywhere. Click. Click. Click. It felt familiar: looking out over a vista, taking pictures. Except, of course, we were photographing a slum. Alfredo spoke over the sound of car engines, horns beeping and a rooster’s crow, telling us that children flying kites used to be a common sight in the favelas. It was “a way to communicate with drug dealers,” he said. “Now they don’t need to rely on kites anymore, because they have cell phones, radios and firecrackers. Firecrackers are used as the first warning signal. People hear the noise, they know something’s going on. Then they use radios or cell phones so they are ready for any kind of situation.”

It’s hard to exaggerate the level of violence found in Rio, much of which is focused in and around the favelas. The Economist has reported that over a recent six-year period, Rio averaged one murder every three and a half hours. And according to the 2005 documentary Favela Rising, the favelas have been statistically more dangerous for minors than Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Both the police and the drug gangs—essentially rival armies with a fragile balance of power—are known for brutal tactics.

Back in the van, we motored on to another favela, Vila Canoas, which was quiet and tiny compared to Rocinha. We stopped at a community school largely financed by the tour company and administered by an N.G.O. in the favela. The school was perched on the hillside and was partially open to the tropical air. In a computer lab, a few boys played video games; in two classrooms, children were walking around, or studying, or working on crafts. We were led up to a rooftop store, where we were encouraged to buy crafts to support the school—magnets in the shape of a Brazilian flag, or the butt of a bikini-clad woman—and as we left, another tour filtered into the school. I bought a flag magnet, then walked downstairs and waited for the rest of the group. Beside me a group of boys and their teacher played ping-pong, and nearby three girls laughed and played jump rope.

I had felt slightly uncomfortable all morning, but in the school that feeling deepened, and for the moment, I wanted out. I was happy that the tour company supported the school, and it seemed like a positive place. But how would it feel to be a child attending that school, watching groups of tourists filtering through, buying souvenirs? I don’t know. All I know is that I felt uncomfortable, and perhaps it was because I’m a teacher, and I think that something singular happens in a classroom, and tourists shouldn’t be a part of it.

We left the school and walked down intimate alleys between buildings and shops and under sagging power lines. We came across two seesaws, and beside them, on a wall, a mosaic of a butterfly created by shards of multicolored tiles. This stop was intended to be, I think, a reminder that all is not terrible in the favelas, and our guide’s tone all day had been realism tinged with optimism. Earlier, Alfredo had said, “In the favelas we’re going to visit, they have seen thousands of tourists. They like the opportunity to have you there so they can show you that they don’t live in miserable, dangerous conditions. They have problems. They are poor, but they are not miserable. Also your presence changes the stereotype of people that usually go to favelas to buy drugs, so in other words, you are welcome.” Whether you believe that or not, all the tour can show is a brief, selective glimpse into places that are feared and romanticized and otherwise off-limits.

It’s easy to feel repelled by the idea of favela tourism. Not long ago I talked to a Brazilian friend from Rio who used to work with a social project in Rocinha, and she told me she thought the tours were offensive. A large part of me agrees. I wish the tour companies weren’t for-profit operations. (Favela Tour donates to the school we visited out of the profits it earns.) I think they should use local guides, and be conducted on foot as much as possible. But if I could snap my fingers and make favela tourism disappear, would I? No. And as uncomfortable as I was at times on the tour—an unease that stemmed not from what I was seeing but from the manner in which I was seeing it—do I regret going? No. I believe that it’s better to see more of the world than less of it. I don’t mean that in a voyeuristic sense. I mean that if these tours, which are superficial and brief, allow some visitors to better appreciate Brazil’s baffling complexity and inequality just a tiny bit better, so be it.

In the taxi back to my hotel, I looked out the window as we cruised past Leblon, past Ipanema, past bright blue tube-shaped waves crashing on the beaches. In Copacabana, I paid and got out. I walked alongside three school children talking and laughing their way down the sidewalk. Intricate patterns of black and white tiles lined the way. I walked past three guys carrying surfboards, headed towards the beach. I was a foreigner in Brazil, but I felt more at home the closer I got to the hotel. It had become a beautiful day in Rio.

I had thought that my time in the favelas was over, but it wasn’t. The next day I tagged along with some American law students who were in Brazil as part of a class studying race and affirmative action. They had arranged to spend the day visiting and learning about a group called AfroReggae, an N.G.O. and band based in the favelas. Locals involved in the group agree to forsake drugs and alcohol to focus instead on learning music, dance and celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture. AfroReggae works, as its mission statement reads, towards “social inclusion and social justice.” The project was the subject of the documentary “Favela Rising.”

We visited a favela called Vigário Geral, where AfroReggae was born, and a place with a long history of violence.

At the entrance stood a few men, one with what looked like a submachine gun. They removed a board filled with nails from our path and covered a gap in the road to allow the van to pass. We eased by a few more young men with walkie-talkies and handguns.

Beyond, the streets were nearly empty. Quiet, sunlit, hot. We ambled down the streets, and I heard the staccato pop, pop, pop of firecrackers in the distance. I asked our guide from AfroReggae if that meant trouble.

“Sometimes they just light them for fun,” she said.

Later, we visited a building where a dozen teenage girls were practicing the drums. We sat on a concrete stage as they drummed, danced, sang—it was one of the most amazing performances I have seen. The music bounced off the walls and tile floor, filling the concrete room, while on the tracks just outside the window a train silently cruised by.

When it was over, the drummers invited us to join them. Our guide had stepped out, so none of us could communicate precisely. But it didn’t matter. Two girls placed a strap around my neck, which they hooked onto a large cylindrical wooden drum that hung to below my knees. One of the girls showed me how to bang a simple three-part beat, and I tried to mimic her: Bam bah bam. Bam bah bam. Bam bah bam. Soon, we were all playing together: the American students and me doing the best we could, the girls and their instructor leading.

We played three songs that way, and when we finished, we stepped outside into the sunlight. I felt elated. And I know why. Travel is best when you interact with others. When you learn from those you’re visiting. When you stand beside someone in her home, even if that home is a violent one, and you put away your camera, and you forget about having any sort of agenda, and you realize you are essentially ignorant, and the world opens a little.

A moment later a guy on a bicycle glided by, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the bright silver tip of the gun hanging from a strap around his neck. Then he disappeared behind a building.

Rob Verger is a graduate student at Columbia University, where he teaches first-year composition. His travel writing has appeared in the Boston Globe. His last dispatch for World Hum was The Dogs of Pohnpei.

Photos by Rob Verger.

Every Friday, on the way home from work, I would watch the procession of black hats as they passed the taquerías on Avenida Presidente Masaryk. With their grade-school-aged sons in tow, the bearded men hurried through the blue-gray Mexico City afternoon, often cutting across traffic in an effort to arrive at synagogue before sundown. Judaism is a religion that defines men in terms of their fathers (for ceremonial purposes, my Hebrew name is Yonatan ben Avram Gershom: Jonathan, son of Avram Gershom), and I found it difficult to be among other Jews without thinking about my dad.

My father was a traveling salesman based in Philadelphia, and had for years been committed to shepherding me into a career more prestigious than his own. Perhaps law, perhaps finance. Instead, I had become a fledgling travel writer. After college, I had run off to Mexico, far from the man whose high expectations had left me feeling as though I didn’t have a say in my own future.

To my surprise, it was the familiar to which I had gravitated. I had moved into an apartment in Polanco, the Jewish section of Mexico City, where I taught business English to cover my expenses.

In fact, my new environment made me feel more Jewish, and more like my father’s son, than ever before. There were only some 40,000 Jews in Mexico City, but 90 percent of them attended Jewish day schools, and very few married outside of the Jewish community. I started going to synagogue, something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager, and found that although I prayed differently (I wasn’t accustomed to rolling my “r"s when I spoke Hebrew), congregants saw my dark, curly hair and knew I was one of them.

As for my father, he had only been close to religion during one period of his life—the year following his father’s death, during which he went to morning prayers almost every day to recite the Mourners’ Kaddish. He believed, above all, that a man ought to always love his father. During that time, I suspect he worried that he had not loved his own enough. It was a preoccupation the two of us shared.

One night, months after the move, he called me at my Mexico City apartment. I figured he was just checking in, as he did about once a week. But when I asked him how he was doing, he told me about the separation, the imminent divorce. What surprised me most was the voice coming through the receiver, not the news itself. (My mother was a patient woman who had worked as a flight attendant for 30 years and put up with thousands of unruly passengers. But neither her yoga classes nor her nightly glass of wine could have helped her withstand my father’s mood swings, which had become much less predictable in his 50s.) But that night, he sounded, for the first time in my experience, pathetic. He was not the same man who had always professed to know “what’s best.”

Over the next few weeks, he and I spent hours talking on the phone. Jewish-day-school kids in black velvet yarmulkes would pass me in the street, and I would immediately feel the impulse to call him, to ask what he had done that day. Had he gotten out of bed? Had he sold anything, or simply driven around town thinking? When I saw the procession of black hats, I felt guilty for being so far from him.

During our chats, he would focus on the person he had been before he married my mother, when he was a visual artist specializing in printmaking. He had earned a degree at the Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia, and for years afterward had lived an artist’s life, crisscrossing America in a ‘57 Rambler. (On the door, he had painted a graphic of Zap Comix’s Mr. Natural, below it the words: “Keep on truckin’.") But by the ‘80s, he had already begun to see those years as illusory. He stopped making art. Piece by piece, he left his existing oeuvre behind—in dumpsters behind apartment complexes, I imagined, and the basements of rented houses—replacing it all with family portraits and other symbols of middle-class life.

Asked why he had quit art, dad had many answers. Money was one. He would say that he wasn’t selfish enough to pursue it. That it was more important that he take care of his family. Another was aptitude. He peaked at mediocrity, he would say. And other times, asked the same exact question, he would simply respond, “I don’t know.” For the past two decades, he had been not an artist but a regional sales rep for an industrial tool manufacturer, working out of his car to supply Philadelphia’s body shops with clamps and brackets and the machines they would need to repair damaged automobiles.

But now the story of his life seemed less clear. What had once seemed like a narrative arc had become a series of hills and valleys.

He even started asking me about real estate in Mexico City. He was speaking like someone who’d just realized he could spend his time anyway he chose, in any corner of the world. The way I had been speaking since graduation.

One of my journalism mentors in college had told me, “If you go to the story, you’ll find work.” So I had moved to a country caught up in an important and polarizing presidential election. Anytime something newsworthy happened, I would call it to the attention of American newspaper and magazine editors. Bombings. Political rallies with crowds estimated at half a million people (a stark contrast to the anti-Iraq War protests I’d seen in the States, which usually looked more like small, casual gatherings.) I hoped that eventually one of those editors would give me the opportunity to write something meaningful in their pages, thereby helping me establish myself as a serious writer.

And at first, everything seemed to be playing out perfectly. For a short while, Mexico City became one of the most newsworthy places on the planet.

The conservative candidate won the popular vote by decimal points, and the leftists occupied Mexico City’s main throughway, Avenida Reforma, in protest of the results. Starting on the eve of the election, I put in some 48 straight hours of writing and reporting toward a story for the New Republic. When I finally went to sleep, I was so tired that I slept through all of the editor’s query emails, and I woke the next day to find that my piece had been dropped. Then Israel launched an offensive into Lebanon, and the American media lost interest in Mexico. I pitched dozens of other magazines, but by autumn, cries for a vote recount had faded—as I eventually learned, this was the normal course of things in Mexican politics. I, meanwhile, had failed to land a single byline. On top of everything else, I was running out of money, and my return to the United States, to better job prospects, was looking inevitable.

One October day, I told my father about Oaxaca, a town some 400 miles southwest of Mexico City, which had recently become embroiled in an old-fashioned uprising, with street gangs commandeering government buildings and calling for the ouster of the governor. I told him I was thinking of going to Oaxaca to gather material for a story, a last ditch effort to land a byline.

And, I said, this may be my only chance to see a revolution up close.

“I never did anything like that,” he said. “I guess you’ve outdone me now.”

At the time, the comment seemed a testament to how the man had changed—or recovered a part of himself—in the time since my mother had left him. Realistically speaking, it was more a testament to his fluctuating moods, which always colored his perception of the things I told him, and of me in general. “I guess you’ve outdone me now”—his comment didn’t signal a permanent change in the way he saw my goals as writer and traveler. But he had said it once, and that was something. 

I arrived in Oaxaca on the tail end of the Days of the Dead and made it to the edge of town in time to watch riot police fire tear-gas cartridges into the crowd. Holding a vinegar-soaked rag over my nose and mouth (the vinegar helped neutralize the tear gas), I realized that Oaxaca City was a place where one ought to have been worried about his safety, not his family issues.

Fifty feet in front of me, masked rebels set buses aflame to keep police vehicles from crossing into their territory. Adolescents broke into convenience stores and rinsed their teary eyes with stolen bottles of cola, while I ran between crowds of people conducting interviews and taking photographs. Together, the crowd and I advanced upon the riot police. When a gas cartridge flew at us, we ran in the other direction. When the gas cleared, we advanced anew.

As a child in the politically apathetic ‘90s, I had credulously accepted my father’s stories about his participation in the great social movements of the ‘60s. As I stood in the streets of Oaxaca, I was mentally writing similar stories for my future children, so that they would idolize me as I had idolized my father, at least until worship gave way to simple human love.

Of course, there are no Jews, and certainly no synagogues, in Oaxaca. But it’s a sacred city by all accounts, filled with centuries-old cathedrals and cobblestoned streets stained with the blood of the Mexican Revolution.

Night fell around 7 that Friday, and the smoke from the protests began to clear from the skyline. I spent Shabbat alone in a hotel room thinking about what my father had told me during our last conversation: that I was doing something he never had. It was the greatest compliment I had ever received from him.

When I moved back to the States a few weeks later, I would find that our relationship had become something far different from what it had been on my departure. If not easier, certainly richer. My father would find the full strength of his voice again, and he would resume nagging me about finding a reliable career. I, meanwhile, would never publish the piece I had gone to Oaxaca to write, leaving me without proof that I knew what I was doing with my life, or at least my 20s.

That night in Oaxaca, I realized that my father might never fully condone my career choices. But he understood them, in the sense that he remembered a time when he made decisions without really knowing why. And in that city overrun by political extremists and opportunistic bandits, I slept like a boy in his childhood home—no, I slept better than I did back then.

Jonathan J. Levin writes about Latin America for Fodor’s Travel Publications. His most recent guidebook is Fodor’s In Focus Acapulco, 1st ed., which will be released in September. 

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“The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.”

-- Buddha

I‘ve been at the Corpus Christi festival in Cuenca, Ecuador, for over an hour before I notice Maria, the small-for-her-age 8-year-old I befriended a few weeks ago after she’d asked if my canvas tennis shoes needed shining. They hadn’t, but Maria seemed to find my spotty Spanish interesting. In the weeks since we met, she’s taught me a plethora of gestures considered rude in her culture, and I’ve taught her to play patty-cake.

Maria is a child, but she is also a businesswoman, and tonight she is going about her work as a shoeshiner. Coming from a don’t-talk-to-strangers culture where easy-living childhoods are promoted as a right, I find it strange to watch Maria as she approaches people to ask whether they need her shoeshine services. When she finds customers, she follows them to one of the square’s benches where she kneels at their feet and begins her work. I know from our talks that her family depends on her to make money to feed her ailing mother and infant brother. She bears a great responsibility and, though she is an exceedingly sweet child, I have never seen her smile.

When the festival has gained too much momentum for Maria to find anyone willing to sit for her shiny-shoe magic, she walks over to say hello. Her work is over for the evening, she says, so she takes my hand to lead me across the square.

Corpus Christi is officially a Catholic celebration, but here in the Andean highlands it’s combined with the traditions of Quichua-speaking locals whose ancestors celebrated harvests around the summer solstice. It is hard to tell where one history ends and the other begins. The festival is a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds. Streams of pipe music flow from every direction. Vendors in felt bowler hats and brightly colored skirts hock rainbows of sugared delights I’ve never seen before. Men in smocks sell balloons to people craving the thrill of watching something beautiful move away from them into the night air. A giant, motorized caterpillar full of laughing children weaves its way through it all. The scene is a bit surreal.

I’m tempted to indulge in the holiday sweets, but I’m really here to see castillos, the homemade structures that will be burned tonight. Like Tibetan sand mandalas and these freshly made candies carefully decorated by hand, castillos are intended for destruction just days after their conception.

The castillos are tall scaffolding-like structures made out of what looks to be the soft tinder of balsa wood. These symbolic castles covered in multicolored tissue paper are lined up in front of the square’s cathedral. I study their temporary, three-story skyline and can’t help but feel a little forlorn that they are going to be turned to ashes. As an insatiable traveler and a hoarder of souvenirs, I tend to see the world as a museum of objects with the power to recall the lives they’ve touched. It seems a shame these works of art are going to be destroyed.

My habit of collecting souvenirs, and taking pictures, and mourning the loss of castillos before they’re even burned, is a bit problematic. I’m often collecting souvenirs in my travels when I should be taking that last swim or climbing that last leg of a mountain trail. At the moment, I find myself behind a camera when I should be face-to-face with Cuenca. My fear of losing the past, and my persistent worries about the future, sometimes keep me from reveling in the present. Letting go is an art I have not yet mastered, but one the castillos’ creators obviously have.

From a distance, the dozen castillos look like giant paper kites. As Maria and I get closer, one of the firework-bejeweled castillos begins to pop. I jump a little, but Maria is unshakable. She pats my arm and tells me not to worry, that I’ll get used to it. “It’ll be fun,” she promises in her native tongue. As she speaks, the fireworks on the castillos start spinning like devilish pinwheels. Flames spit in every direction as the crowd closes in.

In the United States, there would be a line of policemen holding the crowd back. The castillo makers would have to be insured. Onlookers would be required to wear protective eyewear. There would be a fire engine on hand. In the United States, castillos might not even be allowed to burn.

But here, burn they do. Soon one end of the square looks like the sky over Disney World on the Fourth of July. Maria drops my hand and says she’ll see me tomorrow if I take my usual walk through town to the local panaderia for breakfast. Then, she runs off into the still-thickening crowd.

The group gathered around the castillos moves closer and closer. As the flames spit farther and farther into the crowd, the towers begin to sway like wheat in the wind. When the crowd experiences a near miss of fiery debris, everyone explodes into laughter.

I’m up for adventure, but I am a born and bred seat-belt-wearing American, and this is making me as nervous as when I see elderly women jump onto moving buses in Quito. Slowly, I push my way through the crowd until I reach the back of the mass. I notice a group gathered on a balcony over the square. The balcony is only two stories high, but I imagine its view would make a nice wide-angle photograph, so I find the plaster-lined staircase leading to the perch above. From the balcony, the crowd looks a little like a Pentecostal congregation waving wildly in prayer.

The caterpillar is still winding through the square, though most of the children at the festival have found their way to the castillos. A few of them are hanging tightly to their parents’ necks, but several have worked their way to the front. Maria is one of them.

I have an urge to scream down to her, “Maria get back. That’s dangerous. Move to the back of the crowd.” But I do not scream anything. As the castillos reach the peak of their performance, I watch Maria, and a half-dozen other children covered in the black soot of shoeshine, break loose from the crowd entirely.

Maria has left her wooden shoeshine case behind. She is unencumbered. Together, the children chase the flames as if they are as benign as snowflakes. They dance with their palms open to the heavens in hopes of catching a golden piece of Corpus Christi’s burning castles. And in the pulsating light of those beautiful, fire-breathing monsters, I finally see Maria smile.

I find myself unexpectedly smiling back at her, and I briefly forget how dire things could turn. I forget that I have come to take a photo of this smoky scene. Despite the distance between us, I catch Maria’s eye, and we both begin to laugh.

This town square is a dangerous place to dance at this moment, but Maria is conjuring joy. She has found beauty in the castles’ loss, a flame to burn her sullied day to a shine. Maria and I are close to heaven, at Cuenca’s altitude of 10,000 feet, and in this moment, we both seem suddenly, surprisingly, unafraid.

Leigh Ann Henion is a freelance writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian, The Christian Science Monitor and Orion. Her last story for World Hum was Manuel Noriega Slept Here.

Photo of Maria by Leigh Ann Henion. Photo of Cuenca by heldr via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

A quarter of a mile off the west coast of Maui, seated in the front of a two-person kayak, I glided across a glassy sea, enjoying a Hawaiian daybreak. The sun had just peaked over the mountains above Lahaina, bathing the Pacific in soft pink light. The islands of Lanai and Molokai floated on the horizon, their rutted green hills luminous and clear.

A hushed voice behind me said, “Right about here is where the whales like to hang out.”

I’d signed on for a tandem kayak trip with Richard Roshon. He’s been taking visitors out for years to explore the waters off Lahaina. From late November through May, when North Pacific humpbacks gather off Maui, his outings offer the possibility of spotting the behemoth whales close up, from water level, in perfect silence. That’s why I was here.

I’d seen whales from big boats before. I’d always assumed a boat’s hard hull offered some protection in the event that a wayward fluke brushed against it, which I imagined was something like King Kong accidentally brushing his knee against a house.

The idea of paddling among whales in something as small as a kayak was frightening—and alluring. Even by whale standards, humpbacks are big. They’re the fifth-largest whale species and can grow to 45 feet and weigh up to 80,000 pounds. Richard’s Feathercraft kayak, by comparison, is 20 feet long and weighs 100 pounds. Watching humpbacks from such a tiny craft sounded like the stuff of childhood dreams, ancient folk tales, archetypal myths.

I met Richard in his Lahaina apartment a few blocks from the water. “I always like to introduce myself and talk about the kayak at least a day before we head out,” he explained, “and I want everyone to make sure this is the right trip for them.”

Richard spoke about big-wave surfing, and about his solo, weeks-long kayaking expeditions around the Hawaiian islands. He talked about the importance of protecting the whales, a subject he had explored in lectures and a self-published book. He never approaches whales in his kayak, he explained. He paddles out and waits. He said, “My philosophy is to walk lightly and leave no footprints.”

Lean and muscular, with a thick graying beard and big round glasses, he struck me as a modern-day Henry David Thoreau. Only Richard’s pond was teeming with whales.

As I left, he told me he’d call me to settle on the exact day and time for our outing. Weather forecasters had predicted wind and rain. We needed calm seas. Three days later, around 5 a.m., my phone rattled me awake.

“Meet me at the beach in an hour,” Richard said.

Down on the sand, I pulled on a waterproof spray skirt, stepped into the warm water and tucked myself into the kayak’s front seat. Richard gave the boat a push, dipped his paddle into the water and we were off. As the sun’s first stray rays illuminated our way, we passed several boat wrecks. Richard gestured toward a hazy mountain rising off the bow—Mauna Kea, the Big Island’s biggest volcano. Then he pointed the kayak toward deeper waters—humpback territory.

Every fall, thousands of humpbacks migrate more than 3,000 miles from the waters between central California and Alaska to the Hawaiian islands. Many collect in the channel between Maui and Lanai. There, the whales mate, and females give birth and spend the winter and spring nursing their calves, preparing for the long journey back across the Pacific.

Humpbacks are on the federal endangered species list. They face threats from discarded fishing line and drift nets, pollution, engine noise and boat traffic. But for a species that was nearly decimated by whaling several decades ago—there were as few as 1,000 humpbacks in the North Pacific when hunting them was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1966—humpbacks, amazingly, appear to be on the rebound.

As we paddled farther out, Richard said, “You usually hear the whales before you see them.”

Moments later a deep exhalation echoed across the water.

Pfoooooooohf.

I spotted a small cloud of spray rising 50 yards away. My eyes followed the glistening molecules down to their source: a humpback the size of a school bus, the slick black skin on its hump shining in the light above the ocean’s surface.

The whale’s dorsal fin disappeared and its fluke rose, facing us like the palm of a giant hand.

“Look at that!” Richard said. “She’s saying good morning!”

Then as quickly as she had surfaced, the whale disappeared.

My heart pounded. A wave of emotions washed over me: fear, humility, wonder.

The world is getting smaller every day. More people in more countries are using more energy. The planet is heating up. The threats to all species only seem to grow. On some days, the bad news can be overwhelming, and cynicism comes easily.

But in this little patch of the Pacific, time slowed and I felt a flicker of hope. We humans had made up our minds about something. We’d come together and banned whaling. And as a result, the humpbacks were making a comeback. In fact, we soon saw half a dozen more of them surface and dive, each sighting a welcome blow to any pessimism I’d felt that day.

“I’ve been paddling these waters for thirty-something years now,” Richard told me near the end of our trip. “I never get tired of it.”

I could understand why.

Jim Benning is the coeditor of World Hum. This story was adapted from a piece that first appeared in Ritz-Carlton Magazine.

Related on World Hum:
* A Million Years of Memory
* Journey Through the Earth

Related on TravelChannel.com
* Maui Travel Guide

After 2003, when the United States Navy stopped using this island off Puerto Rico’s southeastern shore as a bombing range, Vieques quickly became the next “It” island—luring travelers with its newly demilitarized white sand beaches, roaming wild horses and rustic charm.
—New York Times, October 2007

Cyril worked at the scuba shop just up the road from where the ferry docks in Isabel Segunda, one of the two towns on the island of Vieques, deceptively large at about the same size (and roughly the same shape) as Manhattan. The jet set can make the trip from New York in a weekend, but it had taken me days on a combination of planes, ferries and privately-operated vans called públicos. And Cyril was not who I expected to meet.

“I’m not going to leave here for the next five days,” I’d told Zore, the manager of the Sea Gate Guesthouse, as she led me to my room that afternoon. I needed a breeze, a beach, a view, silence. The Sea Gate was the cheapest hotel I could find, and it wasn’t cheap. I’d arranged for the smallest room, just painted and still giving off fumes, and I only succeeded in knocking $5 off the nightly rate. I’d be alright, I thought, as long as I had my small luxuries—plush towels, a sexy ceiling fan.

The place was dilapidated. Cement walkways had once been painted dreary white, then institutional green, then a makeshift terra-cotta, and now the ground was crumbling in a way that exposed all three colors. What had once been a basketball court had become overgrown, rusty and overrun by feral animals. What was the point of the paint-job they’d given my room? It couldn’t cover up the tacky threadbare linens, the ancient Venetian blinds fit for a nursing home in Florida, the bunker-like architecture. Blow the place up! I thought. Build a courtyard, let the sun in, paint the walls pink.

The beach was someplace else. The empty roads surrounding the property were forbidding. The noise of the local chickens was so obscene that it reminded me of a mockumentary I once watched about a community terrorized by a neighbor breeding roosters against regulation. As soon as Zore’s tour was over, I stumbled down the road looking for a new place to stay.

“Where can I find a público that will take me to Esperanza?” I asked the first gringos I found, a young guy and an older woman sitting on either side of the counter in a shop, drinking beer.

“Yeah ... that can be kind of tricky,” the guy told me. He explained that drivers pick people up when the ferry comes in and drop them off when the ferry goes out. The rest of the time, they don’t work.

He introduced himself as Cyril. While his skin seemed permanently tanned, his hair was so blond and his eyes were so clear that he looked like he might disappear into himself. He wore flip-flops, board shorts and a shirt that seemed like an optional part of the outfit. The woman, maybe 20 years older and dressed in a similar style, was Cyril’s mom. Cyril was born in St. John, where his mom had worked as a bartender. Then they moved to Colorado, where Cyril bought and sold a couple of pieces of property before turning 27 and returning to the Virgin Islands. Last year, he bought a sailboat and sailed with his girl to Vieques. After his girl left him, his mom showed up. She’d been here for six months already and she was buying a house. Yesterday, she’d bought a car.

Cyril’s mom offered me a ride. She did that by way of telling Cyril that he could borrow her car to take me to Esperanza for a drink. Esperanza, the other town on Vieques, is where the gringos drink beer and eat burgers on the beach. I’d planned to stay away, but that was before I saw the Sea Gate.

“What time do you get off work?” I asked Cyril.

“Five o’clock.”

It was already four o’clock, and my guess was the wait for a público would be more than an hour. It was a date.

Cyril’s mom drove a solid car, an old Jeep that was wide open but nevertheless infested with mosquitoes (she suspected they were hatching out of somewhere near the glove compartment). “You should show her the Bravo Beach Hotel,” she said to Cyril.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m looking for a place to stay. Let’s go on a tour before the sun goes down.”

We took a couple of turns on high-up roads with a view of the sea and parked outside the BBH, proudly the first boutique hotel on the island. After you, Cyril motioned. We found the manager, who slapped Cyril on the back and pointed out two pools, an outdoor daybed big enough for two (or three) underneath a sun umbrella, a restaurant, a sushi bar and a chef carrying a can of coconut milk. I was about to throw caution to the trade winds and take a room there at any price, but then a breeze picked up that smelled like a bad day at the beach—gasoline and old fish.

The manager ushered us to the bar. “I’d like to buy this couple a drink,” he announced.

“I’ll have a Cuba libre,” I said, “with dark rum—and have you got some kind of pretzels back there?”

The anthropology student working behind the bar didn’t have anything but the booze. I’d been traveling all day and hadn’t eaten.

“What if we get a to-go cup and continue our tour?” Cyril asked. He had some snacks at home, he said, and he wanted to change his shirt.

Home was an estate that some Californians were building as an exclusive corporate retreat. Cyril might as well have been from California instead of St. John or Colorado. He talked more like a surfer than a sailor or a rancher: Dude ... Yeah ... Yeah, dude ...

Cyril was stoked to be the manager of the property. But, at the moment, the property was coral floors and bare walls and no plumbing. He offered me the spare bed in the room next to his in lieu of finding another hotel room. I’ve put myself in many a compromising situation—some good, some bad—in exchange for a nice place to stay on my travels. If there had been running water, I might have accepted.

The only water was in the swimming pool, carved into the cliff below the balcony that held us up. Cyril flicked on the pool lights. Then he opened his fridge: white bread, ham, cheese, White Castle burgers, pretzels with nacho cheese dip made by Keebler. We held onto our drinks and watched the sunset, the pool beckoning us to come down the spiral staircase, take off our clothes and dive in.

I knew this moment—the Cuba libres, the accelerated intimacy. On my first solo trip—to Guatemala at age 23—this moment had been intimidating. It marked my introduction to a new kind of travel, a new kind of sex.

“What do you want to do now?” Cyril asked.

This kind of thing was safe, I’d taught myself, as long as you knew how and when to get out.

“Let’s go to Esperanza,” I said.

On the malecón, the boardwalk that everyone referred to by the Spanish name, we met a sailor named Jack and a drummer named Carlos. Jack lived on Cyril’s boat, a green hull with black masts like a pirate ship, which was visible from where we stood. Cyril told me he gave Jack free rent because Jack had done him a favor. A guy from St. Kitts named Creation who carved coconuts on the beach told me the next day that it was because Jack had kept Cyril’s boat from sinking. Cyril called Carlos “Uncle Carlos” and I started calling him “Tío Carlos,” slipping in and out of the Spanish I could remember from Guatemala. Puerto Rico has an easy bilingualism that never let me embarrass myself.

“Let’s go have a drink at my favorite bar,” said Carlos. His favorite bar was an island grocery store where you could fill plastic cups with ice, buy a $5 bottle of rum and a $1 can of Coke, and make a round of Cuba libres. “Do you like rum?” he asked, “I’ll buy this for you.”

The four of us—Carlos, Jack, Cyril and I—sat outside with our drinks and played dominos. I don’t know how to play dominos. It’s about strategy, the boys told me. There are seven tiles to each number. I’m a card player, and I’m sure I could have figured out the odds if I’d set my mind to it, but I didn’t want to set my mind to it. Instead, I looked steely-eyed at my opponents (really, one was my partner, but I kept forgetting which) and laid out my tiles in an entirely random fashion.

“Yeah,” said the boys, “she knows what she’s doing.” We played and talked and drank. The boys joked and philosophized about life and sex and sailing. “You know what I mean?” they turned to me occasionally and asked. “Yeah,” I said, “I know what you mean.”

That’s how I travel. I trade on my wits and my wit. I’d spent years of my life like this, exchanging quips that meant something entirely other than what their language suggested. “Do you know what I mean?” men would ask. And I would always answer, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” The realization came kind of late that if I truly understood nothing that they said, they must not have understood anything I said either, must not have known anything about me.

From the grocery store, we continued on to a beachfront bar called Duffy’s.

“Do you serve food here?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure we do.”

I squinted at the blackboard menu. “How are the fish tacos?” I asked. “Where does the fish come from?”

“Boston,” said the barmaid with a laugh. “It’s halibut. It’s good.”

Another man came to join me and the domino players. He stood tall and proud, talking fast. He’d robbed a bank in some Midwestern city, he said. The police had found him, but they knew that if they put him in jail, they’d have to pay to fix up his leg. The wound was patched with skin from his ass, he announced, and bone from his hip. He rolled up his pants to show it to us, and I looked in the other direction.

Tío Carlos glanced at me. He shook his head.

“Okay,” I said.

He shook his head again. “Do you know what I mean?” Carlos asked.

I didn’t know. Did he mean stay away from this guy? Or did he mean this guy is full of shit?

Either way, I’d lost interest.

Across the bar, I saw a man sitting by himself. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, sandy from the beach with several buttons undone on a shirt that he might have otherwise worn to the office, he was confident, content and reading an issue of the New Yorker. I was transfixed.

Cyril was getting back into the Jeep. He had to go to Al’s Bar in Isabel Segunda. I’d had too many Cuba libres. I asked if he would give me a ride home to the Sea Gate on the way. It was fun, looking for the hotel in the middle of nowhere in the dark.

“How the hell am I going to get back to Esperanza tomorrow morning?” I asked.

“I could drive you,” Cyril said. “But I’d have to spend the night at your place.”

I conjured up all the bluff I had. “I’m just not that kind of girl,” I told him.

I think he said he respected me for not being that kind of girl. He didn’t know what I meant.

What I meant was, I’m the kind of girl who will follow you around the world, I’m the kind of girl who will straddle you in the driver’s seat of this car, I’m the kind of girl who grabs passion by the throat and pulls it between her legs. But that’s when I feel like being in lov