He was not the first president to be vilified by the Mexican people, nor was he the first corrupt, ruthless and self-serving leader of a country that has been for more than 75 years under the rule of the "Party of the Institutionalized Revolution" (PRI). Nevertheless, Carlos Salinas de Gortari......

Fez is the most daunting city in Morocco, its French-induced schizophrenia marked to an extreme degree. The old and new cities are two separate and contradictory worlds, each a riposte to the other. The new, French-built town is notable for its enormous tree-lined avenues, grand colonial statements that could only......

Midmorning, late January, 42 degrees Celsius. You’re cruising the Orange River, a fast, broad strip of water that separates western South Africa from the rest of the continent. You’ve shot two rapids of varying difficulty earlier in the morning, but this stretch is flat, and you take advantage of the......

To walk into the rain forest is to enter an epoch before man existed. It is something one ought to do slowly and alone. I have visited the sultry tropical rain forests of Central and South America and the cool, fogbound ones of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Each......

Hands, everywhere hands. Pressed up against a half-opened taxi window; reaching in, tugging, thrusting fistfuls of shiny ribbons at me; pushing other hands away. Hands grabbing my hands, stuffing them with wads of ribbons. My hands shoving them away. Voices pleading, crackling with bravado and determination and poverty and puberty......

As an old Zaca hand I should have known better than to drive my low-slung Japanese econobox up the winding road that crosses five or six streams on the way to the lake. The third in a series of February storms had hit, the streams were now much higher than......

When the sun finally dips below the Cambodian horizon, some of Phnom Penh’s innumerable squatters disappear into the once illustrious Olympic Stadium, while thousands of black bats that have made this ramshackle relic of Cambodia’s 1960s glory their home launch themselves enthusiastically into the darkening skies, offering up their shrill......

At 2,000 feet, Madanapalle’s summer temperature is cooler than in other towns in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This is a green part of India. The Indian mystic Mother Meera, considered by many to be a feminine incarnation of God on Earth, owns a farm about 20 minutes’......