Always so much to say when I’m traveling. From my journeys to Sulawesi and Bali emerged an ecstasy of expository epigrams, emitted from the environmental epicenters of some small but significant islands. (You can now find those dispatches in hoary archives of the Seacology Foundation; how quickly news fades into memory.)

It was a long, productive, but exhausting trip: six weeks in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and India, enjoying the separation from church and state but also aware, every day, of how much the world has changed—and how much I have changed—since my first Asian odyssey, many long years ago. On my final day in Nepal in 1984, I remember walking around a sacred ficus tree holding the hand of a little blind boy, offering prayers to Saraswati and fighting back tears; during my last day in Thailand, just a few weeks ago, I went to see King Kong (the new one, of course) at the Siam Center multiplex, where I had to wrap myself in broadsheets from the Bangkok Post to fight off the cryogenic blast of the air conditioning.

The ape is loose, all right. Learn to love it.  (more…)