Note: The south of Lebanon is the most politically unstable region in the country, and the main theatre of conflict with Israel. Tourists need a permit to enter, but no one offered or asked one from us. Maybe it’s because we could pass for Lebanese. Maybe we were just lucky. Anyone thinking of going should check with the authorities: policemen, soldiers, or tourism workers.

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The gentleman at the sweet shop in Tyre helped us negotiate a good price for a taxi to Bint Jbeil. This is pure Lebanon: buy some sweets, befriend the owner over tea and you have a local fixer for life.

The road was smooth, but with more military checkpoints than usual. We were told to expect soldiers to inquire as to the purpose of our visit. We were to ask them for a visit permit. We were just waved through every time.

It’s common in Lebanon to see flags and posters with political party logos on each street, marking their territory like gang tags. But the further south you go, the more martial the posters get: young men with keffiyeh around their necks and rifles in their hands. The unmistakable bearded glower of Hassan Nasrallah.

After a certain point, the red-and-white markings of the Lebanese army were nowhere to be seen. Only green and yellow. We were in Hezbollah territory.

All around us were grassy hills flecked with white rocks. Some had traditional stone houses. It all looked very biblical. Our taxi had some engine trouble and the driver got out to check under the hood. I stepped out to take some pictures and the driver discreetly told me to stop.

This was the last picture I was able to take for two hours:

Bint Jbeil

The only sign that this town was flattened by Israel in 2006 is the frantic pace of construction. The main commercial street – just a dozen shops on each side, really – has brand new arabesque arches, giving it a neo-souk look. Everywhere you see large, impressive homes going up.

Instead of statues and monuments, parks and roundabouts had decommissioned pieces of heavy artillery, like anti-aircraft guns and clusters of Katyusha rockets.

We walked past the shops and toward a stone mosque. An old Ford with two young men stopped in front of us. The driver, who spoke respectable French, asked what we were doing there.

“Just going for a walk,” I said, introducing myself. “Is that ok?”

“Do you have a permit to be here?”

“No, no one asked us and no one offered one. But we have all our documents.” I showed him my passport.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he answered. “But other people higher up are responsible for this. Do you have a camera?”

“Yes, but I’m not taking any pictures.”

He paused to think. “Don’t go any further,” he said. “Please turn around.”

We did as he said and stopped for a coffee on the main street. This is where interesting things happened.

“Welcome to Lebanon,” a gentleman in his fifties beamed when he saw us come in. He runs a shoe and bag shop two doors down when he is in town. The rest of the time he lives and works near Detroit, where he owns a gas station, and where his wife and three children live.

“I love American people,” he offered without any prompting. “They are so wonderful. I don’t care what anybody says.”

We sat outside the shop with him, the coffee shop owner, and his sister-in-law. Family members and friends would stop by, exchange a kind word, and leave.

“Do you like Lebanese women,” he asked me. “I love them. They are so clean. This is most important for us. First, they must be clean. Then beautiful.”

Like the gentleman in Tyre, he helped us negotiate a fair price for a taxi to Maroun el-Ras, Aytarun, and back. We agreed to 20,000 LBP, roughly $13.

Maroun el-Ras

This town that overlooks the Israeli border from a hilltop is just five km away from Bint Jbeil, but up on a steep climb. The street leading toward it is lined with Iranian flags.

A destroyed Israeli tank watched over Bint Jbeil. A tattered Hezbollah flag lazily waves from it. Not far from it a blocky stone statue has one foot over a green helmet with a star of David.

We arrive at the town’s brand new family park. The gate was decorated with Iranian symbols, and large posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad are clearly visible from the outside.

It looked like the entrance to a theme park: manicured shrubs lined cobblestone walkways. There were several thatched-rood shelters with picnic tables and barbecue pits. Wind turbines and solar panels were everywhere. A small mosque, finished on the outside, was still rough on the inside.

It was a chilly, windy winter day, so the park was empty save for two young Lebanese men who live and work in West Africa, there on holiday. They warmly greeted us.

“So Iran helped build this place,” I asked one.

“No,” he smiled. “Iran built all of it.”

He said that families from all over south Lebanon come here on summer weekends. The park is still wrapping up contraction on a hotel, a swimming pool, and a paintball arena.

He led us to the edge of the park, where the hill drops sharply. “There’s our neighbour,” he said and pointed to the horizon. We could clearly see the fenced border and the Israeli town of Avivim. There were a lot more trees on the other side.

“Aren’t the people here afraid of being this close to Israel,” I asked him. He smiled. “We in the south aren’t afraid of anything.”

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Aytarun and Aynata

Our taxi driver drove us around Aytarun, another border town with nothing remarkable about it. “Aytarun, nothing,” he said in his barely functional English.

Without us asking, he drove to nearby Aynata, where a memorial to fallen Hezbollah fighters stands:

Inside were several stones with Arabic engraving and the Hezbollah logo. Several of them had wreaths, photos of the soldiers, and leather-bound copies of the Koran. I ran outside to take a wide-angle shot of the monument and was intercepted by a Ford SUV driven by a beefy man with a leather jacket, sunglasses, and a Bluetooth earpiece. “Salaam aleykum,” he said flatly.

“Aleykum salaam,” I responded. “Ana min Brazil. Turisti. Afwan, ma behki arabi.” I’m from Brazil. A tourist. Sorry, I don’t speak Arabic.

He grinned. “Do you know what this is,” he asked in serviceable English. “It’s a monument for our martyrs.” He stepped out of the car, even though it was stopped in the middle of the street. “Come, I show you.” His passenger, a well-dressed woman with a hijab, followed him smiling politely. He led us back inside.

“These are for populi,” he said, pointing to the stones on the left side. “Mothers, bothers, and wives.” I assumed he meant civilians. “And these for the martyrs. Every stone is for 14 men.” Fifteen fighters from this town died is 2006, he told us.

“You are welcome here,” he said. “You can take photos here. But outside, no photos.” I nodded.

The graveyard

The taxi driver made one last stop before taking us back to Bint Jbeil. It was a graveyard. It was clear from the flags and photos it was made for Hezbollah fighters. He led us now a row of tombstones with little glass-enclosed shrines. He stopped at the second-to-last stone and pointed to a large photograph of a mature man clutching an AK-47. “My father,” he said.

The cost of visiting the Lebanese south as a day trip from Beirut:
(for two people. $1 = 1,500 Lebanese pounds)

Shared taxi from Beirut to Tyre: 15,000 LBP
Taxi from Tyre to Bint Jbeil: 12,000 LBP
Taxi to Maroun el Ras, Aytarun, and back : 20,000 LBP
Taxi from Bint Jbeil to Tyre: 25,000 LBP
Microbus from Tyre to Beirut: 10,000 LBP

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He should suffer for warping my expectations in such an inhumane way.

This is what you get for $5 in the town of Kottayam, Kerala state.

The bed:
A colony of mildew is positioned to jump on your head in your sleep and take over your brain. The pillow case comes pre-soiled with one (1) pubic hair.

The sink

The bathroom
A 20-watt lightbulb provides mood lighting, casting a honeyed glow on the tile grime.

The spiders are complimentary.

Cairns isn’t just for the Great Barrier Reef. Just tow hours north is a rainforest with deadly crocodiles, virginal beaches, refreshing creeks and at least one bat.

In one of the least-traveled islands of Papua New Guinea, you can find virginal beaches, expert-grade diving and surfing, back-flip into an emerald river, and feed a class of friendly eels.

We went up PNG’s second-highest mountain expecting a straightforward camping trip. What we found was the most challenging and rewarding bush walk of our lives.

When they can’t be bothered with sound discipline, it’s customary for parents to scare their children with fantastic lies.

In Brazil, for example, children are told that if they play with fire they will wet their beds, or that cockroaches will lick their mouths at night if they neglect to brush their teeth.

And there’s the mammoth childhood lie, one that crosses many cultures and is so ridiculous that its survival is nothing less than a miracle: that a fat old man in the North Pole is monitoring every child and delivers obedience rewards on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

Despite their absurdity, to the literal-minded child they are devastatingly effective. The young adult, however, is not so easily fooled. But Australian tour operators at Fraser Island have adapted the childhood scare tactic with lethal efficacy.

The premise is simple: give a group of eight fun-chasing twentysomethings an immense sandy island off the Queensland coast and an expensive four-wheel drive truck to explore it with over three days. Then fill their heads with so many dangers and threats that no one would dream of doing anything memorably fun with it.

The briefing

The day before the trip, travellers to Fraser Island are shown a one-hour video on the dangers of driving on sand. A live person, usually a worker at the hostel that organizes the tour, then repeats many of those warnings and offers further instructions.

An example: if you drive too close to the sea, the salt water will rust the body and you will be fined at least $200.

Another one: If you make a sharp turn in the sand, the truck will flip over and every passenger will be seriously hurt.

Finally, the person who manages the truck fleet and the equipment inventory completes the scare session with photos of cars that flipped over and news clippings mourning a reckless death.

They clump everyone into groups of eight, based not on compatibility but to ensure that every team has enough qualified drivers. This also boosts the chances of being paired with a zealot for rules whose burning need for control makes sure any potential for adventurous exploration is snuffed out (hiya, Lucy).

A wild dingo menacingly strolls on Fraser Island.

The trip

It starts with a barge trip from the mainland to the island. It truly is an all-sand island where a rainforest miraculously thrives. When the tide is high or rocks impede safe passage along the shore, sandy inland tracks offer a detour.

Travelers are given a detailed itinerary and everything is scheduled. Go to a lake at 2pm. Leave by 3:30. Be at the campsite by 5:30.

This is because of the tides, yes, but since it’s policy to infantilize visitors to the maximum extent, responsible independent exploration is strictly verboten. If anyone veers from the itinerary, they will be fined.

Despite the military scheduling, enforced by a group’s self-appointed despot (still here, Lucy?), the trip is lovely. Driving on sand is a unique kind of exhilaration. Soft patches make the van lurch slightly sideways and washouts, creeks of inland fresh water that seep to the sea, can make spectacular splashes if negotiated well.

Fraser Island boasts several lakes. Some are topaz blue with blindingly white sand that rival Caribbean paradises. Others are at the bottom of steep sand dunes and beg for sandboarding or just a good ol’ tumbling.

Bianca risks life and limb by enjoying a casual skip down a sand dune.

The lies exposed

By the second day on the island, most participants realize that driving on sand is actually quite safe and that no, the island’s dingoes aren’t really interested in eating  people alive.

With minimal reasoning, you realize that when driving on wet hard sand – the sand operators say offers the best traction – much of the it sticks to the underbody, taking salt water with it. And anyone who lives in a snowy country knows that cars don’t fall apart at the first contact with a salted road.

You also learn that hurtling down the pillow-soft sand dunes around Lake Wabee won’t really cause lethal spinal injuries. Or that the rough sea  won’t drag you to a drowning death if you simply wade at knee height.

And no one that I heard of suffered a cardiac arrest upon contact with a jellybean-sized jellyfish.

Still, no one wants to take chances. The organizers’ scare campaign is too refined. Their repetition overpowers common sense.

Back at the hostel we asked a staffer why they exaggerate the dangers so much. “We want to make sure you’ll be completely responsible.” My parents would be beaming with pride.

A peculiarity of modern video games is that you never truly die. The player is given unlimited chances to succeed, no matter how many times he may plummet down a canyon.

A vaguely related peculiarity of rocks is that they don’t care how soft your flesh and brittle your bones are. This tenuous association was foremost on my mind as I grappled the cubic face of Ormiston Gorge, an ancient geological beauty deep in the scorched red heart of the Australian outback. If I should slip and smash my skull on the rocks 10 meters down, maybe, just maybe, like Lara Croft and her brethren, I would emerge a few meters back in full health and, if lucky, sporting a pair of impossibly taut DD-cup breasts.

But video games aren’t wholly lifelike, and fortunately, I completed this level on the first try. And how I got in that situation I owe to either: a) Australians’ twisted sense of humour, or b) a poorly-marked trail.

We had completed 2.5 hours of a three-hour walk around the Gorge, which is 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs. It’s mostly quite tame. You get used quickly to looking down to assess the sturdiness of the trail and then up to see if any huntsman spiders made their home between branches above you, forcing you into a spine-shilling game of limbo.

And for the most part, it’s well-marked. For the most part. When we arrived at the Gorge, filled with tea-coloured water thanks to the recent wet season, there was no way of crossing without swimming.

Some of us had expensive cameras in our bags. And there was the possibility of scaling the gorge walls, which were eroded into nice rectangular ledges, and hoping one ledge was wide enough to hold a body to the other dry end.

This was the easy part of the gorge crossing.

The little red arrows that had led us so faithfully to this point were nowhere in sight. Climb or swim. I climbed, and, like a good mule, carried the bag of one of the girls I was traveling with, who opted for swim.

I got to one wide ledge but it ended on a rocky wall and the next walkable one was four meters below with no easy way of stepping down. I had to go back and climb to the next highest ledge. This is where it got interesting.

Nature is a contrarian sculptor and eschews most conventions in structure and form. The ledges on the gorge are wildly uneven, and a safe landing may vanish into an uncrossable gap or shrink into slivers of stone, just enough to hold a few toes and fingertips.

Lara Croft, when scaling Spiderman-like the face of a canyon, can leap from toehold to toehold with little more than a grunt that could be mistaken for a porn excerpt. The sounds I made sounded more like “shit shit shit shit.” Earlier in the trail I had stepped on a loose rock and cut my palm on one of its mercilessly jagged peers. And that was impact from 15 centimeters away. Even if I managed to leap perfectly sideways onto the ledge and still brag it, my palm would be shredded into strips of skin.

I can thank video games for giving me a mild case do ADHD, but no dose of Ritalin could focus me like that rock did. There are few times in modern life when you feel wholly focused on the present, and holding on for the integrity of your bones is one of them.

When I finally got to the other side, where the water was shallow enough to cross without swimming, all the thoughts that were on hold, shoved outside the velvet rope of survival, came tumbling in like an unruly mob. Among the crowd was Lara in her mini shorts, about-to-burst tank top, and whip-like pony tail. She was smiling and winking at me.

In New Zealand, the MojoTrotters braved the world’s third-highest bungy jump so you don’t have to. Watch what it was like in this video.

Want to know more? Read about the experience here.

One of several drug delivery apparati in Queenstown

Queenstown is the most convincing proof that governments can profit from the legalization of drugs. This is, after all, the city that deals the world’s most expensive narcotic. Walk around its compact downtown and you’ll see hundreds of addicts, just biding time until their next fix, for which they’ll pay hundreds of dollars.

The drug dealers are registered companies that are taxed and subject to stringent safety standards. There are very few deaths and virtually no violent crime caused by the drug. Because the drug is so expensive and the city so far from major world cities, users tend to come from higher income brackets. And they normally come for a fix or two, then leave.

It’s impossible for someone to steal the drug and deal it himself in the back market. The barriers to entry for new dealers are so high that the number of dealers – and prices – remains steady. This stability also ensures there are no turf wars between dealers.

Drug users await their next fix at the Queenstown harbour

The price of the drug is exorbitantly high because the cost of extraction is immense. Dealers must build pricey and long-term structures, buy specialized equipment, and hire well-trained staff to deliver it.

Some of those costs may include: passenger boats powered by jet engines, cabins suspended by steel cables over a deep crevice, cable cars that transport users to said cabins, special elastic ropes that are tied to users’ feet, robotic winches that bring users back to safety after a drug administration, transport buses, drivers, cameras and editing computers to give users a visual record of their experience.

Fixes can last anywhere from 20 seconds to a full day. Shorter trips are usually more intense.

Interestingly, the drug cannot be manufactured or purified from any other substance. The drug resides within certain glands inside the users themselves, and requires all these complex structures to extract it.

This drug is called adrenalin.

A pedestrian walks past one of several drug dealing stores in Queenstown

The A.J. Hackett Nevis Highwire Bungy Jump: 134 meters
Cost: $250 NZD (convert this)
Difficulty: must love fearing for your life

When the technician clips the bungy cord on your feet, you vaguely start to realize what you got yourself into.

We had just watched six other people do the jump, billed as the third highest in the world. As thousands have done in the past, they jump, the cord stretches, they bounce. When they’re reeled back to the platform, they look stunned and thrilled, probably wondering what to call the neurochemical sucker punch they just took.

No big deal, you think. I can do this. And you were thinking this when you forked over an absurd $250 for the jump, when you boarded the 40-minute bus to the Nevis site, and when you stepped on the cable car that carries six people to the platform, a metallic cabin dangling over a crevice by steel cables.

You’re all harnessed and buckled. The technician sits you on a reclining chair that looks like it was made for dental torture and clips on the right bungy cord for your weight.

“This is the release cord,” he says, and tucks a red strap into the padded harness around your ankles. “When you finish bouncing, pull on this. It’ll release your feet and you’ll be held by your chest harness.”

That way, you can be reeled back up while sitting upright rather than staring at the rocks that were coming at you 50 meters per second.

Bianca waits her turn as a jumper is reeled back in.

He helps you to your feet and points you to the jump ledge. You see the river below, so dry it’s a trickle. You see the tiny pebbles and presume them huge boulders. There’s nothing between you and the hard, sharp ground.

That’s when you realize exactly what you got yourself into.

“I … I can’t,” I muttered. The numerous safe jumps you witnessed up close meant nothing. They no longer factor in. Self-preservation overrides any higher faculty of reasoning.

Which is exactly why the technician stands right behind you, giving you no choice but forward.

“Oh Jesus,” I said with each step forward, invoking my saviour, like any half-assed Catholic, only when I’m completely fucked. “Oh Jesus.”

“Come on, buddy, you can do it,” the technician said with practiced calm.

My toes were past the edge of the ledge. The technician counted: 3! 2! 1!

Every jumper before me jumped on 1. Every time. No one wavered, and this obedience baffled me. Until, that is, it was my turn.

In seduction theory, there’s something called the three second rule: when you see a woman that interests you, you should approach her within a count of three. Any longer and self-doubt will take command. You’ll start imagining everything that could go wrong, defense mechanisms invoke excuses to back away.

Standing on that ledge, looking down on that lifeless abyss, feeling raw ice in my throat, my thoughts stacked up like pancakes over a small opening, too narrow to go through. There’s nothing that will give you any comfort, any encouragement. You don’t have the luxury to think the fear away. And so you grasp on to the numbers coming from the technician’s mouth, the familiarity of a countdown your only lifeline to something resembling faith.

You jump on 1.

At first, there’s complete silence. Even your scream feels muffled, like it never leaves your lips. A black hole suddenly forms inside your chest and you don’t know if it’s the speed or the sight of the ground racing towards you. You flap your arms as if that will give you any stability, or, at best, slow the fall.

To some people the free fall lasts longer than the advertised 8.3 seconds. To me, it was far less than that. By the time I felt the tug around my ankles and the rocks below reversed direction, not a second had gone by.

I pulled on the release cord but it wouldn’t release. I tried six times. The rope that comes down, hooks on to the bungy tip and reels you back up was fast approaching. You’re supposed to be upright by the time it arrives. It clasped and I began to ascend upside-down.

I began to panic about this, too. But, just as I had disobeyed by most primal instinct when I jumped, here, too, I saw the opportunity to rebel. I dropped by arms, relaxed my abs, and let the machine do its job.

Like in the jump, I had to let the panic speak before shoving it aside and taking the leap. Like every important decision I ever took, I had to entertain every doomsday scenario to finally plunge into the blue emptiness.

I was gently lowered back into the dangling cabin and the technician asked, “How was it?” I wonder if he actually knows, or cares to know. How could I explain this to him? Every jump and every reaction is an assembly line piece, perhaps different in size or colour, but essentially the same.

These guys, they are pros. These guys are bungy technicians.

To these guys, I was just scared.