When you travel, time often disappears inside of a moment. For a stranger walking through Asia, a moment is a chaos of events that cascade around you. When you don't know what is happening--or has happened--your old truths become eroded by these events. And travel often appears to be irrefutable fantasy.

This book roams across the vague borders between truth and dream. There is an assumption here that the traveler inside you is curious about planet earth. So imagine yourself to be on the secret roads of South-east Asia, passing rows of rubber trees and winding through verdant rain forests on the Malayan Peninsula. Dream yourself onto the streets of Singapore with its modern skyscraper canyons, its open-walled colonnaded Chinese teashops, and its English colonial mansions. Then fly off to Northern Borneo where the roads stop at rivers and rivers become highways deep into the ancient rain forest of former headhunters.

See yourself now in a place called Perfect on a rented boat leaving the pier and motoring out into the Sulu Sea speckled with a thousand islands. From the distance you can see through the island of your destination. The land rises only a couple of meters from the sea. The trunks of the coconut trees disappear in the hazy distance so you see only land and fronds and the sea beyond.

You snorkel until dizzy from all the color in the coral.

It takes only a half hour to stroll around the island. There are skeletal remains of turtles, sheets of speckled tortoise shell. You come to the crude Bajau hut built of nipah and palm fronds. The man couldn't speak Bahasa Malay and you don't speak his language so you ignore each other after a few futile attempts at communication. Instead you watch as a man uses an awkward looking axe to hand hew a burnt-out log to make his boat.

His boat-building skills are going to diminish. He's talking the first tentative steps from living on the water to living on land. He eats turtles, turtle eggs, and monitor lizard--a local speciality that is said to taste like chicken. His thatched hut sits on the water's edge as if the Bajau man is uncertain whether or not he really wants to live on land. With an ocean such as this around, it must be a difficult decision.

You walk off the island on a narrow bar of sand. A couple hundred meters from the island, the water is no deeper than your knee. Strange what land looks like when you stand in the middle of the ocean. There's a rainbow in the evaporation.

That night you sit on the beach writing by flashlight. The stars are brilliant, stunning.

Time goes by so slowly you can see the stars move as the earth spins.

The star constellation, Orion, the hunter, is directly overhead. Taurus, the bull is charging through the universe. The bull's horn stabs the Milky Way, that fluid bridge of light that arches across the black sky. Many of the stars in Taurus and Orion are newborns: they began only 100,000 years ago, about the time man first walked on Asian lands. There are stars in the Milky Way that are 100 light centuries away from earth. That means that the light they emitted on the birth date of the infant stars in Orion and Taurus and also when man first stood upright, that same light is arriving at my eyes now.

When you think of those stars, and then the fact that you are sitting on this island with a primitive Bajau family making their first attempt to live on land, and then you think of a home on the other side of the planet with people watching their TV, you realize that the ancient past and the present are occurring simultaneously. It's as if time collapses into now.