Today, the value has shifted. What we look for now is connectedness: the opportunity to check our e-mail, upload video clips and chat on Skype -- even if we happen to be on the Khumbu Icefall, 18,000 feet high in the Nepal Himalaya.

Last week, a network of eight 3G base stations began operating along the route to Mount Everest, in Sagarmatha National Park. They were installed by Ncell, a Nepali telecom firm. The news didn't surprise me. But I felt that, irreversibly, another blow had been struck against magic.

Access to the Internet is starting to seem like a human right, so let me offer a disclaimer. There is no rational downside to the arrival of broadband on the flanks of Everest. I'm not a Luddite, and would never suggest that developing nations should be denied, for any reason, the global access that technology can provide. This 3G network will undoubtedly save lives -- not only by providing weather information and support to Everest climbers and trekkers, but as an alert system for the nearby villages threatened by flash floods from Glacial Lake Overflow (GLOF), another peril caused by global warming.

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On Friday, May 8, the newest offering in the "Star Trek" canon will open in theaters around the world. The film will give us the back story of the original series, and show how its three principals got themselves onto what might be (along with Noah’s Ark and the Titanic) the most famous vehicle in history: the starship Enterprise. Only one of the three main actors of that era will appear in J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek." It won’t be William Shatner (Kirk), or DeForest Kelley (McCoy), who died in 1999. Though Mr. Spock’s role as a half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet cadet is played by Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy makes a cameo appearance as the future Spock, coming to advise his younger avatar.

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Bunaken lies off the north shore of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The small island is one of the gems in Bunaken National Marine Park, created in 1991, one of Indonesia's first marine parks. I am here with Seacology, a nonprofit group based in Berkeley, Calif., that works with islanders around the world to help preserve indigenous communities and ecosystems. In Bunaken and neighboring Manado Tua, a perfectly round island dominated by the towering cone of a dormant volcano, Seacology is funding a revolutionary practice of reviving coral reefs.

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But if one were to speed up the clock, the crisis threatening the region would become obvious. The mangrove swamps would recede, making way for new resorts; the reefs would burst and dissolve, destroyed by dynamite fishing, coral harvesting and pollution. Swaths of tropical rain forest would vanish, giving way to erosion. Mudslides would pour though villages. Worst of all -- and invisible even in time-lapse photography -- one species after another would blink out of existence, its last member obliterated with no more concern than the accidental crushing of an ant.

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A handsome 23-year-old, Vavuniyu is a team leader with the Danish Demining Group in Kuchchaveli, on Sri Lanka's northeast coast. For $110 a month -- roughly the salary of a high school teacher in this underdeveloped country -- he spends four hours each day combing the village streets and pastures for mines uprooted by the tsunami.

To date, there have no reports of Sri Lankans killed by the newly exposed mines. The only victim has been a cow that wandered into a clearly marked minefield. Yet 94 P-4 mines -- the size and shape of hockey pucks, with a plunger on top -- have been recovered. Most have been detonated. But several dozen, their fuses removed, are stored in a red wooden crate beneath Vavuniyu's bed.

"There's no place else to put them," he shrugs. The deactivated mines, he says, pose no hazard, unless the temperature in the barracks rises above 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit).

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I've been obsessed with making this pilgrimage ever since I arrived, a seeming eternity ago, at the southwestern beaches of Koggala. Then, stilt fishermen told me they had survived the tsunami because it occurred during a poya or full-moon day. Full moons are sacred in Sri Lanka; legend holds that Lord Buddha's birth, enlightenment and passing to nirvana (extinction from the wheel of life and its suffering) occurred on full moons. Poya days are a monthly Sabbath. Shops are closed, alcohol is not served and any killing -- including fishing -- is forbidden. Today, the first full moon following the tsunami, will be a day of note at Sri Lanka's main Buddhist shrines.

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Today, Dwayne and I pile into our muddy four-wheeler and stop at the Mercy Corps office to pick up the ever-patient Mr. Tangal, a local employee who will serve as our translator and liaison during our journey to Muthur. Muthur lies only 10 miles south, across Kodiyar Bay and along the coast, but we will have to detour far inland to reach the place. The camp itself is in a nearby village called Samboor.

The trip is significant, for this will be our first sojourn to a camp located in territory controlled by LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) or, as they're more infamously known, the Tamil Tigers. Since the early 1980s, the militant Tigers have been fighting, violently and futilely, to divide Sri Lanka into two nations: Sinhalese and Tamil.

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On Saturday morning, we visit a beach near Kudakally, where the fishermen are working out ways to rebuild their fleet of narrow, brightly painted boats. Each boat employs upward of 40 men -- not to run the boat but to monitor and pull in the enormous coir nets weighted to the seafloor.

As we're standing with the Mercy Corps and Sewalanka team, discussing the sort of support they might offer the fishermen and net makers, one of the men steps forward. He's wearing a clean white shirt and resembles Walter Matthau. He has no special request; he simply wants us to know that he has lost everything.

"My son, my daughter, my wife and " But the fisherman cannot finish his sentence; he breaks down in sobs. All around me, fishermen fight back tears; I succumb. It is another one of those moments when the sheer force of loss hits me like a physical blow. I put myself in this fisherman's place and wonder if I, after losing everything that gave my life joy and structure, could begin to rebuild after three short weeks.

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During a dinner in Colombo, I learn that a Mercy Corps volunteer, Lyn Robinson, is preparing to go shopping with several hundred dollars of private donor money and buy a carload of toys and games. She'd drive to Arugam Bay and distribute them to children in the refugee camps.

As it happens, Nancy Lindborg, the brilliant, vibrant president of Mercy Corps, is in Sri Lanka on a three-day reconnaissance mission. When I tell her about Lyn's plan, she lights up with enthusiasm. It would be marvelous, she says, to make this trip the seed of another "Comfort for Kids" project.

Mercy Corps doesn't often run programs in the United States, but after Sept. 11, it partnered with two New York corporations -- JP Morgan Chase and Bright Horizons (a day-care center enterprise) -- to provide "Comfort for Kids." These were small packages containing morale-boosting gifts for children: colored pencils and crayons, stuffed animals and small toys. In large-scale disasters, children are often left to fend for themselves, as their parents (if they still have parents) manage the rebuilding process. Provided a few creative distractions, though, kids prove remarkably resilient.

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"Destination = 1 Hour"

That's how long it will take us to reach the shores of Arugam Bay. It would be nine tortuous hours by car from Colombo, driving along the twisting southeast road that crosses the mountains and jungles of the island's interior.

Yesterday, along with my work as a communications director for the relief organization Mercy Corps, I imagined I would write about the tsunami supply depot at Sri Lanka's international airport. The process of getting the Black Hawk and the supplies we requested, and getting myself onboard, was a labyrinth that would have maddened Theseus. Two full weeks after the tsunami, the scene at the supply depot is still a scene out of "Catch-22." Trying to get tents, hygiene kits, foam mattresses, plastic sheeting or even bottles of water to the people who need them is something approaching comic opera.

But that's behind us, now. The Black Hawk lifted off at 1 o'clock this afternoon. We were supposed to bring 10 boxes of tarpaulins to Arugam Bay on Sri Lanka's southern coast, but we ended up taking half as many after an NBC "Dateline" crew wrangled its way onboard. Now we sit together in the cramped cargo bay, squeezed between the boxes of supplies.

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It's a combination nightmare and dream come true. More than anything, it's an exercise in being careful what you wish for. Days after the earthquake in Sumatra, the most recklessly generous part of my soul offered a dare to the rest of me: Would I continue to watch reports of the flooding and devastation on television, or get on a plane to Bangkok? I had no idea what I'd do once I arrived, but it seemed I could be of use somewhere. On the spur of the moment I called Third Eye Travel, which specializes in discount trips to Asia. Yes, I could be on a plane to Thailand on the 31st of December.

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"I can't believe you're leaving," he said. "Aren't you terrified?"

"A little." I shrugged. "Anybody would be."

"Then why do you have to go? I mean, why now?

"It's too much trouble to change my flight."

"The airline would understand," Velo frowned.

"I know." I plucked my travel clock from the nightstand, and slipped it into my toiletry kit. "But I have a meeting. As awful as it sounds, I have to be in America by Tuesday."

Outside my window, the sun glittered on the Celebes Sea. Velo and I were standing in my hotel room in Indonesia, where I'd just completed a two-week assignment for Outside magazine. Riots in Jakarta, and the threat of reprisals against Americans, had earned the most populous Islamic nation in the world a grim travel warning from the U.S. State Department. This was the last place on earth my mother would want me to be.

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Rumors abound that the prince is innocent, that the massacre was a conspiracy to put the king's younger brother, Gyanendra, on the throne. To make a bad situation worse, the editor and two publishers of Kantipur, Nepal's largest daily, were arrested Thursday for publishing a call to arms by a guerrilla leader of Nepal's Maoist party.

For most Americans, Nepal holds two dubious distinctions: It's the staging ground for an endless parade of ego-serving expeditions up Mount Everest; and its photogenic capital, Kathmandu, served as a fabled haunt for the nomadic hash hounds of the 1960s.

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Pre-pubescent girls in native costume rushed up with leis; a troupe of Lao dancers swayed on the tarmac, dancing to musical accompaniment that sounded like a rhapsody composed on a planet inhabited by medieval cats. Press photographers snapped pictures as we accepted free T-shirts, handed out by smiling boys who lined our passage into the arrivals lounge.

"This gives fresh meaning," I said to my companion, "to the phrase 'accidental tourist.'"

The date was Jan. 1. My friend Diane and I, along with a load of other unwitting travelers, had arrived from Bangkok on the maiden flight of "Visit Laos Year 1999-2000."

This "Visit (your country's name here) Year" business is an honor doled out by ASEAN -- the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- to its member nations. Last year was Thailand's turn; this year, for the first time, Laos (which joined ASEAN in 1997) received the mantel. The hope of this poor and landlocked country, naturally, is to cash in on the millions of dollars in foreign exchange -- much of it from tourist revenue -- that has flowed for decades into Thailand and, more recently, into Cambodia and Vietnam as well.

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The festival of Dasain is Nepal's equivalent of Christmas, although it spans
15 days and is defined by copious bloodletting. The October holiday
commemorates how the goddess Durga -- a wrathful emanation of Parvati, the
otherwise demure wife of the great Lord Shiva -- slew a giant buffalo-demon
named Mahisasura. In Kathmandu, the event is recalled with zealous butchery.
Tens of thousands of goats, water buffaloes and chickens are ritually
killed, their blood spurting onto black stone shrines across the Valley.

Needless to say, this is a very colorful festival -- red predominating -- and
tourists rise early for the chance to photograph the slaughter. Most
alluring is the annual blessing of the machines, where tools and vehicles of
all stripe are doused with sacrificial blood. Mechanics kill chickens,
sprinkling fresh blood over their wrenches; Honda scooters, taxis and trucks
receive their due as well. A few miles east of where I sit, a light-duty
crane hoists a hapless goat toward the cockpit of Karnali, a venerable 757 in
the Royal Nepal Airlines fleet. The goat is gently coaxed to bare its
throat. With a quick stroke of a khukuri -- the boomerang-shaped blade
carried by the Gurkha regiments -- the animal is beheaded. Blood spurts over
the jetliner's nose, assuring another year of safe passage.

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This sudden reverse metamorphosis -- from butterflies back to cocoons -- was so striking that I almost laughed. The change was especially dramatic in the woman sitting next to me, Sophia, an Iranian by birth who had been living in Hawaii for two years. Sophia's manner, so lively and playful during the five-hour flight, now took on a somber and wary mien. She was doing something she hated, to please someone else: Someone who could not be pleased.

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The one ray of hope is that we are currently in Shiraz, about 550 miles south of Tehran, not far from the Persian Gulf. Isfahan, where we will observe the eclipse, is halfway to Tehran, on the inland side of the Zagros Mountains. It's much less likely to be cloudy. Still, the sight gave our small group a scare, and we spent breakfast debating, half-jokingly, whether we might consider catching a flight back to Bucharest.

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"I try to answer," he admits wearily. "I say, 'It felt terrific. Tremendously satisfying. The mission was going well, and our training had prepared us perfectly.'

"But then people say, 'No ... how did it feel? How did it really feel?'" He bristles. "For Christ's sake, I don't know. I just don't know. I have been frustrated since the day I left the moon by that question." He shakes his head. "Some things just can't be described. And stepping onto the moon was one of them."

Tuesday marks the 30th anniversary of the day that Aldrin and Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins became the most famous men on Earth. Six hundred million people watched their 35-story-tall Saturn V blast off from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969. At least that many tuned in four days later, via radio and television, to hear the first words uttered from another world. Armstrong's "One small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind" appears on the commemorative coins. But it was Aldrin who provided the more poetic pronouncement: "Magnificent desolation."

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A word to the wise: Never go to a communist country to relax. For a cultural awakening, absolutely. For an education, definitely. But not to relax.

Why should this have surprised us? What were we thinking? At what point in their history, Diane and I wondered in retrospect, did the Viet Cong have time to mix up a few mai tais and sun themselves by the pool? And why on Earth should an American's visit to North Vietnam be any more relaxing than a visit by O.J. Simpson to his in-laws?

But here, as travelers invariably discover, lies the Great Yankee Paradox. Never mind that we conducted a secret war here, backed a coup there or refused to buy a country's papayas for 30 years. Most foreigners (with the exception of a few Muslim clerics and beret-capped fanatics) are actually quite happy to see us.

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