It was with ambivalence that I finally made my way to the run-down international airport outside Nairobi one evening in March 1992. My plane ticket said I was taking the midnight flight to Bangkok by way of Bombay and Delhi. But to anyone living with one foot still planted in the nineteenth century -- that is, to most of the people I had been traveling among the previous four months -- this journey would qualify as something very close to magic. I would be seated inside a long metal tube that, despite its enormous weight, would lift off the ground, climb above the clouds and travel thousands of miles, traversing in hours the same ocean that ancient Arab traders used to take weeks to cross in their wind-blown dhows. The Air India jet that would perform this feat epitomized what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the "revolutionary and constantly advancing technology ... which virtually annihilated time and distance" during the twentieth century. Indeed, the main reason time seemed to pass more slowly in Africa was that technologies like the airplane and telephone had not yet touched the daily lives of most Africans.

The same could not be said for my destination of Thailand. It was a country in rapid transition, dangling somewhere between the unhurried rhythms of impoverished Africa and the hyperspeed materialism of my American homeland. I had visited Thailand two years before, in 1990, and as the Air India jet headed eastward through the night, I found myself recalling a young man I had met during that visit who personified the contradictions of Thailand's passage to modernity.

At age twenty-five, Leno stood poised on the cusp of two utterly different cultures. I met him in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand with a hundred thousand inhabitants and an airport that serviced a lucrative tourist trade. Leno rented his own apartment, drove his own jeep and owned a stereo system and a TV set. He had visited Bangkok numerous times and was fluent in seven languages. Modest, capable and genuinely friendly, he was a born leader who seemed destined for a bright future, perhaps as a diplomat or an entrepreneur within Thailand's booming economy.

In his heart, though, Leno remained a child of the forest where he grew up. Leno was the nearest thing I have ever seen to a perfect physical specimen -- sparkling smile, sleek torso, thighs that looked like they could run forever -- and the joy he took in outdoor activity was boundless. A member of the Karen tribe, he had spent his boyhood in a village 120 miles northwest of Bangkok. Despite its relative proximity to the capital, no one in Leno's village had ever seen an airplane or automobile; the villagers were subsistence farmers whose only contact with the outside world came during monthly visits to a nearby trading post. Life was simple, possessions few. Like his eight brothers and sisters, Leno routinely went barefoot as a child. His entire wardrobe consisted of two homemade, hand-me-down cotton smocks, one red, one blue.

At night, everyone in the village used to gather around the fire while the elders told stories. Leno's favorite, he told me, was the story of the eagle and the snake. "The elders said that one day a giant snake would appear in the jungle, flash its tail and cut our village in two," he recalled. "This snake would have ten thousand legs. Then a big eagle would appear in the sky. The eagle would land on the ground, swallow people into its belly and fly away."

No one knew what the story meant, not even the elders who told it. They had heard the tale from their elders, who heard it from their elders, and so on into the past for more generations than anyone could remember. Not until the late-1970s, when Leno was a teenager and the first paved road was built through his village, did the meaning finally become clear. This must be the giant snake, the villagers decided. For had not the ribbon of asphalt come flashing out of the jungle in a burst of noise and dust and cut the village in two? And the travelers and vehicles that began appearing on this road, were they not the ten thousand legs of the snake? Soon after, one villager traveled on the new road to Bangkok, where he saw an airplane land and take off at the airport. When the man described this sight back in the village, everyone agreed it must be the prophesied giant eagle, swooping out of the sky to gobble people up and fly off again.

Recounting the story to me years later, Leno seemed certain his ancestors had foretold the coming of the airplane and the automobile. "I don't know how they did it, but they did it," he said earnestly. "They saw the future." Leno had no trouble maintaining this belief, even as he spoke in the next breath of boarding one of the giant eagles soon to visit Europe, a plan that terrified his peasant mother.

Such incongruities are perhaps to be expected in a culture that is fast-forwarding from traditional isolation to high-tech overdrive. By 1990, the airplane, the automobile and other modern marvels had revolutionized not only Leno's village but all Thailand, opening it to the tourists, technologies, investments and ideas of the relentlessly expanding industrial world. In less than two decades, Bangkok was catapulted from an easygoing, Buddhist-flavored tropical capital to a bustling, global business center. Talk about magic!

Now, in 1992, I was returning to Thailand, and from the moment I stepped off the plane in Bangkok, the contrast with Africa was bracing. The airport terminal here was brightly lit, spacious and air-conditioned, with all the amenities one would expect from its European counterpart: clean toilets, public telephones, plenty of newsstands and restaurants. The customs and baggage claim operations were models of efficiency, and within half an hour, I was heading towards the taxi stand, where fixed-price rides downtown were offered. Since the airport was only fifteen miles north of Bangkok, I figured I might be checked into my hotel and asleep within the hour. It was, after all, past midnight and I was exhausted after twenty-four hours of travel.

Outside, automobiles seemed to be everywhere, another culture shock. My taxi was a late-model BMW whose plush back seat was more comfortable than most beds I had had in Africa. The expressway was crowded with similar vehicles; Thailand was one of the world's leading markets for Mercedeses, and second only to the United States in purchases of pickup trucks. The highway was in good repair, too, more reminiscent of the autobahns of Germany than the crumbling pavement of Nairobi; three and sometimes four lanes traveled in each direction, with guardrails in between. High above loomed huge lighted billboards with names like Sony, Siemens and Samsung in sparkling colors, as if making clear to the newly arrived who, or rather what, was in charge here. The accompanying advertising slogans were presented not in the languorous script of Thai but the snappy authority of English, indisputable world language of the Technological Age.

And yet. Lowering my gaze from these celebrations of global consumerism, I peered into the shadows at ground level, where I saw that the highway was also straddled by slouching shantytowns that recalled the poverty of Kampala and Nairobi. Here in Bangkok, though, the shacks were crammed up to the very edge of the highway, which meant that the inhabitants, in addition to the other burdens of their existence, were treated to a ceaseless assault on their lungs, eyes, ears and nervous systems by the apparently nonstop flow of traffic.

Did I say nonstop? Actually, within three minutes of leaving the airport, the taxi was engulfed in a traffic jam that reduced our progress to stop, crawl and stop again. I remembered Bangkok's terrible traffic snarls from my visit in 1990, but I thought that arriving in the middle of the night this time would let me off the hook. Wrong. Here it was, nearly one in the morning in the middle of the week, and the highway looked like Los Angeles during Friday afternoon rush hour.

Undeterred by the tiny Buddha shrine glued to his dashboard, my taxi driver took the opportunity of one lull in the traffic to urge upon me brochures featuring photos of extremely young, naked Thai women. "I take you," he suggested, clearly hoping to drive me to the nightclub in question. When I waved the brochures away with a murmured "no thank you," he didn't argue but simply slipped them under his seat and turned his attention to our common predicament. Middle-aged and plump, he spoke very little English, but he knew the word for his primary occupational hazard.

"Traffic, bad," he announced.

"Traffic bad," I agreed. Aiming my words carefully, I asked, slowly, "Why traffic bad at night? Day, yes. But night?"

"Traffic same-same," he replied with a resigned shake of the head. "Day, night, same-same."

Though I smiled inwardly ("same-same" was a fetching piece of Thai English I recalled from my earlier visit), this was discouraging news. After poking forward in fits and starts, we finally reached the city proper some seventy-five minutes after leaving the airport. While still bumper to bumper, the traffic moved somewhat more easily downtown, perhaps because it included a higher proportion of motorbikes and tuk-tuks. Three-wheeled vehicles whose name came from the sputtering sound produced by their horribly polluting two-stroke engines, tuk-tuks looked like beat-up golf carts with roofs and back seats and functioned as inner-city taxis. Unfortunately, the advantage that tuk-tuks and motorbikes offered in terms of mobility was undercut by their prodigious tailpipe exhaust. Both vehicles burned a fuel that was part gasoline, part benzene -- benzene, of course, causes cancer -- and each flick of a driver's wrist sent thick puffs of bluish-white smoke into the already soup-like air.

I remembered from my previous visit that the pollution of Bangkok's air had been so extreme it seemed to have a tactile quality; you felt you could scoop up a handful of the stuff and splatter it against the wall like a dirty snowball. Curious, I lowered my window to check its current condition. Sure enough, it was the same viscous gunk as before, complete with that foul chemical odor that caught in the throat and used to give me a headache within two minutes of stepping onto the sidewalk. My rash gesture alarmed the taxi driver. Blurting "No, no," he quickly zapped my window closed by remote control and turned around to study me, as though trying to decide whether I were impossibly stupid or just uninformed. With a nervous, placating smile, he pointed at his dashboard and said, "Air condition."

It wasn't just the noxious fumes he wanted to block out but the awful noise. I got an earful of it when we finally reached my hotel, an ugly high-rise near the Chao Phraya river. Stepping onto the sidewalk while the driver hoisted my bags out of the trunk, I confounded the poor man again by climbing onto a nearby pile of bricks -- like much of Bangkok, the property next door was under construction -- in order to get a better view of the traffic congestion we had been part of. Off to my right, for as far as I could see, stretched three lanes of headlights, their beams semi-obscured by the copious exhaust fumes hanging in the air like dense morning fog. To my left, perhaps ten car lengths away, was a rare bit of open space, an intersection, where the front of the traffic waited impatiently for the light to change. Quite a few drivers passed the time by intermittently revving their engines. The discordant whines and buzzing this generated were bad enough, but paled next to the cacophony that erupted when the pack took off again. With everyone hitting the throttle at once -- senselessly, for where was there to go? -- it sounded like a cross between a chainsaw massacre and the Indianapolis 500.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the entire tableau was how little it seemed to bother most Thais. My hotel room overlooked the street -- from eight floors up, thankfully -- and when I stepped onto the balcony before bed I saw on the sidewalk below an outdoor noodle shop that was doing an amazingly brisk business for two o'clock in the morning. Much of the clientele seemed to be young people. They were casually dressed, giggling, eating, drinking, smoking -- clearly enjoying themselves, while seated at tables no farther away from the traffic-clogged avenue than the shantytowns near the expressway had been. When the revelers were done, they would hop onto motorbikes, two and sometimes three to a machine, and, as if they hadn't inhaled enough poison already, expertly weave their way through the stalled traffic.

In the days to come, I encountered many more traffic jams in Bangkok, both as a passenger and as a pedestrian. I saw that it was by no means unusual for families of four to crowd onto a single motorbike -- the father driving and balancing one child on his lap, the mother holding another child behind him. Conversations with such families revealed that, predictably enough, they were eager to trade up to a tuk-tuk, just as tuk-tuk owners yearned to trade up to cars and teenagers dreamed of their first motorbikes. All of which helped explain why traffic speed averaged a mere seven kilometers an hour. I discovered I could usually cover the same distance faster on foot. I stayed off the main drags and traveled by river bus whenever possible, but most locals seemed indifferent to such self-protective measures. A few wore cotton face masks, but most went about their business impassively, seemingly unconcerned about being constantly gassed.

And traffic jams, it turned out, were only the most visible symptom of Thailand's environmental problems. The Chao Phraya river was virtually dead south of Bangkok. One afternoon, during a river bus ride, I saw three young boys, shirtless and happy, leaping off a rotting pier to swim in the murky waters. Twenty yards upriver, the bus passed a second pier, where an older man calmly lowered his pants, squatted over the side and emptied his bowels. Normita Thongtham, a journalist who covered the environment for the Bangkok Post, told me that each of the dozens of luxury hotels crammed along the waterfront also flushed their waste into the river; they had no choice -- the city had no sewage treatment plants. Waste water from factories added industrial toxins to the mix. Meanwhile, Bangkok's groundwater was so badly over-exploited -- thanks to soaring demand spurred by tourism, economic growth and rapid population growth -- that the city was slowly sinking into the mud. And in the countryside, forests had been felled mercilessly. Thailand's tree cover had fallen from 60 percent of total land area in the 1950s to a mere 18 percent by 1991.

These assaults on the Thai ecosystem were side effects of the extraordinary economic expansion the country had experienced over the past two decades, especially in the late 1980s, when growth rates topped 10 percent. As recently as the 1970s, Thailand had been quite a poor country, with a standard of living not much different from that of Kenya or Uganda. Now, after massive foreign investment spearheaded by such latter-day Winston Churchills as the World Bank, Thailand was an apparent economic success story. Per capita income in 1991 was U.S. $1,570 -- a stunning six-fold increase over the 1971 figure of U.S. $271.

Of course, it was that very surge in incomes that had put so many vehicles on the streets -- enough of them to cause Thailand's work force to lose forty-four days in traffic jams a year, at a cost of several percentage points of foregone growth in the gross national product. Likewise, the factories that boosted the nation's GNP with their output were the same ones who were fouling its air and water with their wastes. One key growth area was the manufacture of air conditioners and refrigerators; a side effect was that Thailand's use of ozone-destroying CFCs doubled between 1986 and 1989. Like many environmentally destructive enterprises in Thailand, most of the air conditioner and refrigerator factories were foreign owned.

At the urging of the World Bank, Thailand had pursued a corporate-friendly, export-led development strategy since the 1960s. It was a straightforward arrangement. Thailand offered cheap labor and natural resources; the bank financed the roads, power plants and other infrastructure needed to exploit those resources; foreign corporations supplied the capital -- the factories and industrial-style farms -- to turn the resources into salable goods. Thailand duly became a leading exporter of rice, timber and electronics, but the environmental and human costs were high. Forests and wetlands were cleared with abandon. National income rose dramatically, but so did social inequality. Peasants unable to compete with global capital were driven off their lands and into the cities, where especially the young and the female worked in industrial sweatshops or the burgeoning sex industry. An estimated one-third of Bangkok's 6.5 million people were rural migrants who squatted in crowded shantytowns like those I had passed riding in from the airport.

Thailand got an environmental wake-up call in 1988, when its rampant deforestation led to landslides that killed hundreds of people south of Bangkok. "The logs slid down the mountainside for two kilometers and crushed people," Normita Thongtham told me. "That was the first awakening of environmental consciousness for both the press and the public in Thailand."

Popular anger led to passage of a ban on logging in 1989, plus a government pledge to increase the country's tree cover to 40 percent. But environmentalists complained that the government's reforestation program only repeated past mistakes, promoting not genuine reforestation but huge plantations where eucalyptus trees would be planted and harvested like so many rows of corn. Worse, these plantations required large-scale evictions of poor peasants; the Khor Chor Kor forest development program of 1991, for example, called for displacing 1.5 million people. Not surprisingly, the peasants resisted, which is more than could be said for most urban Thais.

"Villagers fight to protect the environment because they have no choice," Wittoon Permpongsacharoen, the director of the Project for Ecological Recovery, told me. "The forest is the source of their food, their houses, the water for their rice fields. Middle-class people in Bangkok are concerned about air pollution, but they don't fight. It's such a money culture, people think money can solve any problem. So their response is to buy a better car and retreat inside their air-conditioning."

It was true. Everyone I talked to in Bangkok, from sidewalk food vendors and civil servants to businessmen, students and retired folk, was happy to complain about the traffic problem, but no one was willing to reduce his own driving. Meanwhile, mass transit was virtually non-existent. Bangkok's tram system, rejected as backwards, had been demolished twenty years ago. There was no subway, and the few buses I saw were fiendishly overcrowded and subject to the same delays as cars (but without the balm of air-conditioning). Years ago, Bangkok had been known as the Venice of the East because of the city's intricate web of canals. Most of the canals had been paved over into roads during the modernization drive, however, and still there was far from enough road surface to accommodate all the vehicles. There was talk of building overpasses to relieve the congestion. But what chance did the construction crews have against the mounting tide of cars and motorbikes?

Bangkok's traffic conditions seemed certain to deteriorate after I left Thailand that spring, and they did. In 1995, after three years of worsening congestion and pollution, the nation's beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej complained publicly that the experts charged with solving Bangkok's traffic nightmare "only talk, talk, talk and argue, argue, argue." In 1992, I was told that the average Bangkok commuter spent three hours traveling to and from work. By August 1996, the standard commute was five hours, according to a report broadcast on CNN that showed the children of one family breakfasting in the back seat in predawn darkness. Their father explained that this was the only way to get them to school on time. With a tired sigh, he added that the car not only sapped his time and energy but 30 percent of his income; the only reason he did not leave Bangkok was that he wanted his children to get a good education.

CNN did not mention Bangkok's new auto accessory of choice: the portable toilet. Leaving home without one could be risky, especially at peak travel times. In 1995, one family tried to beat the rush out of town before a national holiday by leaving at ten o'clock the night before. But when they reached the expressway leading to the airport, they found themselves in a traffic jam sixty miles long. According to Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, it took the family twelve maddening hours to get as far as the airport -- only a few miles from their house -- where they gave up and turned around. The Governor of Bangkok told Friedman separately he realized his city had to do something about its traffic: Foreign investors, he conceded, "won't come to live in a town where it takes three hours to travel somewhere by car ... [and] kids grow up breathing bad air." Not all his colleagues felt the same way, though. One government minister interviewed by CNN actually called Bangkok's traffic congestion "a blessing in disguise." Without it, he explained, "we wouldn't have an automobile industry in Thailand."

Reprinted with permission from "Earth Odyssey" by Mark Hertsgaard, published by Broadway Books, © 1998 by Mark Hertsgaard.