ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH COCHRAN

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES after we leave central Athens, at about 9 a.m., the ticket collector on my bus tells me I’ve reached my destination.

“Here?” I say. “Here,” he confirms, and points over my shoulder. “Can walk. Is near.”

As the bus pulls away, I wonder if something got lost in translation — this doesn’t look quite right. After walking along the highway in the middle of nowhere for some time, I pass a gardener who verifies that I’m getting warmer and vaguely gestures over yonder, to the site of the Battle of Marathon. The ramifications of what happened on this fertile plain 2,500 years ago are so colossal, so far-reaching that I can scarcely believe how inconspicuous the site is. I’ve seen more enthusiastic signage for giant balls of twine.

I head off through farmland, olive groves and clusters of upscale villas before eventually stumbling upon a fenced-in field dotted with slender Mediterranean cypress trees. I follow the fence around the perimeter and pay three euros to get inside.

I’m the one and only visitor this morning, and the atmosphere is incredibly tranquil. In the middle of the field is a burial mound containing the remains of the 192 citizen-soldiers of Athens, called hoplites, who gave their lives in the battle. The mound doesn’t look like much, but standing in front of it gives me the most profound feeling of awe: I’m very near the spot where, in 490 B.C., an army of 9,000 Athenians and 1,000 of their allies from the town of Plataea faced off against a much larger force of Persian invaders and, against all odds, won. The feat brought an end to Persia’s first invasion of central Greece and would inspire other Greek city-states to victory at the similarly mismatched battles of Thermopylae (ab-tastically rendered in the film 300) and Salamis 10 years later.

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the Battle of Marathon in the scope of world history. The Greek victory helped safeguard Athenian democracy a mere 18 years after its birth, protecting the very conditions under which Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would soon codify Western philosophy. This burgeoning dēmokratía inspired the ideals of the Roman Republic and every society that’s sought self-governance ever since.

Another, more curious legacy of the battle is an extremely popular running race with an unlikely length of 26 miles, 385 yards: the marathon. Getting to the bottom of that one — and retracing the fabled original route — is why I’m here.

ACCORDING TO LEGEND (which is disputed by historians), as the surviving Persians fled to their ships after the Battle of Marathon, a long-distance runner named Pheidippides was dispatched to take the unexpected good news to Athens, some 25 miles southwest of the battlefield. Despite having just participated in the fight himself, he ran the entire way without stopping, burst into the assembly of Athens’ leaders and managed to blurt out, “We have won!” before keeling over, dead.

Now, I’m not trying to invite a similar fate, but my preparation for the run has been, to say the least, casual. As the weeks that I should have spent training came and went, I reasoned that historical inspiration alone would see me through, horrifying friends who had actually trained for marathons. Nevertheless, pondering the speciousness of the legend as I stand there on the battlefield is sapping my morale. I realize that the sun is getting stronger by the second. It’s 10:15 and already pushing 90 degrees. Well, there’s no time like the present. As I turn toward Athens and tentatively put one foot in front of the other, I begin listening to Herodotus’ accounts of the Persian Wars on my iPhone. The audiobook, while abridged, is over four hours long, giving me an outside chance, I figure, of finishing the run before the tale is told.

I’m not on the road long before I see signs, placed every few miles, that tell me I’m on the route of the Athens Classic Marathon. It was first run in 1896 as the showpiece event of the inaugural modern Olympic Games. Organizers of the revived Olympics wanted an exciting finale that, like the games themselves, harkened back to the glory of classical Greece. Playing off the run of Pheidippides, they devised an event that proved immediately popular, especially among Greeks who were proudly acquainted with the legend. The marathon began near the battlefield and ended in Athens’ Panathinaiko Stadium, rebuilt in resplendent marble on the site of the original stadium dating from the sixth century B.C.; this turned out to be a distance of 24.9 miles. The home crowd was understandably ecstatic when a Greek water carrier, Spyridon “Spyros” Louis, won, coming in at a respectable two hours and 58 minutes.

The now standard 26 miles, 385 yards, was initially run in 1908, when London hosted its first Olympics. Organizers decided the race would begin at Windsor Castle and end at the Olympic Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush, a distance of 25 miles or so. Complaints about cobblestones and tram lines caused the course to be lengthened, as did a revised starting point and finish line. Despite all the 11th-hour changes, though, the 1908 Olympic marathon was a huge success, sparking marathon mania the world over. The first seven Olympiads saw six different distances used, ranging from 24.85 to 26.56 miles, but in 1921 it was decided that the distance used in London would be the standard. It’s been the length used in the 91 years and countless marathons since.

OF COURSE, modern-day marathoners enjoy the benefit of food and drink stations, medics with numbing spray for aching joints and, most important, an entire car-free side of the highway with two lanes of asphalt at their disposal. But like Pheidippides himself, I’m running solo, and as such am presented with a few extra challenges. The highway is intermittently busy with cars and trucks, which often careen onto the shoulder. Fearing death, I find myself running on a very narrow strip at the side of the road. The strip switches from cobbles to paving slabs to dirt lined with clusters of thorny bushes, and sometimes disappears completely for a hundred yards or so. When this happens, I ratchet up my courage, sprint onto the shoulder and hope the drivers behind me are paying attention. Every once in a while people pay too much attention: A minivan pulls up alongside me and its troop of preteen girls hoots and hollers, likely with sarcasm. I originally tinkered with the idea of running in hoplite garb; this high-pitched haranguing assures me that I’ve made the right decision not to.

After entering the town of Nea Makri, I find my canter has become a trot, and by the time I get to the port town of Rafina over an hour later, I’m down to a brisk walk. “I’ll pick it up again soon,” I tell myself, but my knees and feet are beginning to falter. I’m barely a third of the way there, and I’m starting to see why my friends were so aghast at my nonchalance. Also dispiriting: The countryside has changed from majestic, sword-and-sandal-movie vistas of scrubby mountains, plains and rugged coastline to a sprawl of car dealerships, kiosks, coffee shops and strip malls.

My flagging spirits lift when I encounter a statue of Pheidippides on the side of the road near Rafina and stop to take a closer look. In this particular rendering, he appears boyish, wearing a skirt of leather strips, his bronze and oak shield by his side and his outstretched hand holding a rolled parchment that bears fresh news of the Athenian victory. The next Pheidippides statue that I happen upon is several miles farther along, in the town of Pikermi. This time the runner is quite naked and set not on the side of the highway but in the median, facing in the direction of the “Glorious City.”

By the time I leave the town of Palini and make my way to the outskirts of Athens, I’m a little worse for wear. My knees ache, my feet are a mass of blisters and my thighs are chafed. Old Audiobook Herodotus has long since wrapped up his tale and I’m now using my phone’s GPS to push myself resolutely onward: Twenty miles down, just five more to go. Pheidippides may have had the fate of Western civilization on his shoulders, but at least he didn’t have to worry about international data-roaming charges.

The closer I get to Athens’ center, the more I see evidence of the unrest that’s been taking place here over the past year. There are posters and graffiti protesting the proposed austerity measures, and they increase in number as I limp into Syntagma Square in central Athens. This is where many of the protests and demonstrations have been happening. Overlooking the square is a neoclassical building that houses the Greek Parliament, the focal point for the protesters’ ire. In front of the building is a marble relief of a dead or dying hoplite warrior, naked except for his helmet and shield. This is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but the old Athenian I ask about it is quite sure of the warrior’s identity. “Is Pheidippides,” he says. “He helped save Greece.”

Seeing this, I can’t help drawing parallels between the problems Greece faces now and those it confronted 2,500 years ago, when grappling with an existential threat that had huge repercussions for the rest of the world. At the time of this writing, everyone is watching to see whether Greece will be the first nation to jump (or be pushed) from the eurozone. If that happens, Greece will revert to the drachma, a currency that was in use at the birth of Athenian democracy two and a half millennia ago. Walking through the square, I notice an old man selling kilos of drachma for euros; I wonder whether he’d be better off waiting to see how this thing plays out.

Rather than head toward the stadium, which is the end point of the Athens Classic, I limp toward the Agora, at the foot of the Acropolis. This is partly because it’s the public meeting place that Pheidippides would have made a beeline for, but mostly because it’s where my hotel is located and I’m beginning to physically break down. “We have won,” I say when I get there and to no one in particular. A gaggle of German tourists all look at me as if I’ve gone mad. Anticlimactic? Sort of. It’s not until later, when I fall into bed at the Ochre and Brown boutique hotel, that I really feel a sense of victory. One that lingers when I awake, some 15 hours later.

GRANT STODDARD, a writer living in Vancouver, has invested in a great pair of running shoes and arch-supporting insoles.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDREW BANNECKER

]]> http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/02/01/take-five/feed/ 0 http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/01/01/next-big-things/ http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/01/01/next-big-things/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:28 +0000 admin http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/?p=5864 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATHEW SCOTT, GUIDO VITTI and CJ BENNINGER

SHUTTER TO THINK
Lytro founder Ren Ng is taking the blur (and the fuss) out of photography

If you’ve ever taken pictures all day on that fancy new digital SLR only to discover — when you finally take a look on your computer — that most of the shots are blurry, then Ren Ng is ready to help. As founder and CEO of Lytro, the 35-year-old Stanford Ph.D. is responsible for one of the most significant photographic inventions since the Polaroid camera. In December, Ng’s company debuted the Lytro Camera ($399, lytro.com), a stylish, telescope-like device that allows you to focus the picture after you take it.

Representing an entirely new kind of camera, the Lytro uses light field imaging, a photographic process that typically requires 100 digicams and a supercomputer, to capture light more accurately and comprehensively than traditional cameras do. The result: highly editable pictures. Light field technology has been around since the 1990s, but Ng’s breakthrough came when he compressed the work of the aforementioned digicams and supercomputer into one portable device small enough to fit in a purse or briefcase. (As a bonus, the extra information on Lytro-captured pictures means each one is also automatically available in 3-D, if you care about that sort of thing.)

The Lytro is about as knob-free as an iPad, with most of its controls on a touchscreen. “With all their modes and dials and buttons, the majority of cameras today are too complicated for most people,” says Ng. “You can’t use powerful technology for technology’s sake. Our focus is always to make it simple.” To that end, apart from sparing you the need to focus — which allows you to take rapid-fire shots — the Lytro also lets you instantly tag a photo as a favorite right in the camera, so you don’t have to sort through your Facebook shares after uploading.

This year Lytro’s technology is in just one camera. However, since most of the company’s innovation lies in its software and powerful miniaturized sensor, we can see where this is heading: into other cameras, and even into cellphones, which heretofore have been plagued by slow shutter speeds. The Lytro can’t shoot video — but don’t expect the revolution to skip camcorders, since the technology is applicable to video, too. “It really is camera 3.0,” says Ng.

REN NG / AGE 35 / FROM MALAYSIA AND AUSTRALIA / LIVES IN REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. / PREVIOUS GIG DOCTORAL STUDENT, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

]]> http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/01/01/next-big-things/feed/ 0 http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/01/01/a-land-apart/ http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2012/01/01/a-land-apart/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:00:01 +0000 admin http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/?p=5862

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK ABOUZEID

ON AN INTENSELY HOT LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON, a small crowd gathered in the main square of the principality of Seborga to watch Prince Marcello Menegatto induct knights into his court. A red carpet had been unrolled, leading to the entryway of the church of San Bernardo, and one by one, white-robed men walked down it, approaching the newly crowned prince; behind him was a boom box playing ceremonial muzak. Upon reaching the church, each man knelt before Menegatto, who tapped the blade of an impossibly long sword against the inductee’s shoulders. It looked like a scene from a movie, except that the prince was sweating profusely and seemed terrified he might injure someone.

Out in the audience, Franco Ronchi stood, looking equally heat-stricken and anxious. An aspiring perfumer and amateur actor, he had recently made a play to be named the Italian consul for São Tomé, a small island off the coast of Central Africa, but was denied. Hungry for distinction, Ronchi now dreamed of becoming the consul for Seborga. He’d taken a handful of vacation days from his job at a Milanese shipping company to arrange an audience with the prince, yet Menegatto kept putting the meeting off. The day was trying. That morning, Ronchi had left his B&B when the air was still cool, wearing crisp gray dress pants, a black sport coat and a tie of pastel yellow, blue and gray. By the time of the knighting he was sagging visibly, soaked through, doing his best to maintain his composure in the blazing sun. As to whether he was concerned about the prince’s seeming lack of interest, Ronchi smiled. “In Italy,” he said, “everything is difficult but nothing is impossible.” It’s a line he’d picked up earlier from a Seborgan baron, and he would use it again and again in the days ahead.

After the ceremony, Ronchi trailed the procession — the prince, his wife and the knights and ministers — across the main piazza and down one of the narrow, shaded streets toward a restaurant called the Rabbit, where he was to have his audience with the prince. It was postponed.

Ronchi was philosophical. As a reminder, he repeated the mantra, before adding stoically: “May destiny do its course.”

DRIVE 45 MILES EAST from the French border and up a tortuous road and you’ll pass a large blue and white sign that reads, “The Principality of Seborga.” From this point, according to Seborga’s 300 or so residents, you are no longer on Italian soil but in a sovereign nation: a place with its own government, including an elected prince, ministers and a coterie of knights, as well as ambassadors who reside in Luxembourg, Germany, France and Bahrain. You can walk down the town’s cobblestone streets and feel that you’re on the set of a Shakespeare play, or look out windows onto a sweeping view of the Mediterranean. You can also try to dig up a few rare luigini, the local currency, to pay for your espresso. (Stores in town accept luigini alongside the euro, but because one luigino equals 4.285 euros, making change can be a complicated procedure.)

Seborga traces its sovereign origins to 954 A.D., when the Benedictine monks of Lerino gained full control of the town after building a monastery there. In 1097, Seborga became a protectorate of the Holy Roman Empire and later, in the 18th century, of the kingdom of Sardinia.

Then, in 1861, most Italian states merged into the new kingdom of Italy. A few stragglers were tossed back to France, and Monaco became independent. And Seborga? In the midst of all this dividing and ceding and shuffling, the principality was swept into the dustbin of history. Due to a clerical error, Seborga didn’t appear on any of the lists — which meant it became part of Italy by default. Seborgans accepted Italian governance (they didn’t have much of a choice) but they held to the belief that they deserved sovereignty. The question was: How were they going to get it?

A Seborgan gardener named Giorgio Carbone believed he had the answer. He would first restore the town’s ancient traditions, including the elected office of prince. Not surprisingly, in 1963, the citizens of Seborga elected him to that position, and he assumed the title Giorgio I. Such titles would become critical as a way to increase the distance between Italy and Seborga, says Baron Jean-Philippe Arnotte, Giorgio I’s muttonchop-sporting adviser and Seborga’s diplomatic representative in Luxembourg. Arnotte (whose title was purchased in part from a Northern Irish baron) helped Giorgio I develop a coat of arms and a system of heraldry, and began piecing together a Seborgan national history. The plan was to use this history — one that proved the town’s sovereign status — to win national and international recognition. More than four decades later, however, the project remained unfinished; Giorgio I died in 2009. (He attained a new title in death: “His Tremendousness.”)

At the time, Marcello Menegatto was merely a 30-year-old, Vespa-riding businessman. Swiss by birth and hailing from family wealth, he first came to Seborga when he and his wife, Nina, bought a farm outside town. “In the beginning, we just wanted a place for our animals. We didn’t take the whole independence thing seriously,” Nina Menegatto says. “My husband never wanted to be prince.”

But the town had other ideas. Giorgio I’s former ministers talked Menegatto into running after a slate of subpar candidates turned up to vie for His Tremendousness’ throne. “They just wanted the title. They didn’t care about the people of Seborga,” Menegatto says. But he did — and the fact that he owns a construction company didn’t hurt. “My husband’s dream is to build a big hotel and a golf course here,” Nina Menegatto says.

MARCELLO MENEGATTO doesn’t look like a politician — or even a prince, really. He is a hulking man, over 6 feet, with thinning, curly gelled hair and a doughy middle. He’s got a Euro-preppy aesthetic: expensive distressed jeans and shoes with severely pointed toes. He’s more Monaco than medieval, and he stands out as he strolls through Seborga.

One year into his reign, Menegatto still has an uneasy relationship with his title. At a dinner in honor of Seborgan National Day, he sat at a long table in the town square while women in Renaissance-style velvet gowns served him plates of grilled meat. He wore a sash in the Seborgan colors of blue and white. He looked bored. The next day he disappeared in the middle of an interview for this story, ducking out to buy a pack of cigarettes and failing to return. When his wife called to ask where he was, he told her he’d gone home. He said he thought the interview was over. Not even his wife bought that excuse.

Part of his ambivalence might owe to the fact that not everyone in town is so delighted with the new leader. Certain factions have refused to abdicate allegiance to Giorgio I. They call themselves the “White Knights” and they hold late-night meetings at their headquarters (a bed and breakfast outside town) to plan ways of sabotaging the new regime. After the knighting ceremony, for instance, the prince and his wife rode through town in a horse-drawn carriage. Later, the White Knights collected the horse droppings and left them in a bag outside the prince’s office.

This kind of behavior is precisely why Menegatto didn’t want to be prince in the first place. Even though notable Seborgans asked him to run for the position, he found the competition nasty. “My opponents were trying to find out everything bad I’d done in the last 20 years!” he says.

Meanwhile, Nina Menegatto, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was elected minister of foreign affairs, has thrown herself into her new role with abandon. She spends her days preparing documents for the Hague and conversing with foreign media. She runs the principality’s PR campaign and has partnered with an Italian fashion company to make a line called Principato di Seborga. In a tiny shop along one of Seborga’s narrow streets, you can buy sneakers named for the prince: The “Marcello Primo” comes in crocodile and snake leather for 245 euros (about $335). In the main piazza, tourists can buy Seborgan-themed bags and perfumes, polo shirts with the Seborgan crest and even Seborgan license plates and passports. (Arnotte says he’s traveled abroad on such a passport without difficulty.)

Nina Menegatto’s English is impeccable and, with her long brown hair and fashionable outfits, she bears a resemblance to the Duchess of Cambridge (née Kate Middleton), whom she admires. “She’s so down-to-earth,” Nina says. The highlight of her job so far was a trip to England for a polo match hosted by Queen Elizabeth. Nina was invited by a friend from boarding school, and used the opportunity to network with Arab investors.

She is intelligent and charming, but is quick to point out that being the prince’s wife doesn’t make her royalty — not that the Seborgan people recognize the distinction. “It takes me an hour to get across town,” she says. “People are always stopping me, calling me ‘our princess.’”

She talks passionately about Seborgan independence and her plans to build a new playground beside the central piazza. She is eager to bring tourism to Seborga while also preserving the town’s cultural and aesthetic integrity. “We won’t build anything taller than five stories,” she says. “But we do want a new hotel and shops and restaurants. And of course we’ll have to run our own schools and collect taxes and do everything a country does.”

A FEW WEEKS AFTER Franco Ronchi returned to Milan, he received word that his request to become the consul for Seborga had been denied. The decision was made by Nina Menegatto. It’s one of her new duties, and she aims to be much more discriminating about titles than Giorgio I was. “So many people write to me saying they want to be a consul or a minister,” she says. “I tell them they must come here if they’re serious. In the past, some of our consuls haven’t really done anything. Like the one in Indonesia.”

Though disappointed, Ronchi consoles himself with the dream of one day selling his perfumes in New York City. And he takes solace in a few encouraging words from Arnotte. “He told me to be patient and wait for the position,” Ronchi says. Then he shrugs. “But if that is not successful, I will try for another African country.”

JENNIFER MILLER is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her first novel, The Year of the Gadfly, is due out in May.

ON A BALMY MORNING IN HAINAN, an island at the southernmost tip of mainland China, the sun rises over Yalong Bay, light glittering across the water. Children, silhouetted against the new day, scamper to the sea and laugh as they stick their toes into the waves. Still a bit groggy, we wander through our minimalist, Balinese-style resort, past a pool that snakes among the lush gardens like a river, and take in the view of the tropical coast before us. Fishing boats circle a tiny volcanic island in the distance. A few steps more, and our feet sink into the white sand. We head for the water.

We get only knee-deep, however, before a whistle sounds. It comes from a lifeguard standing far from the water’s edge, who gestures wildly for us to return to shore. He is dressed in khaki pants and sneakers, but what he lacks in conventional lifeguard attire he more than makes up for in zeal for the safety of his charges. After a little cat-and-mouse with him, we give up and walk back to the beach. Another vacationer overhears us joking about the lifeguard and says, chuckling, “He’s been freaking out all morning.” A Beijing-based oil executive from Norway, the vacationer has resigned himself to lazing under a thatched-roof palapa.

After breakfast, we decide to go exploring. Our hotel, the Mangrove Tree Resort, is located in the city of Sanya. Once something of a backwater with only a smattering of resorts, Sanya has become a hotbed of high-end development. In its most exclusive enclave, Yalong Bay — where international hotel chains like St. Regis, Ritz-Carlton and Sheraton have erected palatial complexes — BMWs and Audis zip through swanky hotel driveways while guests in terrycloth robes pad past boutiques selling the likes of Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and Zegna. Pagoda roofs and white towers peep over spiky betel nut trees, drooping banyans and tall palms: Hainan’s wild beauty tamed into manicured perfection.

Yet Sanya isn’t just another tropical getaway for the stylish and well-heeled. It’s an emblem, a cornerstone of the Chinese government’s audacious plan to completely remake Hainan. The effort was unveiled only last year, but already the progress is astounding. New hotels and condo complexes abound, and great swaths of the island, from cities to outlying villages, are dotted with cranes and clad in bamboo scaffolding. If all goes according to plan, by 2020 Hainan will be unrecognizable, a global destination favored by a growing class of new Eastern money, transformed by the force of a rising superpower’s can-do spirit. To quote the government, Hainan will be nothing less than the “Hawaii of the East.” But first, there’s work to be done.

THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME that Hainan, a Belgium-sized island of 8 million, has tried to go big. In 1988, Beijing elevated it to province status and declared it a “special economic zone,” hoping it would become an export hub like Shenzhen. Tax breaks and other incentives failed to launch the would-be industrial center; however, that didn’t deter a slew of real estate speculators from snapping up land and constructing new buildings in Hainan’s major cities, triggering an economic boomlet. Provincial GDP jumped 41.5 percent in 1992 and 20 percent in 1993. Then, in 1994, the real estate bubble burst, leaving strips of beachfront lined with half-finished buildings. After that, Hainan’s economy really deteriorated.

The slump seemed destined to last. But the late ’90s brought hope, as waves of tourists from Russia and the mainland began arriving. Word had gotten around that Hainan had all the features of Hawaii — pristine beaches, verdant jungles, volcanic peaks, laid-back island vibe — but was closer and cheaper. China courted more foreigners and relaxed the visa requirements for citizens of more than two dozen countries. About five years ago, development again began to soar.

Encouraged by the growth, Beijing went all in last year and announced the Hawaii initiative. The government paved miles of Hainan’s roads, launched advertisements throughout China and a marketing campaign in Europe and opened the island’s first high-speed rail, a $3.3 billion project. So far, the plan is working: The number of overnight tourists jumped 11.6 percent to 23 million in the first 11 months of 2010, compared with the same period the year before. Hainan is booming anew.

Yet for all its recently acquired jet-set polish, Hainan — which lies on the same latitude as the Caribbean, making it China’s only tropical island — is still grappling with the contradictions that come with such prodigious growth. There are dozens of ultraluxe new stores, yet haggling remains prevalent, even in some hotels. There are miles of beautiful beaches, but also restrictions on swimming, owing in part to the fact that the tan-averse Chinese seldom sunbathe or send their kids to swimming lessons, making the idea of a beach vacation somewhat foreign. Hainan is, as a whole, a place in the throes of adolescence.

“As far as natural beauty is concerned, it’s there,” says Wendy Wu, founder of New York–based tour company Wendy Wu’s China. “As far as its tourism industry, they have a ways to go, but it will happen. Even Hawaii didn’t become Hawaii overnight.”

FOR ALL THE GOVERNMENT’S talk of the Aloha State, though, Hainan’s new identity remains up for grabs, with each of its private developments offering a different vision of what the island should look like. While most of these are of the Bali/Fiji/ Hawaii variety, developer Ken Chu has another model in mind: Dubai.

Chu — a glossy-haired mid-30s mogul whose crisp shirt is unbuttoned Vegas-style to show off a glittering chain — hails from the Hong Kong family behind Mission Hills Group, owner of some of China’s biggest golf courses. The company opened its latest site in Haikou, Hainan’s capital city, last year: Mission Hills Haikou. The second largest golf resort in the world, it boasts 12 courses with more on the way (including one designed as mini golf writ large, complete with a replica of Beijing’s National Stadium and a golf hole in a giant bowl of noodles), and 150 hot spring mineral baths inspired by different cultures’ bathing rituals, allowing visitors to float in salty pools reminiscent of the Dead Sea, for instance, or steep in Chinese herbal teas.

Chu’s vision for Hainan marries size with decadence because, he explains, bigger is always better in China. Projects like Mission Hills are “very much like Dubai’s,” Chu says. “You have megaprojects. You build them and people will go because people are curious. It’s just like that in China.” He expects the total cost of the Mission Hills project to hit around $4.7 billion — and here’s the thing: Even he isn’t sure it will work. “If we do all the number crunching, it’s not a viable project,” he says. China, after all, has a minuscule golf market.

But Mission Hills Haikou mirrors the larger leap of faith the government and investors are taking on Hainan. This hope is the driving force behind the island’s construction race to the sky. “There’s a lot of pride in building this project,” Chu says. “It’s not ego pride; it’s China pride. It’s showcasing the new China to the rest of the world.”

Some, however, scoff at the vision put forth by Chu. We met one expat in Bo’ao, a lazy seaside town on Hainan’s eastern coast, who likened Hainan to a teenage girl who “doesn’t know she’s beautiful just the way she is.” The woman, who declined to be named for this article, moved here in 2006 and fell in love with Bo’ao: its charming country lanes perfect for biking, its quaint Buddhist temples and the nearby indigenous communities where villagers practice an ancient agrarian way of life. She treasures the place, and worries that in its rush to appeal to wealthy tourists, her adopted home could lose its individuality. When we tell her about all the glitz we’ve seen in Sanya, she shakes her head, convinced that decadence is not what Western tourists want. “This is not the Hawaii of the East,” she says. “This is China’s tropical island. I think it’s wrong to say it’s the ‘Hawaii of,’ because the implication is that it can’t stand on its own merits.”

DURING OUR STAY, we manage to experience each vision of Hainan. We break away from the lifeguard and enjoy a full hour of whistle-free body surfing. We hike the leafy trails of a rain forest bursting with orchids and banana leaves. We soak in hot springs and drink margaritas at a swim-up bar. We eat at roadside restaurants and savor a favorite local dish, Wenchang chicken, made from birds raised on a diet of peanuts, coconut and banyan seeds.

And while many people we encounter want to make their vision of Hainan the defining one, the island will never be Hawaii or Bali. Nor does it need to be. “In six years, once the boom settles, the culture will start shining through,” says Wendy Wu. “It can be a destination of its own.”

At night, Bo’ao comes to life. Illuminated fishing boats line up in the water in search of squid, looking like a string of pearls against the darkness. We wander onto a bustling street brightened by overhanging lights, where late-night loungers spill out of teahouses onto the sidewalks. We find a table and order an island specialty dessert: chao bing. A man pours fruit purée onto a cold metal plate and mixes it with a paddle until the slush forms creamy peaks. He tops it with condensed milk and brings it to our table. The mango-flavored ice is a pleasant contrast to the muggy night.

The locals are chatting away around us and we can smell the briny ocean air. Hainan is not Hawaii. In fact, it may never be. But what it is, is a singular slice of paradise; one we couldn’t experience anywhere else.

DEBORAH JIAN LEE and SUSHMA SUBRAMANIAN are buying khaki pants for their next beach vacation.

WILD KINGDOMS

THAT’S THE SPIRIT
Following in Steinbeck’s Footsteps to Espiritu Santo: the Galápagos of North America

THE DAY IS HOT and still. The sand is white. The island of Espiritu Santo rises before me like a rusted shipwreck, as a bed of stingrays passes below. I’m floating in a touring kayak, a hundred yards from the beach, reading John Steinbeck’s The Log From the Sea of Cortez. I’m just off the island, a few miles and several coves from where, seven decades ago, Steinbeck himself was sorting through marine specimens on the deck of a 76-foot sardine boat called the Western Flyer and complaining about the lack of beer.

That was March 20, 1940. Steinbeck, who in less than two months would win the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, had spent most of the day on the beach, collecting sea cucumbers and starfish. There was whiskey, wine, stale drinking water, the gentle sloshing of waves against the hull, a visit from some friendly locals in a wooden canoe and a quotient of excellent conversation. If only they hadn’t run out of beer, it would have been paradise.

Espiritu Santo has changed only imperceptibly in all these years. It’s still a stark, silent Eden, visited by a relatively modest number of people just temporarily. Lying off the eastern coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, slightly north of La Paz, it’s the crown jewel in an archipelago of 244 islands, islets and coastal areas in the Gulf of California (a.k.a. the Sea of Cortez) that was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. The sea around Espiritu Santo is considered one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, aswarm with nearly 900 different kinds of fish and host to more than one third of all known marine mammal species. Jacques Cousteau is said to have called it the “world’s aquarium” and the “Galápagos of North America.” Steinbeck called it “ferocious with life.”

The island itself is 23,000 acres of rough desert, recently promoted to national park status and home to all manner of rare lizards, seabirds and cartoonishly thorny plants. There are feral goats and cats and a unique species of black-tailed rabbit, as well as ancient transplanted figs and the ruins of a 19th-century pearl farm. In season, pangas arrive hourly with day-trippers from across the channel, kayakers like myself explore the coves and crazy rock formations along the coastline, snorkelers swim with sea lions, and overnight campers sip frosty margaritas in deluxe solar-powered eco-villages.

And yet there was Steinbeck — and the rest of the crew with him — impatient to weigh anchor and head for the grand old city of La Paz. Lounging on the deck of the Western Flyer, Steinbeck watched as a yacht cruised by. “On her awninged after-deck ladies and gentlemen in white clothing sat comfortably,” he wrote. “We saw they had tall cool drinks beside them and we hated them a little.”

Gazing from my tiny craft over to someone’s luxury camp onshore, I know how he felt. Suddenly I’m wishing I weren’t facing a 4-mile paddle back to the peninsula, and the nearest margarita. But then, what’s 4 miles? With the sun still high over the peninsula to the west, I seal the book in the forward hatch, take a swig of warm water from a plastic bottle and point my bow toward La Paz. —DAVID PAGE

Featured Creatures
Where to swim with what, and why

WHERE: Off Poipu, Hawaii
WHAT: Giant sea turtles
WHY: Sometimes the turtles will bob close enough to look you in the eye, and while it might be just for an instant, it’ll feel like having an entire conversation.

WHERE: Jellyfish Lake, Palau
WHAT: Hundreds of thousands of nonstinging jellyfish
WHY: It’s utterly hypnotic. Golden or orange and varying in size, the pulsing jellyfish migrate across the lake each day to follow the sunlight, and you can swim right along with them.

WHERE: The Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan
WHAT: Lionfish
WHY: The gulf teems with fish, but none is more eye-catching than the lionfish, with its long, feathery fins and zebra stripes. Just keep your distance — it can sting.

WHERE: Off Cocos Island, 300 miles from the Costa Rican coast
WHAT: Hammerhead sharks
WHY: Because sharks are awesome. And these waters, beloved by divers, offer more of them than any other place on earth. —STEVE KETTMANN

Casting Call
In the remote Cook Islands, an angler’s paradise awaits

It’s a shame the Cook Islands’ namesake explorer didn’t do more actual, well, exploring. In setting foot on only Palmerston Island — flat as a postage stamp and barely bigger — Capt. James Cook missed out on the chance to drop a line in what just might be the world’s most idyllic fishing spot, right next door.

Though various piscine prizes weave their way throughout this 15-island South Pacific chain, the island of Aitutaki has an unbeatable lure for both the fish and those who catch them: a picturesque ring reef that encloses an enormous lagoon. A speedy drop-off beyond the reef means you don’t have to motor far out to sea to troll or jig for deep-water prizes like marlin, mahi mahi, skipjack and wahoo; within the reef, the 12,500-acre lagoon is perfect for casting for trevally and the elusive bonefish.

Best of all is the camaraderie. At the local game-fishing club you’ll find an abundance of cheap beer and a dearth of skepticism — ensuring any fish story will meet the most receptive of audiences. —JENNIFER L. JOHNSON

ISLAND WISDOM, PART 1: UPON ENCOUNTERING A KANGAROO
Take a T. rex, shrink it to about 6 feet, cover it in fur and give it a deer’s head, and you’ve basically got yourself a kangaroo. Put boxing gloves on it, and you’ve got a sight gag. These are just two of the many things to be learned on Kangaroo Island, a charming wonderland off the South Australian coast where seals laze on the beach, koalas sleep in trees, wallabies dart across roads and ’roos abound. Most often, the latter will casually hop away if you get anywhere near them. But should you somehow bump into one, resist the urge to put up your dukes: A kangaroo, if so inclined, can lean back on its meaty tail and deliver a kick that’ll put a substantial crimp in your holiday plans. (Not that it will, necessarily. But it can.) That’s why your best bet is to seek out the tamer specimens lingering around the visitors center. They’re friendly. They like people. They’ll eat out of your hand. So bring an apple. —JASON FEIFER

]]> http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/12/01/island-time/feed/ 0 http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/best-buys/ http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/best-buys/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:00:39 +0000 admin http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/?p=5508 PHOTOGRAPHS BY LISA SHIN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN JAY CABUAY

GIFT GUIDE: ELECTRONICS

Expert Pick
PRECIOUS METAL
You can bet that most of what your college freshman will be doing with her brand-new computer is Googling and writing papers, so there’s no better person to ask what netbook to give her than Brian Rakowski, vice president of product management for Google Chrome. He recommends the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. “It’s incredibly simple to set up and it maintains itself, so you won’t end up with a second job as tech support for the lucky person you give it to,” he says.
$430 / www.samsung.com

FRESH AIR
Fast (and silver) as a speeding bullet and light enough to leap small desk obstacles in a single bound, Apple’s latest entry-level notebook, the amazing MacBook Air, which boasts Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, should be on the wish list of anyone who’s ever had to lug a heavy laptop around while on the road.
$999  / www.store.apple.com

TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT
If you’re ready to get into the DSLR pool but think you’d rather wade in than do a cannonball off the diving board, ask for the Canon Rebel T3 Red 18-55mm IS II kit. It has a 12.2-megapixel sensor and all the ISO settings you could possibly need, yet is as user-friendly as a pool noodle.
$900 / www.usa.canon.com

DOUBLE TALK
Cell phones and Skype are great, but when you’re not at the office, you might miss the feeling of importance conveyed by holding (and slamming) a traditional banana phone. Enter Native Union’s Moshi Moshi 03i, a Bluetooth adapter that can sync calls from two devices and transmit them to a handset.  
$150 / www.nativeunion.com

OF SOUND MIND
Collecting 13,000 international radio stations, all your personal songs and an intelligent music feature à la Pandora and playing everything on listening stations throughout your house, Bang & Olufsen’s Beosound 5 Encore might be the most comprehensive home music setup short of a house band.
$3,350 / www.bang-olufsen.com

]]> http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/best-buys/feed/ 0 http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/toil-and-trouble/ http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/toil-and-trouble/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:00:15 +0000 admin http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/?p=5506

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SARAH WILMER

I HAD TO PRESS MYSELF flat against the wall to keep the hotel clerk from kicking me. He and a guest — a glamorous woman in a traveling coat — were wrestling on the reception desk, fighting over a set of room keys. I probably had no business being back there in the first place, but nobody had tried to stop me — or, if they had, I hadn’t noticed. I was too busy thinking about the sinister man i’d encountered a few minutes earlier, washing his hands in a bathtub. A little later, I found myself wandering through a cemetery, fairly confident that the shapes looming in the darkness were just statues — until one of them moved. It was a man, a hulking figure wearing an apron, fumbling in the soil.

This may sound like a dream brought on by bad seafood, but it’s not. It’s Sleep No More: a show that takes your preconceptions about what a night at the theater should entail and completely shatters them. The work of pioneering British company Punchdrunk, Sleep No More is a sprawling, immersive performance piece that’s part Shakespeare, part vintage Hitchcock and part live-action video game.

The show takes place in a renovated warehouse in New York’s Chelsea district. It’s a disconcertingly large venue, spread out over six floors and more than 100 rooms. Audience members — if that’s what you can call them — are invited not only to watch the events unfolding in the make-believe McKittrick Hotel, but also to throw themselves right into the thick of it all.

Here’s how it works: Upon entering the set, you are led through a dimly lit maze into a Prohibition-era bar, complete with a lounge singer crooning the standards. After a drink or two, a nattily dressed but nonetheless ominous man hands you a white beaked mask, which you’re required to wear for the duration of the show. From there, you’re ushered into an elevator, whose operator gives you the lowdown: no talking, don’t touch the actors, head back to the bar if you need a break. The elevator lurches to a halt and he adds, “Fortune favors the bold.” The door opens to a misty darkness. Showtime.

The story loosely follows the plotline of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s twisted tragedy, with a bit of Hitchcock’s Rebecca thrown in. But that’s all I can tell you for sure, because the rest is up to you. No two playgoers’ experiences are ever the same. You may spend the evening wandering deserted rooms, picking through letters, photographs and bits of macabre detritus. You may choose to follow a specific character all evening, chasing him from floor to floor, or to abandon that character for another one halfway through. You’ll be privy to very intimate moments. If you’re lucky, you might even get yanked into a secret room by one of the characters for a private tête-à-tête. The point is, it’s up to you. You shape your own narrative according to where you go and what you do. It’s an entertaining, surprising and invigorating experience.

Punchdrunk has been putting on shows like this since 2000, when a 22-year-old drama school graduate named Felix Barrett first founded the company. Its specialty is adapting dark, reality-bending tales, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death to Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, and the troupe stages its work in derelict tunnels and abandoned buildings, with the only constant being that the audience is flung headlong into the action. The shows sell out wherever they go, and the response has been so positive as to appear, at times, a bit unhinged. “All I can say is ‘WOW.’ I don’t believe that I’ve ever experienced anything remotely like this,” gushed a woman on a Broadway World discussion forum. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

THE PAST DECADE or so has not been kind to traditional stage productions. People are too busy poking, tweeting and texting to sit still in a theater for two hours. The public demands brevity, interactivity or at the very least a pair of 3-D goggles. The form has tried to update itself, but with the exception of a few brilliant outliers (The Book of Mormon, for instance), Broadway seems to have resigned itself to its fate. Attendance is down, ticket prices are up and there’s little relief on the horizon.

Punchdrunk, on the other hand, flourishes, owing its success in part to the fact that it anticipated the tastes of a public saturated with media and bogged down by the demands of the digital age. Its shows provide the engagement of social networking, the visceral jolt of a Hollywood thriller, the blood-lurch of an amusement park ride. “Our whole desire is to put an audience at the heart of the action,” Barrett says. “You’re completely empowered to make any decision you want to. It’s the opposite state to conventional theater: that amazing danger that’s inherent within giving the audience a choice.”

Conceived and directed by Barrett and choreographer Maxine Doyle, the New York production of Sleep No More represents Punchdrunk’s most ambitious effort to date. The show opened in 2003 as a modest 10-person production in a former Victorian school in London. Six years later, an expanded version came to another shuttered schoolhouse, this one in Brookline, Mass. Produced with Harvard Square’s highbrow American Repertory Theater, it was Punchdrunk’s first show outside the U.K.

Since Sleep No More hit New York, it’s been looking poised to make the leap from cult phenomenon to full-on sensation — in part because of its blockbuster production values and in part because, well, this is New York. “We always wanted to do a show in New York,” Barrett says. “It’s such a vibrant, passionate theater city. We were really excited about that audience and how they might hurl themselves into the work.”

YOU COULD ARGUE that the biggest star of Sleep No More’s New York run is the venue. Barrett is drawn to spaces that reinforce the mood of a piece, and the warehouse on West 27th Street could have been purpose-built for his needs. “I only saw it for an hour, but I knew it was the right place. It was love at first sight,” he says. “It’s got that feeling of excess and decay, perfect for the power-hungry, obsessive elements of the storyline.”

Another important element of Barrett’s productions is music. The film noir soundtracks of the 1940s and the gilded tunes of the swing era were an early inspiration for this show, and, other than the occasional gasp, groan or muttered verse, their eerie strains are pretty much the only sound you’ll hear.

Punchdrunk aims for a physical, sensory style closer to interpretive dance than to scripted theater. Rather than expressing anguish or desire through words, performers crawl up walls, clamber onto furniture, wrestle on pool tables or suddenly take off at a dead run.

Sleep No More plays with all the senses: Lady Macduff’s neglected apartment smells like rotting food, and the air in the graveyard is tangibly cool and damp. You’re invited to rifle through drawers, steal a discarded piece of candy, pick up the phone to see if there’s anyone on the other end (sometimes there is). Barrett’s approach to theater means no lazing around or stepping back. The harder you work at Sleep No More, the more you’ll get out of it. “We fight against passive obedience, the formulaic sitting there quietly in a theater seat that only stimulates your brain,” he says. “If the body is stimulated as well, if you have to actually make decisions and have ownership, the repercussions fall on your shoulders.”

Some people balk at this kind of participation, but most throw themselves into the experience. A few go a little overboard. Conor Doyle, who plays several roles and is also the show’s assistant choreographer, once saw a woman attempt to stop a character giving another a glass of poison. “She’d completely forgotten that it was a show and it was fake,” he says. “She cared about the character in that moment. She genuinely wanted to save her.” Barrett, for his part, recalls a night when a man made for an open coffin, lay down inside it and slept through the entire show.

“People have done some really amazing things. I look at them and I think, Wow, you’re doing that right now! OK,” says Tori Sparks, who plays Lady Macbeth. “It’s hard for a lot of people, to just be shot off into the dark and left to their own devices. I think that your reaction is very telling of who you are as a person.”

PUNCHDRUNK ISN’T THE only company intent on demolishing traditional boundaries between audience and actor. The trend’s epicenter is in the U.K., where experimental outfits like Il Pixo Rosso, Belt Up Theatre and Shunt employ gimmicks such as video goggles, Victorian parlor games and wild goose chases beneath London Bridge. In the U.S., the American Repertory Theater’s The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is performed on and around a sweaty dance floor.

Few, though, have generated the kind of enthusiasm that’s greeted Sleep No More. Celebs including Trey Parker, Kevin Spacey and Amy Adams have slipped behind the mask. The show has seen its run extended over and over since opening in March, and continues to sell out. There are online communities devoted to it, whose members, in an attempt to get to the heart of the show’s narrative, spend hours piecing together the fragments of their experiences.

While Barrett is quick to point out that Punchdrunk’s productions aren’t meant to supersede the traditional model of stage, actors and viewers in seats — “Conventional theater has its place, and I love it,” he says — he does seem intent on further deconstructing the form. This fall will see the launch of Punchdrunk Travel: Participants arrive at an airport, collect plane tickets and a bundle from a locker, and fly off to a mystery venue for three days. “As soon as you leave the airport, you’re inside the show,” he says. “It’s going to be completely global.”

Of course, secrecy being paramount to Punchdrunk’s mystique, Barrett is loath to divulge any details on his forthcoming travel agency or the inevitable follow-up to Sleep No More — though he and his company are most assuredly up to something. “I can’t tell you when or where,” he says. “But it’s coming.”

Boston-based drama critic JENNA SCHERER has to remind herself not to follow random strangers around actual hotels.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA BARISONZI

“SOMETIMES YOU START to think you’re Ronald McDonald with a fungo bat,” Rick Dell says. It’s Family Day at the ballpark, and while Dell and his staff have tried to organize some afternoon entertainment, he’s already disappointed. The Tibetan players haven’t put on their costumes for the traditional dance this year. Watching them stomp around the mound in their baseball uniforms just isn’t the same. Worse, the weather is dismal for a June Sunday, with a smoggy haze settling defiantly at the edges of the field like the barrier to another world. But Dell’s mood is set to lift. Soldier is about to show the parents how to hit.

As an instructor explains the mechanics at work, Soldier approaches a tee at home plate and sets his feet into the familiar pits in the right-handed batter’s box. His body tightens for the moment it takes him to set his stance and then unwinds, smooth as a spindle, sending his bat into the ball and the ball into deep center field, trailed by the delighted gasps of onlookers.

Soldier is Zhu Songjun. He’s a lithe six feet and 170 pounds. He can run 60 yards in seven seconds and throw a baseball over 80 mph. He’s 15, a Chinese kid chasing a quintessentially American dream: to play baseball in the majors. “I am my happiest on a baseball diamond,” Soldier says, in Chinese. “It is an unspeakable feeling.” Dell, Major League Baseball’s director of baseball development in Asia, brought the teenager here to the MLB Development Center in Zhu’s hometown of Wuxi, an ancient city on the Yangtze River fast becoming entangled in the sprawl of Shanghai, some 80 miles away.

On a map of China in Dell’s Beijing office, Wuxi is just a dot in a constellation of other dots that make up China’s baseball galaxy. The points on the map, from Xinjiang in the far west to Fujian in the remote south, mark every place baseball exists in the country, including expatriate little leagues and MLB’s own youth camps. These are the places Dell and his staff scour, offering the best young players the chance to enroll at the two-year-old Development Center.

Dell hand-picked every player here — all 37 of them — and he invented Soldier’s nickname, as well as the sobriquets for “Shoeshine” and “Wanger” and “Bernie” and everyone else, which aren’t nicknames as much as they are placeholders for Chinese names that Dell can’t pronounce. His efforts have earned him a nickname of his own: A colleague calls him “China’s Mr. Baseball.” It’s his job to do what a decade ago was unthinkable, and what today is merely highly improbable: deliver the first-ever Chinese baseball star.

RICK DELL HAS a bent-kneed gait and a wisecracking humor gained from a lifetime in baseball, half of it — 27 years — spent coaching at the College of New Jersey. He worked off-seasons as one of MLB’s few willing ambassadors to Asia before coming on full time in 2007. On Family Day, he’s wearing an MLB uniform — he never steps on a diamond without one — and his New Jersey Athletic Conference championship ring, the only ring he has, which he never removes. He’s innocently, impossibly optimistic, the kind of man who told his staff at a January meeting that the myth of Sisyphus is a fable about the need to make work fun. In other words, he’s just the guy to look for baseball standouts in China, a country where baseball has been nonexistent since the Cultural Revolution, whose national team came in dead last in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and which has yet to field a single major leaguer, much less a superstar.

MLB is betting that marketing will play a big part in turning the situation around. The organization has engaged in an aggressive campaign to pitch baseball to China as an egalitarian game with a cosmopolitan sheen. “It’s foreign; it represents fashion, international culture, cool,” says Leon Xie, MLB’s managing director in China, the hard-nosed realist charged with selling baseball to the Chinese. But when asked how MLB can decisively capture the imaginations (and disposable income) of Chinese youth, he sighs. “We haven’t answered that question yet.”

The competition is intense. The National Basketball Association’s success in China is, however unfairly, MLB’s constant standard for comparison. An estimated 300 million Chinese play basketball (compared to the 4 million or so who play baseball), and enough of them follow the NBA that Goldman Sachs once valued the association’s China market at $2.3 billion. “We’re not trying to match the NBA in 15 minutes,” Dell says. “Remember, the NBA’s been here 20, 25 years. People lose sight of that.” The NBA has other advantages, too. Unlike baseball, basketball requires little in the way of equipment, and the game is easy to play in the crush of China’s increasingly dense cities. Then there’s Yao Ming. Any mention of the recently retired Houston Rockets center elicits exasperated sighs from Dell and his colleagues.

Dell touches on this point over breakfast at a DoubleTree by Hilton, one of the sleek luxury hotels that have sprung up around interior China, even in Wuxi’s otherwise barren New District. “We may not get that player we’re talking about during my time here in China,” he says. “It’s not like one of these guys has to be the next — I wouldn’t say Yao Ming — let’s say Derek Jeter. It’s not like that at all.” It can’t be. Developing talent for baseball is different from developing it for other games. A physical aberration like Yao can pretty much step onto a professional basketball court. Baseball takes technique born of endless training and practice. It takes discipline.

This is the quality the Development Center is attempting to instill. Recruits live together in the dorms and eat at the same tables. They normally spend four days per week, every hour not dedicated to class or sleep, training on a dirt infield refurbished and modernized by MLB, which they share with the Xishan sports academy on the grounds of Dongbeitang High School.

They have a clubhouse with laundry service, a private weight room and, of course, a pristine baseball diamond where they drill, throw, run and take batting practice with wooden bats.

But there is something else going on here too. Enrollees at the Development Center have their educations, equipment and housing paid for — a real gift, Dell emphasizes, for players from poverty-stricken provinces like Qinghai or Gansu. The fact is, these young hopefuls are drawing on more than just talent and hard work. They are often, quite literally, hungry. “These kids are already better off than they were, and they’ll be better off when they leave,” Dell says. “And that makes me feel good about what we do.”

FAMILY DAY EXEMPLIFIES the awkward marriage between the easy community of American baseball and the Chinese imperative to impress one’s parents. “When we get a player, we get his family, too,” says Xie. “I don’t just mean his parents, but also his grandparents on both sides. If we get one, we get the rest.” On this holiday weekend, the kids seem eager to please, their expressions severe, their movements deliberate and precise. But when the time comes for the parents to have a go themselves, things quickly devolve into slapstick. They swipe, they swat, they grope and grapple and collapse to the ground laughing. Dell watches a parent skitter a ball a few feet along the ground following a swing that appeared to crack the man’s back. “It’s so weird,” he says. “It’s like when you give a Chinese person a glove. Without one they can catch the ball fine, but when you put a glove on ’em, they’re helpless!”

He’s enjoying himself now, ribbing parents and players alike. “Mr. Dou hits better than his kid!” he yells at one hapless batter. “That must be his best shirt!” he hollers at a man wearing a garish yellow shirt. “Look at this guy!” he shouts as another father steps to the plate wearing camouflage cargo shorts, Tevas and a LeBron James jersey. “He looks like he’s coming from the Jersey Shore!”

Among the prospects playing today, there are a few who stand out. Aside from Soldier, there’s “Sky,” Shi Kai, a lumbering Beijing pitcher who’s throwing 80-mph heat at 13 years old, and “James,” Zhai Lianjie, a precocious switch-hitter from Changzhou who sprints 60 yards in 6.4 seconds and can sling a ball more than 300 feet. “I’ll be very surprised if we don’t have a couple of kids out of this group that would be interesting to somebody in two years,” Dell says. But even the incurable optimist can’t ignore the odds. “I already know that 99.9 percent of these kids are never going to play in the major leagues,” he says at one point. “I know that’s probably true.” He pauses, staring past the backstop. “But one day, one of them will play in the major leagues. Somebody will.”

A few days later, with their families back at home, the kids get down to the serious business of regular practice. With the defense arrayed around the prim outfield and the raked infield, land reclaimed from the rush of industrial progress, it doesn’t look like China. It looks like something else, like a dream. “Cowboy,” Lin Shukao, is on the mound. The batter is James. Cowboy winds up, rears back, lurches forward, and after his back cleat violently departs the rubber and the rough string of the seams leaves his fingertips, there is a pregnant moment, a half-second when the pitch is nothing but potential — a hit or a strike. James shifts his hips and brings the bat around. He makes contact and sends the ball over the wall in center field, 315 feet.

The dreary Wuxi haze finally lifts. The sun shines. In the distance, beyond the fence, Dongbeitang’s outdoor basketball hoops glimmer.

JOHN B. THOMPSON lives in Cambridge, Mass. His fastball is not worthy of the name.

ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN BERKHEISER & MIKE CALDWELL

We’d been looking for the white-rumped swift for three hours when John Muddeman told me the story of the orthopedic surgeon. Muddeman, a transplanted Brit who looks like a healthier Sean Penn, lives outside Madrid, a city that bills itself as one of the birding capitals of Europe. He’s been guiding birders for 30 years, and eight years ago he cofounded the eco-tourism outfit Iberian Wildlife Tours. He’ll take you on insect expeditions, wildflower jaunts and rabbit hops, but his main love is birds, as even the briefest of conversations with him will make clear.

Birds, he’ll say. Birds, birds, birds.

Recently, on a blisteringly hot day, Muddeman took me to the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, 40 kilometers north of Madrid, in search of a very elusive species: the white-rumped swift.

Though relatively common in sub-Saharan Africa, the swift is a rarity in this part of the world. In fact, there have been only two sightings in the last 50 years. But elusiveness isn’t its only appeal: The white-rumped swift is also a very weird bird. It can remain airborne for years at a time, feeding and sleeping on the wing. Half a million miles might go by before it alights. Muddeman swore this is true. “They are,” he said, “aerodynamic machines of the first order.”

Yeah, I’d like to see one of those.

I should say here that I’m not into birding. Birding is for people who wear many-pocketed shorts and rough woolen socks, people who know how to make nettle tea. I don’t even own a pair of binoculars. So, as Muddeman started to tell me the story of the orthopedic surgeon, an American client he guided a few years back, my only thought was: This guy sounds kind of nuts. And by most standards, he kind of was.

Birders are, by nature, acquisitive creatures. They are especially fond of creating checklists — birds they’ve seen, birds they haven’t. It’s when birders get down to the last three or four unseen species that things can get strange. This is when the diehards tend to become afflicted by what people in the game call List Fever.

The orthopedic surgeon had it. Muddeman picked the man up at his Madrid hotel and was immediately subjected to a litany of demands. There were seven birds on the surgeon’s wish list, at the top of which stood the great spotted cuckoo. Despite years of intense searching, the American explained, the cuckoo had eluded him. It wasn’t so much the man’s words that worried Muddeman as the look that accompanied them. A look that could best be described as fearful.

It was the tail end of summer when the two men set out late in the Spanish season for the great spotted cuckoo, which favors Africa in the winter months. Many of the migratory species were beginning to fly south. Getting the cuckoo would be big. Capital B big. Muddeman, a gentle, low-key man by nature, listened to the surgeon’s aspirations with a sense of quiet foreboding.

As the hot sun beat down, the two men tore over the local foothills, training their binoculars on crevices and listening intently for the bird’s distinctive call: cher-cher-kri-kri. By the end of the second day, they’d knocked most of the species off the surgeon’s list, but the great spotted cuckoo was nowhere to be seen, and between his precisely timed power naps in the car, the surgeon was getting more and more uptight.

“I’ll never get it!” he screamed at one point. His tone was accusatory, as if the guide had somehow contrived to kidnap the last great spotted cuckoo in Spain and was holding it against its will.

As he recalled the trip, Muddeman’s knuckles grew white on the steering wheel; he hates to disappoint a client. But now it was happening again. We’d been prowling the outskirts of Madrid for hours, looking in vain for the white-rumped swift, and I was beginning to understand how the surgeon felt.

The swift was my great spotted cuckoo.

WHEN IT COMES TO obsession, the orthopedic surgeon was very much in the minor leagues. The real players are the so-called Big Listers: birders who have made a solemn vow to lay eyes on every single one of earth’s 7,000 or so species. The number of people who have actually achieved this goal is about the same as those who have walked on the moon. These are not your weekend dabblers. These are the guys who disappear into the jungle and reemerge weeks or months later proclaiming they’ve spotted the last surviving ivory-billed woodpecker. Or, just as often, they get divorced, lose their homes and end up never finding the object of their desire.

The white-rumped swift is a bird for extreme birders, if only because it’s also kind of nuts. For one thing, this bird doesn’t go for building nests. Instead, it invades the homes of another species, the red-rumped swallow, fighting and bickering until its victim flies away in terror. There are stories of people finding white-rumped swifts lying on the ground with their claws death-locked into the flesh of an opponent.

I wanted one.

Three hours into our hunt, however, running into one of these thuggish birds was looking like an increasingly unlikely prospect. I was hot, parched and sulky.

“John, do you really think we’ll find it?” I asked as we trudged back to the car after another failed bid.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve looked for it very, very hard with no luck.”

For 14 years, he’d looked for it. We jumped into his little Citroën. I turned away and stared out the window at flocks of non-swifts.

OVER THE COURSE of our day together, Muddeman taught me how to look at birds. It’s not only coloring and size, he said brightly, but things like “hand” — the position of the end of the wing — and the attitude of the head. The bird we were looking for is small and black, with oversize wings and a fringe of white striping at the base of its tail. To the untrained eye, it looks almost exactly like the house martin, except on the martin the white continues all the way up the belly.

Muddeman can spot the difference at 200 yards. And if he doesn’t see a bird, he’ll hear it. Sixty percent of the birds he spots are found by sound alone. It also helps to be able to identify a nest, he said. A telltale mark of a white-rumped swift’s is a rim of white feathers at its opening. “We’re not sure why they do that,” he said. “But they come into the nest at high speed in the dark, so it might be like a set of lights on an aircraft carrier.”

We made our way to a huge reservoir. Fish lazed in the dark green bowl of water and birds fluttered overhead. This rocky, sloping landscape, Muddeman said, is precisely the kind of environment that attracts the red-rumped swallow — and so, potentially, the White-rumped Swift.

Sure enough, there they were: dozens of the apparently unmolested swallows, feeding in the air and swooping down to their cliffside nests. These were joined by a few black house martins that seemed to be toying with us, looking enticingly like our birds until they flipped over to reveal their white bellies. No swifts.

We returned to the sweltering car and headed back toward Madrid, necks craned to look up through the windshield, like UFO hunters. “It’s really a one-in-a-million shot,” Muddeman sighed.

He glanced up.

“A nice Imperial Eagle over there.”

I nodded and brought up my binoculars. It was indeed a Spanish imperial eagle, big and impressive, with a downward hand that made it look like an American hawk.

We spent two more hours crisscrossing hills and skirting small towns, peering into every passing stone structure, culvert and bridge. Muddeman pointed to a pod-like bunker 30 yards from the road.

“That’d be a good spot,” he said, pulling over.

“What is it?”

“Civil War bunker.”

I tramped over and peered inside one of the thin gun slits, seeing nothing but pitted concrete and tangled weeds in the gloomy interior. No white feathers. I took a few steps back and imagined half-starved Spanish Republicans charging the bunker with their bayonets flashing in the sun, the Nationalists hunkered down, waiting for the moment to fire. It struck me then that birdwatching isn’t only about watching birds. This bunker wasn’t on my list, but it was worth looking at.

Our journey was coming to an end. As dusk approached, we headed for a large rocky outcrop called the Peña de Cadalso. Small birds circled the hill’s stony top, riding the currents, catching bugs and aerial plankton as the hot air pushed them up the slope.

“I’ll be damned!” Muddeman cried after about two minutes. “There it is, right there.”

“You’re lying. Where?!”

“There, right below the big cloud, at about 1,200 meters. It’s moving to the left. Fast.”

The blue sky dipped in my binoculars as I scanned the air. Swallow, swallow, house martin. And then I saw it. The black bird was shooting to the east and the base of its tail flashed white. Muddeman was laughing manically. “Bloody hell! That’s brilliant!”

We clapped each other on the back and grinned at people in passing cars. I brought up the glasses again and followed the bird as it looped overhead; then we spotted its mate. Not only had we claimed the third Madrid sighting in nearly 50 years, but Muddeman suspected that the white-rumped swift was actually nesting here, claiming new territory.

“People will be rushing out here from Madrid,” he shouted before getting on the phone to call his partner. I could hear a voice whooping on the other end of the line.

As we drove back to the city, Muddeman told me the epilogue to the surgeon story. The next day, with the disappointed birder on a plane back to the U.S., the guide picked up another client, and they drove into the hills. The first bird that flapped lazily across their path?

The great spotted cuckoo.

STEPHAN TALTY, who currently lives in Madrid, is working on a book about the British double agent and World War II hero Juan Pujol Garcia, a.k.a. “Garbo.”

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Harry Western Center; Polo Ralph Lauren; Tommy Hilfiger

JIM MANLEY, A TALL, white-haired rancher, leads a visitor past a homestead cabin alongside meandering Oxbow Lake. Up ahead are the remnants of a handmade rail system leading into an abandoned silver mine. The mine has two entrances. One has collapsed. A cougar has taken up in the other. “I’ve been coming to say hello to the cougar every time I get out here,” Manley says, inspecting the cave.

You’d expect Manley to be a grizzled Westerner more suited to horse-breaking than high society, but the reality is a little more complex. While he is indeed the proprietor of this place, the 6,600-acre Ranch at Rock Creek, just outside Philipsburg, Mont., he’s also a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. “I’d wanted to own a ranch all my life,” Manley says. It took him 20 years to find the one he wanted, and another year to turn it into the luxury lodge and impeccable cowboy fantasia that it is today.

But then such is the draw of Big Sky Country. Bordered by Yellowstone National Park to the south and Glacier National Park to the northwest, Montana has never been accorded the jet-set cachet of an Aspen or Jackson Hole (nor, one suspects, would it want it). However, there is a gentle cultural shift afoot, with rustic-luxurious ranches like Manley’s becoming popular weekend destinations that combine high-end amenities with the breathtaking landscape that has long drawn hikers, skiers and trout fisherman here to the land of silver and gold.

It’s that same blend of ruggedness and effortless style that drew us here for Hemispheres’ fall fashion spread. We spent three days at the working ranch soaking in the Montana air, tooling around on muddy roads with the ranch hands and shooting the latest Western-inflected styles from big and small designers alike, accompanied by the odd pair of gloves or chaps on loan from the resident cowboys.

At dusk one day, after we had wrapped the shoot, Kerry, the ranch manager, brought us out into the field where the horses roam at night. He stepped out of the Jeep and whistled. The horses all perked up and wandered over to greet us, sniffing and gently brushing their heads against us like so many friendly dogs. It called to mind something Manley had said earlier, when he told us he hoped to retire here some day. “It’s like paradise on horseback,” he said. www.theranchatrockcreek.com

THE BOLSHOI THEATRE WAS burned in 1853 and bombed in 1941. Lenin tried to have the building, with its neoclassical Corinthian columns and aristocratic air, knocked to the ground in a gesture of proletarian wrath. And a stream flowing under the building did everything in its power to weaken the stone foundation. Despite this ceaseless assault, the Bolshoi remains standing.

This building, home to some of the world’s leading dancers, singers and directors, is the gem of all Russian performance spaces. It opened in Moscow in 1825 for the Bolshoi Ballet, a company founded in 1776 by Catherine the Great, and saw the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Rachmaninoff’s opera Aleko. It’s home to the biggest opera in Russia and the largest ballet company in the world (its name in Russian means “big”). But when inspectors discovered cracks in the structure in 2005, the theater shut down. It was literally falling apart.

Originally set to reopen in 2008, the Bolshoi has undergone a renovation that was mired in scandal and embezzlement. The records of one firm working on the project, ZAO Kurortproekt, showed it was paid three times for the same work at a time when the Kremlin was trying to crack down on corruption. The cost ballooned to $800 million and the opening was delayed three years.

Now, if all goes according to plan, on October 28, 2011, the footlights at the Bolshoi will shine anew.

“Pray God doesn’t make you live in a time of change,” says Anatoly Iksanov, general director of the Bolshoi Theatre, a ribbon of cigarette smoke filtering through the bristles of his white mustache. Iksanov is in charge of two and a half orchestras, 220 dancers, 110 opera singers and thousands more stagehands, costume designers and conductors. Yet he still manages to sleep through the night. Which, he points out wearily, is the only time delegations of artists aren’t knocking down his door. “Artists must be given a lot of work,” he says, lowering his gaze. “When they’re busy on tour or creating new shows, they quit blaming managers and creating crazy scandals.”

Indeed, scandals are frequent occurrences. Take one from last winter, when several dozen very racy pictures of Gennadi Yanin, the ballet’s manager, were emailed to hundreds of people and posted online in what some speculate was a smear campaign against a potential acting chief. And that’s in addition to the continuing public barbs and criticisms from disgruntled former and present dancers.

To all of this, Iksanov shrugs. The scandals, he says, are for public consumption and the journalists who love them. While he wants to protect the Bolshoi name, his concern isn’t the petty back and forth of dancers. His charge is to promote the Bolshoi name from “one of the best” to “the best.” That means drawing new audiences to the old art. Last spring, the Bolshoi teamed up with Bel Air Media and Pathé to broadcast its ballets in movie theaters around the world — Europe, the U.S., Japan and Brazil — even screening ballets to gauge audience interest. A test screening of the ballet Flames of Paris in Paris created such a stir that by the time the Bolshoi booked the tour and the dancers arrived in the city, everyone knew about the show and almost the entire government came to the premiere.

Iksanov is also in Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s Ministry of Culture, which is working to solve labor law issues that are stagnating the talent at the Bolshoi. The Bolshoi gives lifelong contracts to its members. “We’re not allowed to fire those who have not retired, and we can’t bring in someone new. It’s a big problem,” says Iksanov. “Without new artists, new blood, we can’t grow the way we need to.”

But Russians can be reluctant about change, even though (or perhaps because) they’ve had their fair share of it. In 2000, Iksanov was appointed to oversee the company’s transition from the damaged historical stage in the Bolshoi Theatre to the New Stage, a brand-new, smaller house next door, during renovations. His challenge was to keep the company intact and make sure it continued performing. Bigger productions found a temporary performance spot at the Kremlin Palace, and others toured Europe and beyond. Iksanov had his work cut out for him — the smaller space wore down the performers, particularly because the job went three years over schedule. Artists are already a finicky bunch. But then so are conservationists.

Russians with a white-knuckle grip on tradition wanted the decaying theater untouched and left as a museum. Iksanov recognized the importance of retaining the interiors, but the stage and inner workings needed an overhaul to support new technology and keep pace with the world’s most renowned institutions.

“The Bolshoi Theatre is a living, breathing organism,” says Iksanov, as he stands to leave and meet with the main conductor of the current opera, The Golden Cockerel, opening in two nights. “It needs to advance to survive.”

“I CAN TALK ABOUT this for hours,” says Mikhail Sidorov, spokesman for Summa Capital, the construction company President Medvedev hired in 2009 to oversee the final stages of the renovation. He’s standing below the original stage on one of the four new subterranean levels that doubled the size of the historic theater to 80,000 square meters. This particular level has a chamber orchestra stage out of a futuristic flick. The room looks empty at first, but the floor is segmented like a puzzle. Using a complex hydraulic system, platforms rise up, turning a flat floor into a raised stage with rows of tiered seating for 300, like a pop-up book. The German engineers behind this underground stage gave the same hydraulic advantage to the expanded 135-capacity orchestra pit.

As Sidorov points out that there can be no more than a two millimeter gap between each section, he couldn’t be more excited. If you didn’t know better — if it weren’t for his spotless suit and uncalloused hands — you’d think he’d renovated the Bolshoi himself. His two-hour tour of the theater includes stories of contacting the great-grandsons of the tradesman who provided the original front hall tile, the hand-looming process that took three years to dissect and then weave the exact fabric from the period of Alexander II, the restoration of acoustics that the Soviet era destroyed. An observation about a replica electric lamp can make Sidorov sigh. It’s a happiness that attends a job well done and almost finished.

His company picked up the project after the renovation had dragged on for four miserable years. Everything came to a deadlock in 2009 — tales of corruption and ineptitude had reached their zenith, and nine general contractors had come and gone. Iksanov appealed to Medvedev, who took on the Bolshoi as a personal project, creating a special group in the Ministry of Culture to oversee it and hiring Summa Capital to take on the final renovations. With the energy and resources behind a Medvedev-backed project, the estimated 2015 finish date suddenly shifted to 2011. Summa Capital immediately expanded the 24-hour workforce from 400 to 3,600 people.

Nineteen hundred of those workers are restorers and craftsman of gypsum, wood, bronze, fabric, handmade stucco, dyestuff and more. Of the 1,900 restorers, 162 are gilders.

THE AUDIENCE HALL of the Bolshoi Theatre has six levels of balconies, each broken up into recessed boxes. Shop lights make each look like a backlit shadow box. On a four-foot scaffolding, a gilder sits on the side of her hip, her knees and feet tucked in at her side. She uses her finger to spread petroleum jelly on the back of her hand. She picks up a fanned brush made of squirrel tail hair and brushes it over the thin layer of petroleum before touching the top of the brush to a thin leaf of gold resting on a suede pillow. When she picks up the gold leaf, it shivers. The tiny, lustrous square is hand-hammered so thin that light shines through it. It is a tenth of the thickness of a spider’s silk. It will cling to every crease of a fingerprint on an oily finger. Rub it between your fingers and it disappears. But place it on molding that has been prepped with clay and egg and a swipe of distilled alcohol like vodka, and the frail leaf bonds to it, creating the illusion of solid gold. “No golden paint will have such a noble effect, such a bright color,” says Vera Babich, a third-generation gilder. “Over time, gold paint darkens and never achieves the same look.”

When all is said and done, the audience hall will be adorned with five kilograms of gold. It will cover the ornate double-headed eagles of Imperial Russia that replaced communism’s hammer and sickle above the czar’s box, and rim the six balconies that surround the wood-paneled, violin-shaped hall, which is ready to reclaim its top spot in the world of acoustics. Three hundred kilograms of gold surround the two-ton chandelier. Each piece of gold is individually cut, so not a scrap goes to waste.

Babich personally trained 60 of the workers, including her two daughters. “From my childhood my father was a gilder and took me to his projects. I didn’t have to study — he taught me to gild and polish on every job.” Not everyone catches on so easily. Sometimes it takes two years just to learn how to prep the molding.

Babich didn’t always know she wanted to be a gilder. She got a medical degree after college, but even before that, she had another passion. “When I was younger, my parents traveled too much for me to attend classes,” she says. “I love my work and my job, but it was my dream to be a ballerina.”

INNATE TALENT POSSESSES the eyes first, a glimmer as a dancer holds a pose: a curved neck, extended chin, the unfurled fingers of a buoyant hand held aloft in a quiet dance studio. Then the first strike of a piano key shoots through the body, animating a fierce delicacy of movement.

If you’ve never seen a ballet, or ballerina, or a TV broadcast of tiny people leaping around a faraway stage, it doesn’t matter. Talent announces itself as a force, a biological draw and immediate impulse to never, ever take your eyes off of this inhuman being. It shouldn’t be so easy for a novice to tell a principal dancer from her understudy, but it is.

Anastasia “Nastia” Meskova is easy to pick out, but then again she isn’t your typical Bolshoi ballerina. “It’s easy to see it in Nastia,” says Ludmila Semenyaka, Mescova’s master teacher and legendary prima ballerina for the Bolshoi. “You come to see a performance, and you can do nothing but watch her. You realize something strange is happening and you can’t explain why.”

Nastia is known equally for her fire and beauty. The 25-year-old has danced since she was two. She auditioned for the Bolshoi Ballet Academy at the age of eight — two years earlier than most — and now works as a soloist for the Bolshoi Ballet. The best part about her solo title, she says, is that it guarantees she and her 5-year-old son can finally have an apartment to themselves during the few hours a day she has to enjoy it.

On most rehearsal days — 10 hours long, minimum — her chestnut hair is swept up into a haphazard bun and she wears the uniform of most Bolshoi dancers: skirt, leotard under a well-worn, draped sweatshirt and the down booties marketed to mountain climbers but coopted by ballet students. What makes Nastia different is her presence. An actress knows how to hold a room, harness intensity, study a character: the holy tenets of Russian ballet.

Russian ballet may share French technique and Italian style, but it owns emotional intensity. In the late 19th century, actor, director and coach Constantin Stanislavsky took ballerinas from their barres and taught them to live onstage as swans, sleeping princesses or star-crossed lovers. Character was about beauty and humanness. Shades of feeling and believable truth. Method acting before it had a name.

You can see it in Nastia as she watches herself in the mirror. Her movements aren’t the stoic poses and arches of the other girls. She’s aggressive and seductive. It makes sense that she’s taken with contemporary, modern and neoclassic dance pieces — forms traditionalist Russia is slow to love. “Doing 1000 Years of Silence on tour in France last summer gave me freedom. It took me four or five months to change my mentality and let go,” says Nastia. “Russians just don’t understand contemporary dance. For me, it’s a pity, because why not? You should drive the car at every speed.”

Nastia straddles the Bolshoi changeover. She honed her modern style with choreographer and former Bolshoi artistic director Alexei Ratmansky before he took a position at American Ballet Company in New York. She’s worked with Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi Ballet’s new artistic director, in the past, respects him and believes he can bring good change to the Bolshoi. She danced on the historic stage before it was closed, and like many dancers, she blanches at the idea of any additions to her home theater, let alone massive hydraulic systems and four new floors. “The old building saw so many things. It’s no longer a place I know,” she sniffs. “I feel like they knocked down a cathedral and put up cardboard.”

The director for the piece she and a partner are working on, Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, will be in to watch the couples perform the piece after a couple of months of rehearsals. He’ll pick the lead couple or he may change them around. Nastia isn’t overly stressed about it, which also seems very un-ballerina-like. But with a child, she’s hyperaware that a retired ballerina’s pension isn’t much to live on. She doesn’t want to teach. She wants to live like principal dancer Nikolay Tsiskaridze, who judges on a show similar to American Idol when he’s not dancing. She wants to find multiple platforms for her talent. Maybe finish college. Or go back to acting.

“Onstage you spend all of you. All of your power, everything,” Nastia says. “You must love it or you’ll look like a picture — flat. Right now, it is the love of my life. In Russia, you dance with your soul.”

She begins the dance again. It has soul, like a great ballerina. Like the Bolshoi Theatre will have again soon.

Seattle-based writer RACHEL STURTZ took six months of ballet when she was 13 to prepare for this story.

“IF MY GRANDMOTHER found out what I did with her recipe, she’d kill me,” says Willin Low, chef at Wild Rocket, a popular fusion restaurant in Singapore’s Mount Emily neighborhood, as he brings out plates of his own creation, tau yew bak, cannelloni with braised pork belly, soy sauce, garlic, five-spice … and cheese. The meal prior to this was full of clever variations on classic Singaporean street food—a soft-shell black pepper crab, a more delicate version of the country’s spicy, hard-shell classic; a brown rice dish with baby octopus, teriyaki sauce, salmon carpaccio and roe; a bowl of spaghettini with prawn-and-crawfish-infused oil, dried shrimp, scallops and more prawns, the mere notion of which could fell a whole town’s worth of people with shellfish allergies—but the introduction of cheese was unexpected. Some would argue perverse. But what it is is revolutionary. Well, Singapore revolutionary. Soft revolutionary.

A native, Low started out studying law. It’s the sort of thing one is expected to do in Singapore, a place where sober application is something of a state religion. He worked as a lawyer in London for eight years, but found the job disheartening and English food “terrible” (for Singaporeans abroad, missing home and missing food at home are one and the same). So he taught himself to cook, and, in time, he got very good at it. He opened a catering sideline on the weekends, and that worked well enough that he dropped law, and in 2005 opened Wild Rocket, named in part after his favorite salad. “Some people will think of the salad, and some people will think of the spaceship,” he says.

The handle works for the restaurant, but the intermingling of simple food and spacecraft also serves as a good metaphor for modern Singapore, a famously strict, hyperefficient city-state driving relentlessly toward a spotless, prosperous and most of all futuristic future, but at the same time a place whose denizens are uniquely obsessed with eating, or makan, where even taxi drivers are bona fide gourmands with fierce opinions and stratospheric standards. Food is how the Singaporean soul respires, a place where, as one chef puts it, “if you’re not great, you’re done.” Here friends greet each other not by inquiring as to how they are, but as to whether they’ve eaten: “Makan already or not?”

Of course that’s what they say to one another. What they say to Western travelers engaged in eating their way across Singapore is usually something else: “Did you try durian?”

I had come to Singapore for the same reason many people come to Singapore: to eat street food until I fainted. By midmorning on my first full day here, I was already within striking distance of my goal. Spread across a table in the Tiong Bahru Market—a open-air “hawker center” lined with little stands offering street food specialties—were the remains of the following: shui kueh, gelatinous rice cakes covered with spicy, slightly bitter minced vegetables and chili sauce; two plates of “carrot cake,” made with a carrot-shaped Chinese radish and eggs, one with black fish sauce, one without; soft squares of yam with chili paste and sesame seeds; some tubes of rice flour with more chili paste; fritters dipped in strong coffee with condensed milk; and two pieces of mian jian kueh, or “stubborn cake,” pockets of chewy dough with shredded coconut. Between the sweltering heat and the chili, I was sweating visibly by the end of my breakfast binge, but every single thing was delicious, at points verging on revelatory. Not to mention cheap, averaging around $3.50 a dish.

Singapore has long had a world-class street food scene, but in the 1970s the government moved the vendors off the streets and into expansive pavilions, which were erected all over the island to ensure order and cleanliness. Prior to the consolidation, hawkers would do things like wash dishes in a single bucket of water all day long — pause for a moment to consider that — but today’s hawker centers are so impeccably clean and tightly regulated that you can eat your way through them without fear of dire gastrointestinal consequences. The centers are always bustling; people are always eating. “Singaporeans eat five meals a day,” my charming, witty guide Garry Koh told me. And yet, I said, everyone is thin. Garry shrugged. “We sweat a lot.”

Over the coming days, Garry would take us on a knee-buckling journey through the hawker gauntlet. Among many, many other stops, we hit the Tian Tian Hainanese stall at the Maxwell Food Centre for chicken rice, a succulent national dish in which chicken is boiled and rice is cooked in the liquid and served with chili paste; next was Rojak, aka “Singapore salad” with mango cake, turnip, dried bean curd, bean sprouts and pineapple with prawn paste, a rich, sweet dish with a slow-moving heat. At the Tekka Centre in the Little India neighborhood we stopped for an afternoon snack of perfectly fried banana fritters and the Maya Mohan stand’s pulled tea, a spicy, milky ginger tea dramatically poured from a cup the hawker holds aloft above his head. We savored it as Garry told us about durian, the notoriously pungent fruit that has captivated the locals for many years.

In the past, hawker stands were passed from generation to generation, but their continued existence is a bit less assured today. The hours are long, the pay is bad, and there’s no vacation time and little chance at retirement savings, so the younger generation, faced with far more lucrative options in the booming Singapore economy, isn’t particularly interested. “The dream of every hawker is to make enough money so their children won’t have to do this,” says Violet Oon, a prominent local writer, cook and food historian who I meet for a drink at the palatial Shangri-La Hotel. As a result, she says, “people say it’s dying.”

That cuts right to the central culinary paradox of Singapore. People love food here to the point of preoccupation — eating being one of the two things you’re allowed to do in public with abandon (the other being shopping, ideally for luxury goods) — but being a cook is still viewed as somewhat disreputable, something for foreigners to come and do. Historically, if you worked at a restaurant, Oon says, it was “because you were at the bottom of the heap intellectually, because you couldn’t do anything else.” As a result, in Singapore you had local food and you had fine dining cuisine, usually Western, with minimal cross-pollination, and with vernacular food getting little respect in fine-dining circles.

This attitude is changing and the gap is closing, gradually, with the rise of a few celebrated homegrown haute cuisine chefs like Willin Low, Justin Quek of Sky on 57 and Michael Han of the celebrated FiftyThree. Local food lovers hope that the arrival of celebrity chefs like Daniel Boulud, Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck, Guy Savoy and Joël Robuchon — all of whom opened restaurants here last year — will lend some more prestige to the trade and draw a new generation of Singaporeans into the kitchen. Ashton Hall, a brash 31-year-old American chef with an impressive résumé that includes two stints running restaurants for Jean-Georges Vonderichten, is now helming Bistro Soori, a sleek, contemporary Asian fusion restaurant here (try his ingenious take on foie gras, the house special). He told me he’s struggling to recruit and retain local talent, and hoping that the restaurant boom in general and Bistro Soori in particular can help the country develop a backbench of talented young cooks at the fine-dining level. “I don’t think Singaporean families have grasped that being a chef is a great thing,” he says. “That’s what I hope to do.”

THERE ARE FOUR of us standing in Ruqxana Vasanvala’s backyard, choking. We’re making fried kangkon leaves with sambai in her outdoor kitchen, and Vasanvala has instructed us to fry the mortar-pounded spices — red chili, shallots, garlic and more — until we choke. Then we add onions and pounded dried prawns and repeat. “Oh my god, it’s like chemical warfare,” I tell her, gasping after round two. “This is how you win a war,” she jokes. “Or better yet, serve them the food and win them over, right? Make them friends.” Vasanvala is a former engineer who dropped out a decade ago to teach cooking at her bungalow in Bedok. Growing up, all of her neighbors kept their doors unlocked. “I used to run in and out of everyone’s house,” she says. “That’s how I learned: watching other people’s mothers cook.”

Vasanvala teaches us to make turmeric rice, spicy pickles and ikan panggang, grilled sea bass wrapped in banana leaves with a spicy, bitter, slightly citrusy sauce. These are Peranakan dishes, Peranakan being the mix of Malay and Chinese that provides as much of an ethnic baseline as there is in Singapore’s overwhelmingly immigrant culture. It’s here, I would argue, between expensive haute cuisine and cheap hawker food, where Singapore’s sweet spot resides. The Peranakan chili crab at Long Island Seafood, a 65-year-old local institution, was extraordinary, a whole crab steamed and served in a large bowl full of rich chili sauce with a bit of sweetness. Eating it was physical, like breaking down a piece of slippery field artillery, but the effort made the payoff that much more satisfying. And the meal we had at True Blue, a celebrated eight-year-old Peranakan restaurant, was my favorite. Crab and chicken meatball soup, beef randang and ayam buah keluak, chicken stewed in spicy black sauce with Indonesian black nuts cooked in their shells for hours to the consistency of black tar. You scoop the nut paste out with a small spoon and mix it with chunks of chicken, chili paste and rice. In a week’s worth of great dishes, it stands out as my favorite, one of the best I’ve ever tasted.

“MY DAUGHTER LOVES THEM,” says Garry, eyeing the durian. He sniffs. “But I make sure she eats them outside the apartment.” We’re sitting at a picnic table next to the Chin Yong Fruits Trading stand. It’s late at night, but all around are durian lovers picking at the greenish, custardy pods found inside the spiky fruits in varying states of rap ture. Beside us are two dozen garbage bins full of durian husks from the day.

The smell is so pungent it’s practically visible. Durian is banned from hotels and public transit on account of its distinctive odor; you can smell a durian stand before you can see it. That said, it’s also a highly prized delicacy in Singapore, sometimes fetching as much as $60 for a single fruit. “It tastes like heaven,” Garry says, “but it smells like hell.” It’s a nice turn of phrase, but I would argue that it tastes exactly like it smells. After I eat it, everything smells and tastes vaguely of Durian. It’s like a haunting. It takes days to wear off. Then Garry mischievously slips me a durian shake without telling me what it is and it starts all over again. Let’s say no more about the durian.

Okay, one more thing about the durian. At present, Singapore is building the world’s largest indoor tropical gardens and the world’s largest aquarium; they already have the world’s biggest ferris wheel and debatably the world’s biggest fountain, “the fountain of wealth.” Their new supreme courthouse looks like a flying saucer. They own the distinction of having the world’s largest pillarless structure: the convention center at Marina Bay Sands, which is one of the two mind-bogglingly lavish, multibillion-dollar integrated resorts opened last year, sort of Vegas by way of Dubai, with feng shui, where visitors can buy, among other things, gold-plated tea. What’s more, with strong financial and tourism sectors and the world’s busiest port, Singapore’s economy is like a perpetual motion machine. Since its independence in 1965, the nation has devised without question the cleanest, most orderly and efficient society on Earth. And yet its citizens are completely devoted to a weird-looking fruit that smells absolutely appalling. This, I venture, is worthy of note.

Executive Editor JOE KEOHANE can still taste the durian.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BARRY FALLS

IN ASSAM, A SLIVER OF northeastern India known for its black tea and one-horned rhinos, lives a squat, baby-faced 32-year-old woman named Anandita Tamuly. In the springtime, sitting in her sparsely furnished cinder-block home, which is adorned with traditional straw hats and a portrait of Ganesh, the Hindu god of good fortune, she produces a binder filled with press clippings and miscellaneous scraps of paper. Among them is a note from Dr. Prabin Bora, an eye surgeon in Jorhat.

It reads: “This is to certify that Miss Anandita Dutta [her maiden name] … has been examined by me regarding any abnormality in her eyes. Her eyes are normal.”

THAT THIS WOULD BE THE CASE is astounding when you consider what Tamuly does for a living, which involves rubbing bhut jolokia peppers, the hottest peppers in the world, into her eyes. The eye trick, which is not a trick at all, is just the beginning. Tamuly also scarfs down those same chilis as if they were peanuts — 60 in two minutes is her personal record so far — and slathers a purée of them up and down both arms for good measure. It’s a strange vocation that has brought her international fame and frequent television appearances. Over tea and cookies, she shows off a DVD reel of her feats on the big color TV in the bedroom they helped her pay for. (Even in this tiny village in rural India, it seems, there’s no escaping the allure of reality-show stardom.)

Tamuly’s 15 minutes have been made possible by the emerging fever for fiery foods in the West. Hot peppers these days are much more than simple comestibles. For the most obsessive pepper-heads they’re tantamount to religion. These adrenaline junkies who put their mouths, if not their lives, on the line are always pushing the limits on how much heat a human can take, actively antagonizing their bodies with capsaicin (the compound in chilis that causes the burn). Their ardor for the hot stuff has given rise to a multibillion-dollar fiery goods industry. And the bhut jolokia peppers Tamuly inhales are the rarest, most iconically incandescent of all hot peppers — 200 hundred times hotter than jalapeños and more than twice as hot as habaneros. Though these little fireballs are relatively new to the international market, in Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and New York they’ve lately been selling like Big Macs. And they’re indigenous to only one place: this sliver of India near the border with Burma. I flew there last spring to see for myself where it all began. Within days, I would be taking a foolishly big bite out of a bhut jolokia.

BEFORE THEY ACHIEVED CULT notoriety for being the key ingredient in hot sauces with names like Pure Death, Satan’s Rage, Naga Sabi Bomb and Lethal Ingestion, bhut jolokias (sometimes called ghost peppers) had more practical applications. Though they have long played a part in the local cuisine, mostly among tribal groups, the peppers have more often found use as a folk remedy for stomachaches. They’re not only safe (in small doses), some locals believe they’re also good for you. As they like to say in Assam, “It hurts going in but not coming out.” Moreover, rice farmers have long used the peppers as an elephant repellent, grinding them into paste and smearing it onto fences to ward away marauding pachyderms. And in the old days, before the Brits brought railroads, tea and cricket to Assam, the Ahom kings who had ruled the region since the 13th century would rub bhut jolokias into subjects’ eyes as punishment for wrongdoing — which may have been where Tamuly got the idea in the first place.

But it wasn’t until recently that the bhut jolokia caught the attention of the rest of the world. In 2003, Indian military scientists in the garrison town of Tezpur, a traditional bulwark against the Chinese Red Army, who last invaded in 1962, began exploring the potential of a weaponized chili — looking to turn it into a crowd control grenade. They knew that the bhut jolokias that grew in the area were hotter than Hades, but nobody knew precisely how hot they were. So they commissioned a test to find out where it ranks on the Scoville Heat Scale, the global standard for spiciness devised in 1912 by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. It scored off the charts, and so they published the findings in the official journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences. The paper caught the attention of the Indian press, and those articles soon crisscrossed the globe on the web, finding their way to Paul Bosland at New Mexico State University, who had gotten some bhut jolokia seeds from a chili fanatic who’d visited Assam. Bosland, who heads the university’s nonprofit Chile Pepper Institute, grew a few plants in greenhouse conditions and confirmed those Scoville scores. He submitted his findings to Guinness World Records, which in 2007 declared that the pepper was indeed the hottest on earth, topping the million mark on the Scoville scale (the jalapeño, by comparison, averages about 5,000).

Assam’s first and only bhut jolokia exporter began touting the pepper’s Guinness status to hot sauce producers in Germany, England, the U.S. and Japan. Soon foreign reporters began appearing in Assam in pursuit of the bhut jolokia. Demand for the peppers rose sharply worldwide. Today the peppers are increasingly crossing into the mainstream in the U.S. and Europe, showing up in chocolates, hard candies and jellies. And last year New York’s Brick Lane Curry House unveiled what it claimed was the world’s hottest curry, made with 10 dried bhut jolokia pods and accompanied by a certificate for anyone foolhardy enough to tackle a bowl.

The peppers had never been a cash crop in Assam, which is why, since 2007, local supply has fallen far short of global demand. To keep pace, the agricultural authorities in Assam have been urging farmers to try their hands at growing peppers. “The bhut jolokia has saved the local economy,” says Ananta Saikia, a professor at Assam Agricultural University who, with his wife Leena, supplies dried pods, powders, pastes and flakes to hot sauce makers worldwide. In the last few years, the wholesale price has gone up some 1,500 percent. Though the supply is woefully short, ghost peppers are now exported by the ton.

GUWAHATI , ASSAM’S MUDDY regional capital, is densely packed with some 800,000 souls. I arrive at the start of the pepper’s growing season, which runs till late summer, when torrential monsoons usually wash away the crop. Crossing the state in an Indian-made SUV, along the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra River, I spy crinkly-skinned red chilis in every roadside market, stacked on mats next to the potatoes, eggplants and carrots.

The locals tend to discourage imprudent foreigners eager for a taste. In Jorhat, a tea town six hours east of Guwahati, I meet up with the Saikias, who five years after launching their company, Frontal Agritech, are still Assam’s only bhut jolokia exporter. Ananta suggests I try a sliver of fresh pepper with dinner but strongly advises against eating it whole — at least without a physician present. Workers at his processing plant wear gloves and goggles, and the warnings on his packaged products suggest doing the same before starting to use them. “Bhut jolokias are essentially poison,” he tells me. “It’s dangerous to eat them.” But, I reason, if a diminutive woman can eat 51 in one sitting, as Tamuly did for celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay in 2009 (falling short of her televised record), I can certainly handle a single pepper. Can’t I?

AFTER I SPEND A FEW DAYS CONTEMPLATING the bhut jolokia, my chance comes over dinner at Thengal Manor, the tea plantation turned guesthouse where I’ve been staying. I consider the little pepper that sits primed on my plate. It is red like the devil, red like a very sore throat. Despite its fearsome appearance, it’s harmless when intact. Unlike some of its milder brethren, no fiery oils seep through this pepper’s skin. You can touch it, even lick it without repercussions. Its searing heat lies beneath the surface, on a time delay, buried within. While habaneros hit you fast on the taste buds, bhut jolokia’s burn comes on very slowly. I witnessed this delayed reaction on an early appearance Tamuly made on a variety show on Indian TV. A scrawny young guy from the audience had volunteered to eat a pepper before she began shoveling them down. Brash, he downed one whole, raising his hands in triumph when he was done. No big deal. Shortly after, though, his face registered something like panic. A minute later, the camera caught him gulping down water, wiping up tears, gasping for relief. I clutch the pepper by its harmless stem and bite off a little hunk. At first it’s more sweet than hot. Not bad, I think. I can handle this. In fact, it’s actually pretty tasty. And so I go in for a big bite. And then it hits me, slowly at first, exponentially building, the tears kicking in after two minutes, the sides of my tongue throbbing as if I’d tried to swallow a red-hot poker. I reach for a spoonful of steamed rice, and then for another. Neither rice nor soda deliver any relief. It takes about 10 minutes for the pain to subside. While I certainly won’t be challenging any world records, I’d eaten the hottest pepper on Earth and lived to tell the tale.

Back at Tamuly’s home, I sit in the front parlor and talk more about chilis, her life’s work. She grew up poor without much education, she tells me. Now, newly with child, bhut jolokia might be her ticket out. Before the tsunami she flew to Japan to make a TV appearance, her first overseas trip. Soon she’ll be en route to the U.S. to film another show, Super Humans on the History Channel. Yet one prize eludes her: recognition from Guinness World Records. A few years back she wrote to inquire about submitting a claim for the record for bhut jolokia eating. She received a letter back informing her that she was welcome to challenge the record-holder for jalapeños, American Alfredo Hernandes, who in 2006 consumed 16 peppers in a minute. She shows me the letter she got from London, and a sheet of paper listing eight rules under the heading “Jalapeño Pepper Eating — Most in One Minute.” Tamuly was confused and insulted by it, she said. But though she’s never seen or tasted a jalapeño, she’s willing to give it a shot if she can get her hands on some. She’s pretty sure they’ll be no match for her. “I can eat those like candy,” she says.

JAY CHESHES, a New York–based food writer who can hardly bear getting shampoo in his eyes, poses no threat to Anandita Tamuly.

CHILE
The Carretera Austral

330 MILES

Fly into Coyhaique, pick up the car you wisely booked in advance, and head south on Route 7 to Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael to see the glaciers cracking into the sea, and to Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo to see the jagged mountains. Then end at the former frontier outpost Villa O’Higgins, where, if you feel inclined, you can arrange transport to Campo de Hielo Sur, the famed South Patagonian Ice Field. — JOE KEOHANE

NEW ZEALAND
Coastal Highway 6

533 MILES

You may have to steel yourself to drive a large vehicle on the left side of the road if you attempt this rambling drive down the dramatic west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, but the bumps in the road end there. Once you rent a camper van in Nelson, you can stop pretty much anywhere along the seaside cliff s of Highway 6, which means you can choose your own route from beach to glacier hike to campsite with minimal planning. Finally, you find yourself in Queenstown, the birthplace of bungee jumping and the perfect staging area for whitewater rafting and a strange pursuit called “canyon swinging.” — JACQUELINE DETWILER

PANAMA
The Road From Colon To Pedasi

142 MILES

Every year, around 14,000 ships traverse the isthmus of Panama by way of its storied canal, which took 48 years to build. After picking up your motorcycle in Panama City, you’re on your way to the colorful port city of Colon, where you dip your toes in the Caribbean. From here, double back toward the Pacific, stopping to spin through the cloud forests at Altos de Campana National Park, the tiny town of Rio Hato and, finally, the perfect beaches of Pedasi. — MIKE GUY

SEDONA
The Red Rock Scenic

7.5 MILES

This brief jaunt from the New Age town of Sedona offers a quick tour of some of the more striking desert vistas on this continent. The byway is lined with evocative rock formations such as Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock and Snoopy Rock (shaped, respectively, like a bell, a cathedral and Snoopy). After the scenery, the next best thing about this trip is access to hiking and biking trails, as well as the requisite crystal purveyors. If you want to stretch your legs and make an afternoon of it, pull over and take a trek. If not, just enjoy the magnificent red clay and low scrub and maybe stop for a bite in the charming village of Oak Creek. — LAYLA SCHLACK

NORWAY
The Atlantic Road

53.3 MILES

Starting north of Kristiansund, in countryside dotted with summer farms and fishermen’s cabins, the Atlantic Road bridges mossy islands in the Norwegian Sea, winding south past the otherworldly town of Molde. In autumn, visitors come to watch wild storms drive waves against the bridge supports, but in summer, they come for misty vistas of the western fjord area, with few threats more extreme than the occasional whale or seal. Halfway through, give your nerves a break with a stop in Kårvåg for some of the freshest fish you’ll ever eat. — JD

MAUI, HAWAII
The Hana Highway

52 MILES

This famed drive starts in Kahului and goes to Hana. Your first jaw-dropping sight will be the aptly named Garden of Eden Arboretum & Botanical Garden, where the opening scenes of Jurassic Park were shot. Along the 52-mile road, you’ll pass the 130-foot Lower Puohokamoa Falls and Wailua Falls, which tumbles 80 feet into the Pacific. Oheo Gulch is worth a stop to dip your feet into the Seven Sacred Pools (shown here). Your final destination is the town of Hana, a secluded throwback with about 700 residents. Relax with a drink from the Hasegawa General Store and enjoy the scenery. — LS

INDIA
The Road from Mumbai to Goa

359 MILES

On the long (expect the whole thing to take about eight hours), somewhat challenging trip from one of India’s biggest cities to the tiny, wealthy seaside state of Goa, start heading south on NH17 away from the city. Stop by the Karnala Bird Sanctuary, and then work your way down through forests and along ghats running alongside the river Vashishti. En route, you’ll pass small scenic coastal towns and fishing villages. Once in Goa, enjoy the palm-studded beaches, famous temples and churches, and the unique architecture — a vestige of 450 years of Portuguese rule. — JK

GEORGIA
The Barrier Islands

180 MILES

As barrier islands go (the Outer Banks, Great Barrier Reef), the cluster protecting the Georgia coast are overlooked. Each of the eight islands has its own personality. You may not have time to see them all, so start by sampling some garlicky steamed crabs on Tybee, just outside of Savannah. After that, drive the coastal road (and a little I-95) to Little St. Simon’s, with enough bird species to dazzle the most jaded naturalist. Finally, park and take a ferry to the most beautiful of them all, Cumberland. Ashore, cycle to the ruins of the mansion Plum Orchard, and take in overgrown luxury. — MG

IT’S MY LAST DAY in Angola, and so far the trip has been a complete disaster. I’ve secured almost no diamonds for my employers in London, while the dapper Antwerp dealers have been stuffing their coffers. Finally, a massive cache of black market ice opens up in an eastern province, and in a last-ditch effort to secure it for myself I embark on a complex misdirection campaign, bribing the Dutch prospectors and sending my own on a wild goose chase around the country. Against all odds, it works. When the diamonds go to auction, I bid unopposed.

“I can’t believe you’re pulling this off,” Jason Rohrer says, looking over my shoulder. He’s been watching me play a game he’s developing called Diamond Trust, biting his lip when I make a bad move and attempting, futilely, to provide pointers as I jab my stylus at the Nintendo DS screen.

We’re sitting in his office, a tiny cinder block cube in his house in Las Cruces, N.M. His desk is a thicket of wires, connecting a Nintendo dev kit, a modified DS with an artery of cords coming out the back and a trio of aging computers chugging along. One of them, a 10-year-old laptop that Rohrer received from his sister, has a busted hinge and needs to be propped open with an award. Aside from the wire clutter, it’s a Spartan space.

If Rohrer seems overly invested in how I do in a 15-minute playthrough of a video game, it should be noted that the game is one that he designed and built from scratch. In the past hours, he has shown me stacks of papers from the planning phases — notes about cognition and epistemology, aborted alternate designs — pen and paper versions played through at the kitchen table with his wife and kids. He references magazine stories about conflict diamonds, rattles off obscure game theory terms and explicates the tortured process he’s undergone to distribute his creation after parting ways with its original backer, a large game developer called Majesco Entertainment.

In short, Rohrer has poured a lot of effort into this game.

That might seem excessive if we were just talking about a video game, but it would make a lot more sense if we were talking about art. Rohrer is on the vanguard of a new movement in video games, one that eschews their schlock origins for complex, carefully considered experiences that owe as much to Kandinsky and John Cage as to Pac-Man and Duke Nukem.

His creations address such weighty subjects as marriage, the impulses to have children and be an artist, the difficulties of shared community space and, yes, conflict diamonds in Africa.

That might all seem a bit, well, niche. However, in recent months art games have been making strides into the mainstream. In 2008, Rohrer’s friend Jonathan Blow released Braid — a Mario Bros.–style game in which players’ motivations for rescuing the heroine are increasingly called into question. To date, it has made over $5 million and garnered near-universal “game of the year” commendations. While indie and art game designers have in the past been relegated to side tents at game industry expos, Rohrer addressed the Game Developers Conference this March three times and beat out Doom designer (and gaming megastar) John Romero for a conceptual game prize. Earlier this year, Swedish programmer Markus Persson blew all indie game records out of the water with Minecra , which has, to date, made over $33 million.

A prime example of this new aesthetic would be Passage, Rohrer’s first major entrée into the world of art games. Designed for GAMMA 256, a curated show in Montreal in 2007, it is abrasively lo-fi, with Atari-style graphics and chip tune music written by Rohrer himself. In it, you play a tiny pixilated guy centered on the left side of a narrow stripe of screen. Moving around a map, you find treasure chests to up your score. You come across a female character, and if you walk up to her, a heart appears, and she joins you in your journey.

But that company comes at a cost: The two of you can’t get to all of the treasure chests you could on your own. Eventually, another harsh reality dawns on you. Once on the far left side of the screen, you inexorably make your way over to the middle and then the right. Your hair changes from blond to gray. When you reach the far right edge, your wife turns into a tombstone. Then you do. Almost mockingly, the game reveals your score. Game over.

If that all feels a bit chilling, then you’ve go en the point. Rohrer has described Passage as a “memento mori,” and when he talks about it, it’s clear that the game is something very personal for him. “I just remember having this feeling as I programmed it,” he tells me with a smile. “I knew it was the perfect way to express this thing inside of me. I just kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m making this.’”

Others couldn’t believe it either. After releasing it for free online, Rohrer watched as word of it spread from his friends’ blogs to major gaming news outlets to, eventually, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire and The New York Times. Within months, Passage had been canonized, lauded by top game designers in speeches at the Game Developers Conference and referenced by top-shelf developers as something to aspire to. Roger Ebert, who had previously drawn the ire of fanboys by claiming that games could never be art, was inundated by demands that he play it until the crotchety reviewer saw a video of the game and abandoned the debate entirely. Overnight, Rohrer had become one of the figureheads of the art game movement.

If that’s not necessarily a mantle Rohrer asked for, it’s one he’s particularly well suited to take up. Standing 6 feet, 8 inches in a worn blue hoodie and jeans — a uniform he wears literally every day — he looks more like a mountaineer than the stereotypical Cheetos-chewing programmer. He speaks carefully but relentlessly, drawing on a tall stack of books, CDs, magazines and games to illustrate ideas. Conversations drift laterally from topic to topic. An observation about his sleeping infant, Novy, morphs into a discussion of the video game concept of “perma-death” — that is, when a game gives no extra lives, causing players to value their one — before turning to his research of the secret Rosicrucian Order.

Five other random topics:  
1. In college he and some of his Cornell buddies spent a year developing and implementing a system for beating the casinos at roulette — a system involving passive ultrasonic transmitt ers, a hacked Palm Pilot and a tiny electric motor; they chickened out after making $40.

2. In 31 years, he’s never held a full-time job.

3. Each of his three children has a one-of-a-kind first name (Mez, Ayza and Novy) and no last name.

4. He designed and built his own trance-inducing pulsing LED glasses, which he used to come up with the title of another game, Inside a Star-Filled Sky, which he describes as an “infinitely recursive shooter.”

5. He and his family live on a total of $14,500 per year, an income cobbled together from donations, game profits and the support of a patron. They graph their expenses from month to month on a piece of paper on the back of his office door.

This last point comes close to the heart of the Rohrer family’s lifestyle. They have no cars, no insurance, no mortgage. Their living room consists of a futon frame (no mattress), two found wooden chairs and a small, antiquated television. They eat as much as they can grow in their small backyard garden, which they cultivate during New Mexico’s long growing season. Rohrer and his wife homeschool their children, following the “unschooling” philosophy, in which students pursue their own interests in a largely unstructured environment.

It’s a lifestyle with many practical consequences. When I first meet Rohrer, he, Mez and Ayza are preparing for a trip to the farmer’s market. To that end, he’s got a tandem recumbent bicycle with attached trailer. He sets me up with their other bike — actually a recumbent three-wheel terra trike — and then his son briefs me on some of the hazards we’ll be facing.

“It’s mainly pit bulls,” Mez tells me, “but some Rottweilers. And one time my dad chased away a Pomeranian.” The dogs, Rohrer explains, snap their chains, hop their fences or slip out their front doors and then, inevitably, come after people on bicycles. “My wife, Lauren, has been attacked twice,” he warns. Now she won’t ride anymore. That’s pretty tough when the only other means of transportation is a half-mile walk to the bus.

In some ways, life with the Rohrers has a gamelike feel to it. “It’s often struck me,” Rohrer says, “that the game of making games is more fun than the games themselves.” Maybe that’s why his games seem to be wrested from real life. While many programmers streamline their lives to make room for the virtual worlds they’re creating, Rohrer complicates his — upping the degree of difficulty until it becomes worth playing.

For example, while the surprise death of a neighbor led Rohrer to create Passage, it was his experiences raising Mez that led to another of his best-known creations, Gravitation.

In that game, you must balance your own interests — searching for white stars on a maze of platforms — with the desires of a small child, who would like to toss a ball back and forth with you. The twist is that playing with the child gives you the power to get to the stars, and searching for stars too much will estrange you from your child. That’s a tension pulled directly from his life. “I definitely come out of my office too tired to engage with my kids some days,” says Rohrer. “I wouldn’t trade the time I spend with them for anything. But then I wouldn’t trade the time I spend in my office either.”

When I say goodbye to the Rohrers on my last day in Las Cruces, Jason and Lauren are cooking dinner in the kitchen. Mez plays Minecra in Jason’s office. As I prepare to slip out the front door, their toddler Ayza looks up. He’s got an entire world spread out on the living room fioor: Legos, wooden trains, paper maps and Playmobile figures. “So long,” he says, with a surprising nonchalance. And I say back, “So long.” He nods at me once and then returns to the floor, creating the rules of a universe.

Contributing writer MATT THOMPSON finds the degree of difficulty in his life sufficiently high already, thank you very much.

BY GRANT STODDARD

“ THERE’S A JUVENILE MALE HALFWAY UP THAT STRANGLER FIG,” says animal control professional George Cera as he brings his golf cart to a stop and points into a grove of trees. I follow Cera’s finger but once again fail to see what he’s zeroed in on. With clinical swiftness, he uses a single pellet to dispatch the lizard, which is about the size of a professional-scale football. We walk over to find a lifeless ctenosaura similis or spiny-tailed black iguana.

“I kinda hate to do this,” he says as sweat beads on his sun-reddened pate. “But it’s a manmade problem, and trying to stop it from getting even more out of control is just the right thing to do.”

The stocky, 275-pound Cera places the animal in a cooler with two others he corralled earlier with similar deftness.

“Gettin’ hungry?” he asks. “One more like that and we’ll have enough for lunch.”

This is Boca Grande, a small community on beautiful Gasparilla Island in southwest Florida. It may not look like it, but the town is the front line in a desperate defense of Florida’s native flora and fauna against invasive species. The spiny-tailed black iguana is just one of around 400 nonnative animal species known to be lurking in Florida’s dense, verdant undergrowth. Burmese pythons, lionfish, Nile monitors, feral hogs and rhesus monkeys have all made Florida their home, wreaking varying degrees of environmental havoc. Last year, keeping the lid on invasive animals and plants cost the Sunshine State more than $500 million. By some estimates, that figure will rise dramatically.

According to Kristina Serbesoff-King, Invasive Species Program Manager at the Nature Conservancy, Florida is a victim of its location. “About half of the Florida peninsula experiences a subtropical climate,” she says. “This allows for a year-round growing season, meaning that nonnative plants and animals that have invasive characteristics thrive here.”

The spiny-tailed black iguanas on Gasparilla Island, for instance, descended from just a few exotic pets that were accidentally released in the late 1970s. The man who did so ’fessed up in 2008, several hundreds of thousands of dollars into the eradication program.

Alien species’ success is almost always at the expense of native plants and animals that can be wiped out with alarming speed. Serbesoff-King says that after direct habitat destruction, invasives are the greatest cause of listed species decline. But what finally stirred Boca Grande residents into hiring a trapper wasn’t the rapid degradation of the local biosphere, says Cera, but the prolific amount of iguana excrement—iguano?—piling up in their driveways, around their pools and in their attics. The exclusive island paradise had been befouled.

“When I showed up, I was like, ‘Man, you got a bigger problem than lizard poop,’” says Cera as we careen along golf cart tracks that run alongside the road. “There were hardly any flowers, no birds were singing, a total lack of young gopher tortoises, fewer anoles than you’d expect, and almost every snake I came across was all tore up.”

Here’s why: Ctenosaurs are the jocks of the iguana world. Not only do they hold the Guinness World Record for being the planet’s fastest lizard—having been clocked at 21.7 mph—they’re also more physically robust, omnivorous, cold resistant and aggressive than your green pet store iguana. While last year’s uncharacteristically frigid Floridian winter depleted many invasive reptiles, the burrowing black spiny-tail rode out the cold snap and seems intent on staying.

After quickly assessing the extent of the problem, Cera put in a bid of $20 per head, beating out around nine other trappers. An initially unpopular and protested “iguana tax” was set at between $40 and $70 per every $1 million in home value. With at least a quarter million dollars hiding out in the brush, Cera soon found a place to stay on the island and went to work.

“If this was two or three years ago, we’d have seen around 50 large adults by now,” says Cera as he scans some of the iguanas’ favorite haunts. “There are still a lot of lizards out there, but I think that individuals who have reproduced are the ones who have that gene for being leery, and they’ve passed that gene on to their young.”

In addition to being a trapper, Cera is also an amateur scientist, brimming with theories about evolution, the earth’s age and, most colorfully, the cognitive abilities of his cold-blooded nemeses.

“They can recognize me,” he says, collecting another kill from beneath some palm fronds. Lunch is becoming more substantial.

Cera is so confident that these iguanas have the capacity to recognize individual humans that he has changed clothing during hunts to lull them into a false sense of security. Another, more easily verifiable trick he plays on the ctenosaurs is casting a fishing line into the undergrowth, using a rubber frog as a lure.

“I reel in that frog along the ground and a few of ’em will chase it,” he says. “You can count on them being hungry and aggressive pretty much all of the time.”

At the peak of his operations, Cera was culling up to 500 iguanas per day. The work was starting to take its toll. “At the beginning it was difficult to deal with what I was doing,” he says. “See, I’m really just a big animal nerd.”

Cera does not look like a nerd of any kind. He looks, well, like a tough-guy biker—bullish, with a wiry goatee and shaved head. At his core, he’s always been an animal lover—who loves to eat wild game.

“I don’t believe in killing for sport,” he says. “I always tell my kids, if you’re gonna kill something, you’d better be planning on eating it.”

The people of Central and South America have used the iguana as a food source for centuries, referring to it as gallina de palo or “tree chicken.” (Beyond the supposedly similar flavor, the ctenosaur’s mannerisms— head bobbing and cocking—are uncannily henlike.) The lizard was so important to the diet of Central and South Americans that the Catholic Church long ago reclassified the iguana as a fish, permitting its consumption on Fridays and religious holidays.

“When I read that, I thought, ‘What a waste,’” says Cera. “I’d been just throwing them away. I started to compile recipes that I found and figured out some stuff of my own, basically substituting iguana meat for chicken.”

The recipes, along with some observations about invasive iguanas became a book: Save Florida, Eat an Iguana! that Cera wrote and self-published.

Not content to let me take his word on how delicious iguanas can be, Cera calls up the South Beach Bar and Grille to see if the chef would be up for lending his gastronomic flair to the five lizards we now have on ice. The chef has recently found success with beer-battered “gator wings” and is more than happy to research other novelty items for the bar menu.

Cera hands the catch over to the eager chef, and soon lunch arrives in the form of ctenosaur tacos. Even in among the cilantro, papaya and shredded queso, my senses are relaying that I’m not eating chicken. It’s quite delicious, though I’m slightly relieved that the chef chose not to serve it on the bone.

A year or so after Cera arrived on Gasparilla, native birds like scrub jays begin to return, and the gardens are in full bloom. Locals who were less than welcoming to Cera at first even went so far as to offer personal apologies for how they’d treated him when he first arrived. In fact, his program may have been too successful. The USDA is planning to take over and study the remaining population, and the town is considering discontinuing his services. Cera thinks this is a mistake.

“Here’s the reality: At some point you have to stop studying them and start killing them,” says Cera. “And we passed that point a long, long time ago.”

The discussion in Boca Grande is whether governmental organizations or private contractors like George Cera are more effective at keeping invasive species’ numbers in check. Kristina Serbesoff-King and her colleague, Dr. Meg Lowman, think that the best results will be achieved when both are working in concert.

“Private contractors are integral to invasive control,” says Serbesoff-King. “They have worked hand in glove with agencies throughout Florida. Yes, they are being paid to implement control efforts, but they are also sharing their lessons learned with the larger group.”

Serbesoff-King is the cochair of the Florida Invasive Species Partnership, floridainvasives.org. The website is a way for information on invasive species to be shared and acted upon in Florida. It’s proved a useful tool in protecting Florida’s natural species. “The way that people have been coming together to help combat this problem has helped keep me thinking positively about the task ahead of us,” she says.

As we thread in and out of opulent neighborhoods on Cera’s golf cart, we catch occasional glimpses of the USDA truck, eliciting resigned head-shaking from him.

“If they get about six iguanas, they consider it a good day,” he says before waxing poetic on the federal takeover of a once private enterprise. “The days of the cowboys, pirates and explorers are gone. What am I to do?”

BY MICHAEL KAPLAN

It’s just minutes from fight time, and the fans are pouring into Bangkok’s Rajadamnern Stadium. The venue’s concrete exterior is adorned with bright red and yellow banners and oversize portraits of tonight’s title fighters blowing in the breeze above the entryway. Keeping a careful watch of it all, wearing a black- and-gold sport shirt set off by a diamond-encrusted Rolex, is Songchai Ratanasuban. Unflappable and fleshy, he’s reputed to be the most successful muay Thai promoter in Bangkok, operating with a flattering and unwieldy nickname: “Golden Hand, Diamond Brain.” He sits at a folding table between a couple of food vendors, munching fruit spiked with sugar and chili, and slugging down a one-shot energy drink. This is his show.

The time closes in on 6:30 p.m., and tonight’s first fight, the one for the championship, is poised to begin. The contenders are the 22-year-old favorite Kitti Phromlert—nicknamed Tee U.S.—and a younger, shorter, thicker fighter named Phra Chan Chai. They step into the center of the ring. As is Muay Thai tradition, a three-piece band situated at the front of the stands kicks up a rollicking song with throbbing drums and hypnotic horn lines played from an Asian-style clarinet called a pi chawa. Tee U.S. and his opponent unspool a swirling traditional prefight dance, with rolling arms and twisting torsos, as a thanks to their trainers and supporters.

The music continues after the fight begins, but it’s no longer there to help express thanks. It is there to egg on the fighters, pushing them to be more aggressive. Phra Chan Chai delivers a kick to Tee U.S.’s sternum. Tee U.S. counters by grabbing Chai’s leg, hanging on to it, twisting it, and attempting to drop Chai onto his back. The fighters clutch one another’s necks, kneeing each other’s thighs in an effort to put the opponent off balance and deliver a devastating kick. The music becomes increasingly intense, acting as a score, punctuating each body blow, amping up the crowd of 6,000, as well as the fighters. Up in the top rows of seats, behind a 20-foot-high fence, where the most fanatical Thais are seated, waves of deafening cheers echo around the concrete arena. Tee U.S. is in control.

Muay Thai was first developed in the 16th century by Thai soldiers, likely as a means to repel potential colonizers. These days the martial art, a predecessor to the mixed martial arts currently fashionable worldwide, is so popular that even fantastically stylish hotels, such as the Metropolitan Hotel Bangkok, where I happen to be staying, sell fight packages that include ringside seats and escorts into the arenas where fights take place.

Five nights a week, muay Thai matches draw thousands of fight lovers to two cavernous stadiums in Bangkok. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are wagered each night, which makes the sport more profitable for some fans than it is for the fighters. But the boxers don’t seem to mind the disparity. “Muay Thai is so infused in the Thai culture that it’s borderline religious,” says Yodchatri Sityodtong, chairman and founder of Evolve MMA Academy, Asia’s largest chain of martial arts gyms and a former muay Thai fighter. “It taps into a lot of Thai values: spiritual, cultural and competitive.”

Just a day and a half before the big bout, Tee U.S. is relaxing in Kratumban, a rural village about 20 miles outside of Bangkok surrounded by fragrant mango fields and orchid farms that stretch to the horizon. There’s a muay Thai camp there, and when I arrive at 9 a.m., a half-dozen boys are already kicking at heavy bags, exchanging sharp elbows and punches in a battered boxing ring beneath a corrugated steel roof and executing onehanded pushups in the heavy morning air. The boys, aged 14 to 20, have hard-angled baby faces and work with almost military precision, the smacks of leather and grunts of labor ringing out into the surrounding fields.

Meanwhile, in a small room nearby, Tee U.S. soaks idly in the tub. Ordinarily, the star of the camp would be out there training with his fellow fighters, but he’s saving his strength for what promises to be the most important match of his young life.

He emerges from his bath, shirtless, in a pair of blue gym shorts, climbs into the now empty ring and lies on his rippled stomach as the other kids mill around. Trainer Nakorn Nankell, a big-faced, small-framed man who used to be a fighter, rubs him down with an astringent-smelling liniment oil. Tee U.S., all skin, bone and muscle, weighs 110 pounds. He must get down to 105 by the time of tomorrow morning’s weighin. “The oil provides heat,” he says. “It will help me to lose weight.”

As is the case with many young muay Thai fighters, Tee U.S., whose nickname was inspired by his love for America, was discovered in his local Buddhist temple, where he began fighting at the age of 9, in the northern farming region of Isaan. Fights are held regularly in these holy places, which function like neighborhood YMCAs in rural Thailand, and scouts from Bangkok are always eager for recommendations from monks and neighborhood trainers. Tee U.S. was one of these. He let home when he was 14, moved here and began rising toward professional status, honing the elbow attack that would become his trademark. Like the other fighters, he sleeps in a small communal room next to the practice ring, with wooden pallets serving as beds and the floor doubling as dining quarters. The accommodations are spartan, but nobody seems to mind. The older kids mentor the younger ones, both in how to fight and how to behave outside the ring. At times, the younger athletes seem more like contented sleep-away campers than professional fighters.

The mood is light, but the stakes for the impending bout are high, and the outcome will have financial ramifications that ripple well beyond Tee U.S. If he wins, he’ll split his payment, which will be at least $1,300, with Orasa Chueam, a slender and attractive woman who manages the camp (one of 5,000 across the country) on behalf of her family. He’ll also get a little sweetener in the form of a big party thrown by Orasa in his honor. After paying off his debt to the camp, he’ll split the remaining proceeds with his family. Tithing to parents is a Thai tradition, even among the wealthy. Of course, Tee U.S. doesn’t come from money. Since he started fighting, his family members have relied on his winnings to survive.

If he wins this match, his purse for the next fight will likely increase by 50 percent. If he keeps winning, it can go as high as $5,000 per match. But if he loses? No party, “and his fee for the next fight goes down,” Orasa says.
As one of the camp’s breadwinners, it would be understandable if Tee U.S. were a little nervous. He’s not. “I’m looking at it as just another fight. If I get too excited, I might make mistakes,” he says. But it’s hard to resist getting worked up. “Fighting in Bangkok was my dream,” he says matter-of-factly. He’s had about 300 fights, around 1,500 punishing rounds, but doesn’t even know his record. “After winning the belt, I’ll begin keeping track.”
Like most people involved in Muay Thai, the promoter Songchai fought his way up. “My family was very poor, and, as a boy, I was sent to live with the monks in the temple,” he says, sitting in his street-level office, which is sandwiched between a pair of large homes that he owns. “I began as a fighter, but I saw no future in it. So I began promoting.” Known for his keen eye, integrity and ability to match competitive fighters, Songchai has spent the last 30 years promoting bouts in Bangkok’s two big stadiums, Lumpini and Rajadamnern, including tomorrow night’s bout featuring Tee U.S. Adorning his office is a pair of altars devoted to Buddha, a wall-size dry-erase board on which he keeps track of upcoming fights and four vases that each contain one fighting fish. “Put these fish together and they attack the cheeks, necks, and eyes,” says Songchai, admiringly. “They fight to the death.”

I run into him at 6 the next morning inside the arena, where the evening’s fights will take place. Asked who he likes in the title match, Songchai hedges at first, then finally ventures that Tee U.S. has a better than 50 percent chance of winning. As an ace matchmaker in Bangkok, Songchai knows the fighters as well as he knows his own children. He spends afternoons scrutinizing them, observing their form, finding holes in their strategies. There are no fans around this early in the morning, but the stadium is full of anxious young fighters in boxer shorts preparing to weigh in.

Tee U.S., who still needs to trim down, spends 90 minutes trotting around the arena, careful to find a balance between losing weight and preserving energy for his match tonight. More running, more sweating, more liniment oil all combine to send him to the scale with a sense of confidence. He steps on gingerly, watches the diode numerals settle in at exactly 105. He suppresses a smile and poses for the local photographers. Catching his eye, I ask him what he will be doing this afternoon. Before he can answer, his trainer fires back, “Eating!”

Through much of the fight, Tee U.S. seems to be in control. By the third of five rounds, though, the momentum shifts. Slowly, grindingly, Chai takes the lead. Now he’s the one landing more punches and connecting with his feet. His combination of strength and youthful endurance work in his favor. By the fifth and final round, Tee U.S. is in trouble. Chai comes at him with a series of kicks, which catch him in the chest and head with wicked accuracy. As the round winds down, even Tee U.S.’s mighty elbows seem to be of little use. He loses in a decision.

Five minutes after the fight concludes, I spot a dejected-looking Tee U.S. standing alone backstage by the dressing room. He wears a gold-colored robe; his gloves are off and his hands have been untaped. I ask him how it feels to leave Rajadamnern without the championship, without the big party. “Win or lose, I feel the same,” he says, a bit unconvincingly, demonstrating a no-regret attitude, the Thai version of manning up. He keeps rolling his head from side to side, fidgeting as if he can’t wait for the conversation to end. He insists that there is nothing he could have done to turn things around. “It must go one of two ways for each of the fighters, and I don’t feel bad about it.” Chai was bigger and younger, he says. Tee U.S. was not aggressive enough. The fans rattled him.

By the time we’re done talking, he’s forcing a smile and planning his future. “I take a break for three or four days,” he says. “Then I’m back to work, getting ready for my next fight.”

Whether he wins or loses, MICHAEL KAPLAN, the author of three books and countless articles, always feels bad after a fight.

ON THE LITTLE-KNOWN GREEK ISLAND of Kalymnos, Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest free solo climber, is maneuvering his way around massive rock chandeliers hanging from a concavity on the side of a mountain overlooking the Aegean Sea. The stalactites and tufas create an upside-down, three-dimensional limestone forest, which can be disorienting and take a long time to pick through. It’s relentless, physical, big-muscle climbing. And yet Honnold, who has been basically hanging upside down from his hands and feet for well over half an hour, never seems to tire. He moves neither quickly nor slowly, but with a calm deliberation. Near the top of the wall, the most difficult part of the route, called the crux, he grunts three times. A moment later, with no further fanfare, he clips his rope through the chains. The climb is over.

“Fun,” Honnold says of a climb that many would consider either the thrill of a lifetime or a flat-out terrifying ordeal. “Pre y mellow.”

The 25-year-old California native is one of the best-known climbers in the world, a status he secured by free-soloing—climbing without a rope or any protection—routes considered difficult even with a full complement of safety equipment. In September 2008, he shocked the international climbing community by free-soloing the north face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. It’s considered the most formidable free solo ever done, and when it was over, Honnold was hailed as a superhero by some and denounced by others as incredibly irresponsible. Critics said he was sending the wrong message to impressionable young climbers.

Nobody who knew anything of rock climbing was lacking for strong opinions on the ma er. “He told me he was going to solo Half Dome,” Chris Weidner, a good friend of Honnold’s, tells me. “My first reaction was, ‘Are you kidding me? Don’t do it.’ But he was obviously going to.” It is his unwavering confidence that sets Honnold apart from other climbers, says Weidner. “I genuinely believe he leaves the ground thinking there is a zero percent chance that he will fall.”

HONNOLD ISN’T ALWAYS hanging by two fingers from death’s doorknob. When I met him back in February, he had just completed the climbing equivalent of a pleasure cruise, what he called his Sport Climbing Tour of the Antiquities. It started with a sponsor’s expedition to Chad, where he clambered up Dalían towers of poorquality sandstone in the middle of the Sahara. Then he climbed in Jordan and Israel, and finally he met his girlfriend, Stacey Pearson, in Turkey. They’ve been monkeying around on these limestone drip features in idyllic spots (with ropes) for nearly two months.

In Greece, he was wearing a uniform of sorts: a red hooded sweatshirt bearing the name of his biggest sponsor, The North Face, a pair of dark gray pants and some badly worn running shoes. His hair is mussed and his irises, an odd metallic brown, are strikingly large. (Pearson, his girlfriend, describes his eyes as “bovine.”) His shoulders are broad, his fingers are expectedly thick. Sitting in his room on Kalymnos one night, still wearing that red hoodie, he describes himself as simply “nondescript.”

Honnold was born in Sacramento. “He could stand up the day he was born,” his mother, Deirdre Wolownick, recalls. “He could pull himself to his feet, and he had huge hands.” At 12, during summer vacation, Honnold made his first foray into climbing, in the French Alps. A er that, his father, Charles, started taking him to a local climbing gym. “He would belay me for hours,” Honnold says, using the climbing term to describe one person holding the rope so the other doesn’t hit the ground in a fall. “Dad would just be down there, looking around, feeding out slack.” When his father wasn’t around, Honnold would ride his bike 12 miles each way to the gym, alone, to climb sideways along the contiguous walls—for hundreds of lateral feet. With no one to belay him, he couldn’t go up or down. “I would traverse back and forth across the wall,” he says. “I had a Walkman, and I would just blast Megadeth and traverse.”

School was socially difficult for him. “Heinous,” as he puts it. “I was the world’s biggest loser. I wore the same pair of sweatpants every day for all of middle school.” But he fared well academically, and a er graduating high school with straight A’s, he le home in August 2003 to a end U.C. Berkeley’s college of engineering. The summer a er his freshman year, however, his father suffered a massive heart attack and died. Honnold, who had never taken to college, dropped out and entered what he calls his “blue period.” “I was alone a lot,” he says. He turned to climbing for solace and began soloing in earnest in the spring of 2005, spending long periods at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, a place peppered with hundreds of 30to 300-foot-tall domes that form a patchwork of endless climbing routes. Without a partner and usually too shy to introduce himself to potential ones, Honnold set off alone, soloing simple routes all day long. “It was just easier that way,” he says.

Soon afterward, he bought a white Ford Econoline E-150 and hit the road. The van was spartan, and Honnold lived like a monk: a rubber mat on the floor, a thin foam pad on a sheet of plywood for a bed, a simple camp stove, a crate of books. He’d wake up, make eggs and climb all day. Then after a dinner of macaroni and cheese and tuna, he’d read big books by headlamp until he fell asleep. He didn’t drink; still doesn’t. He was young, and it seemed as if he could hang on forever.

A year later he got his first taste of fame when he soloed two Yosemite Valley test pieces, Astroman and the Rostrum in a single day. Honnold treats this leap as nothing more than a logical progression. He had climbed them flawlessly multiple times with gear; the climbing was secure and suited his strengths. He had soloed countless shorter routes at similar grades, and he knew he wouldn’t fall. The achievement was impressive but not unprecedented.

His 2008 solos of the Moonlight Buttress and the Regular Route on the northwest face of Half Dome, however, put him indelibly on the climbing map. Moonlight is a striking pillar of Navajo sandstone streaking 1,200 feet above the main road in Zion National Park. Most of the climbing happens in a half-inch crack that splits the buttress for nearly its entire length. It’s called a “finger crack,” because that’s all a climber can get into it. There are times when no more than a few square inches of the surface of the climber’s body is actually in contact with the wall. For most people, even highly skilled climbers, this is wildly insecure. Climbing 1,200 feet of it without a rope is inconceivable.

Half Dome is considered even more risky. It is more than 2,000 feet tall, and the top is guarded by hard, nearly vertical slabs. Up there, the climbing happens on features like credit card edges and protrusions the shape and size of worn pencil erasers, all hanging over thousands of feet of empty air. It took Honnold two hours and 50 minutes to climb all the way up, and it didn’t go as planned. On an essentially featureless slab near the top, with no easy retreat, he froze. He had reversed a sequence, pu ing himself out of position to make a move. He was “gripped,” genuinely scared. He didn’t want to be there.

Honnold completed the climb, but he was so shaken he vowed to stop soloing. Yet word of his feat was spreading fast. He wound up with 5,000 Facebook friends and had to delete his account and set up a fan page. He won a three-year contract with The North Face and has been featured in ads for Black Diamond, climbing rope manufacturer Maxim and shoe company La Sportiva.

A year later, after several bold but not death-defying routes, he found his confidence again. Last year he soloed a challenging 1,000-foot wall outside of Las Vegas with almost no rehearsal. In late 2010, he soloed another 1,000-foot monolith in Yosemite via a route called the Crucifix, which he called his best solo yet. In the crux there was no hesitation, no fear. “For once I was like, ‘I’m up here because I want to be up here,’” he says, smiling. “Like, ‘This is cool.’”

WHAT HE WILL ATTEMPT NEXT is a topic of heated speculation in climbing circles. Honnold declines to say what his plans entail, but most people expect him to solo El Capitan, the 3,000-foot wall that dominates Yosemite Valley—and, as both cradle and crucible, American rock climbing’s history. The last thing Honnold needs is distraction while attempting something near his limit of perfect control. But that is part of the problem with El Capitan. People sit in the meadow below the wall with spo ing scopes, watching the seeming ants questing on the granite expanse. Nonetheless, the wall is on his mind. “That’s the elephant in the room,” he says. “I know that if I did it, it would be the raddest thing ever.”

It would also be the most perilous thing he’s ever attempted in a career of astonishingly perilous things, and that worries his friends and family. Pearson says, “When he talks about soloing and the possibility of death he always says, ‘Yeah, it would be, like, the worst four seconds of my life. But then it’s done. He just grazes over the idea.” His friend Chris Weidner adds, “I worry about him, because there’s a real possibility that he will die soon. He takes enormous risks, often, and the confidence that makes him a world-class climber also, in my opinion, leads him to take some foolish risks.” His mother worries too, but she trusts her son’s judgment. “He’s the only one who can decide to do it or not,” she says. “I would never tell him not to. It would be like telling a concert pianist, ‘You know, that’s bad for your fingers. You’ll end up with arthritis.’”

On Kalymnos one night, the rain provides a steady backdrop of white noise. The weather has forced Honnold to scrap a planned day of climbing. Antsy, tired of just si ing there, he gets to his feet and mills about in the kitchenette. I ask, trying to provoke him, “What would failure on a solo mean?” He replies without pause, “Plummeting to your death.” And a er a beat: “Which would be a huge bummer.” It’s semi-ironic, and we chuckle at it, but the quip nevertheless hangs there in the air for a moment against the sound of rainfall. Honnold moves across the room. Looking out the window into the night, he sighs. “I hope we get to go climbing tomorrow.”

ALEX LOWTHER, a New York–based writer, climber and documentary film producer, had to promise his mother and girlfriend he would not free-solo anything on Kalymnos.

Trial by Fire

Pucón, Chile – CLIMB A VOLCANO.
One of the most trafficked volcanoes in the world is so potent that the local Mapuche tribe who lived there called it Quitralpillán Villarrica, or Residence of the Ancestors with Fire. Regardless, every year more than 15,000 travelers scale Villarrica, near Pucón. It’s home to an open lava pit and last erupted in 2009.

To reach the snow-covered pinnacle, you’ll need crampons, an ice axe and a medium fitness level, but the view of a cauldron of bubbling lava beneath is easily worth the effort. // www.outdoorexperience.org

EXPERT: GEOFF MACKLEY, DISASTER ENTHUSIAST AND HOST OF DANGERMAN
Although this videographer, photographer and TV host has experienced just about every kind of cataclysm, his specialty, volcanology, has been immortalized in a hit YouTube video he filmed in which a colleague is hanging a third of the way into Vanuatu’s 1,650-foot Marum Volcano as it erupts. “That was the most extreme volcano shoot I’ve ever done, but it wasn’t terrifying to me,” he says. “It was awe-inspiring.”

Down Under

Aquismón, Mexico – DESCEND INTO THE SÓTANO DE LAS GOLONDRINAS.
Every sunrise, visitors peering down into the Sótano de las Golondrinas, or Cave of Swallows, detect movement deep in the sinkhole. In the cave below are, as you might guess, swallows.

Over the course of a half hour, the birds awaken and rise up through the cave in a great column. In the evening they return, align themselves over the opening and dive safely below. At more than 1,000 feet deep, the cone-shaped cave, located in dense forest in the foothills of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains, is one of the deepest sinkholes in the world. Fortunately for travelers who come here to rappel via rope or even parachute down to the mossy floor, it’s also easy to get to—just a 20-minute walk off of the road. Tours can be arranged in town. Not recommended for ornithophobics.

EXPERT: BILL STONE, WORLD-CLASS AMERICAN SPELUNKER
In February 2012, the Texas-based Stone will return to J2, a cave system in the cloud forest in Ocotal, Mexico. During his 2009 expedition, his team descended nearly 4,000 vertical feet below the surface of the earth via rope and dived through underwater caves into a cavern considered the most remote place on earth (7 miles from the entrance). This time, he wants to go another 6.2 miles in and perhaps 6,500 feet down, hoping to advance, inch by inch, what mankind knows about this dark place in the planet. “It’s like three-dimensional chess,” he says, “except that each move takes three years.”

Rapid City

Patagonia, Chile – PATAGONIA’S MOUNTAINS ARE RIFE WITH GOOD RAFTING.
Patagonia just sounds adventurous. The name conjures images of perilous treks on narrow trails, steep cliffs falling off to your side. But actually one of the best adventures you can have in the region is on the water, at the confluence of the Rio Azul and Futaleufu River. There you’ll find some of the best ra ing in the world: Turquoise water tears between snowcapped mountains and forms frothy Class IV and V rapids. A local outfier—such as Expediciones Chile, which has trips of various lengths and for different skill levels— can equip you with horses or mountain bikes for those stretches that are too rough to ra . Your sleeping arrangements, luckily, are a li le less adventurous at Expediciones’ Tres Monjas Eco Camp, a campground with a sauna, gourmet chef and private skinny-dip beach. You don’t want to tackle those Class Vs without a good night’s sleep. // www.exchile.com

Pedal Power

Tanzania – MOUNTAIN BIKING TO TANZANIA’S NGORONGORO CRATER.
Starting below the towering peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, this moderately difficult 300-mile route, along cow paths and Jeep trails and amid elephants, ostriches, lions and other African megafauna, leads across the baobab tree–studded Masai Plains and into the Great Ri Valley, past stunning vistas and lake sides dotted with fishing villages. The ride concludes at the Ngorongoro Crater, a 100-square-mile volcanic caldera in the Serengeti formed millions of years ago when a volcano erupted and collapsed. Today it’s a self-contained ecosystem reputed to have the world’s densest population of lions, along with black rhinos, hippos and about 25,000 other species living in the grasslands, swamps and forests between the crater’s steep, 1,400-foot walls. There are a few tour companies you can book to lead you along the trip, handle camping accommodations and, most important, book your Ngorongoro safari in advance. Riding your bike at a high rate of speed into the crater as though it were some kind of BMX ramp is not advised. Those cheetahs are both nimble and hungry. // www.keadventure.com

EXPERT: DAVID HOUGHTON, CANADIAN ULTRACYCLIST AND TOUR D’AFRIQUE VETERAN
For four months in 2005, Houghton rode almost 7,500 miles, from Cairo all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, in something called the Tour d’Afrique, gaining membership in the “Efi Club” (an acronym for an unprintable name that includes “every” and “inch”). “Whether you get sick, or the bike breaks down, or you get hit by a truck, you go the whole distance,” he says of the club’s ethos. “You never take a day off . That maniacal discipline really appealed to me.” The trip to Cape Town was grueling but worth it. “Riding into the city and seeing Table Mountain, I was crying,” he says. “I had never been there before, but I felt like I was coming home.”

Surfing Safari

Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica – HANG 10 ON THE OSA PENINSULA.
There are very few places that intimidate Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls (see “The Hemi Q&A”). But when he parachuted into the dense jungle of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, he had second thoughts. Home to jaguars, tangles of snakes and unspeakable insects, the wildness is part of what makes Matopalo, the surf break off Osa’s beach, so special. The rabble stays away. Of course, you don’t have to parachute in, but it’s not exactly Times Square, either. From tiny Golfito, you’ll find a handful of lodges and a variety of world-class waves. // www.pavones.com

Drive Like Heck

Dalton, N.H. – LEARN TO SPICE UP A QUIET SUNDAY CRUISE.
Some people find a quiet drive along a tree-lined road on a Sunday relaxing.

Others prefer to tear sideways at full speed on a closed course, quarterpanels inches from the treeline. At Team O’Neil Rally School & Car Control Center, you learn how to do the la er. Using dozens of miles of dirt roads, the instructors teach the fine art of skid control, high-speed vehicle dynamics and, if you want, the vagaries of off road rally racing. // www.teamoneil.com

EXPERT: KEN BLOCK, WORLD RALLY CHAMPION DRIVER AND COFOUNDER OF DC SHOES
Few sports require nerves as steely and car control as precise as rally racing, in which drivers steer, skid and slide along winding gravel roads narrower than alleys. Block, who drives a $1 million Ford Focus in the World Rally Championship, is the top American in this very European sport. “I started out at the Team O’Neil school,” he says. “That’s where I learned to stay in control of the car in very extreme conditions—like a WRC race, where I literally have to memorize thousands of turns over the course of a week, and do them at 100 mph. Sideways. It’s fun.”

In Deep

Moab, Utah – GO FAR BEYOND HIKING IN MOAB.
Canyoneering is a cross between climbing and hiking, yet somehow it transcends both. In part, the appeal is in the surreal: rappelling into a Seussical slot of red rock or dangling from a cliff while watching shafts of light illuminate underground streams. Nowhere is the feeling more pleasantly disorienting than in Moab’s national parks, where outfiers like Red River Adventures, The World Outdoors and Moab Cliffs and Canyons lead intrepid adventurers into striated sandstone crevices and past soaring pinnacles. You don’t even have to be a dyed-in-the-wool explorer to get your first taste: Halfday trips into Chamisa Canyon and Morning Glory can be structured to include sub-100-foot rappels, easy scrambling and even a swim or two. // www.redriveradventures.com

Reef Madness

Queensland, Australia – A DEEP LOOK AT AUSTRALIA’S BEST WRECK DIVE.
The Great Barrier Reef off of Queensland, Australia, a racts more than 1.6 million tourists a year. While most come to gawk at the thousands of species of aquatic life, there’s also some history under the sea. The SS Yongala was a passenger ship that launched in 1903 and sank in 1911. Its wreck was discovered in 1958, and divers have reveled in exploring it ever since. Although the inside of the ship is now off limits (the air bubbles can erode the structure), you can see the name still intact on the outside, as well as a spectacular artificial reef with bright coral, barracuda, sea turtles and, from May to September, humpback whales. Yongala Dive can take you out, show you the ship and have you back in time for dinner. // www.yongaladive.com.au

EXPERT: PHILIPPE COUSTEAU, UNDERSEA EXPLORER AND HOST OF OCEAN’S DEADLIEST
For Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques, who revolutionized scuba and undersea exploration, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. “I’ve been diving in the Great Barrier Reef a lot, but my most memorable time was when we were filming Ocean’s Deadliest. I was with Steve Irwin on what turned out to be his last expedition. It reminds you how powerful nature is.”