"Are you lost?" he asked me.

"Not really," I said. "I know where I am; I just can't find the place I want to go."

"I am Mr. Ibrahim," he said, gesturing grandly at the buildings of Beirut, "and this is my city." He looked to be in his early 30s, but he spoke as if he thought of himself as a wizened old patriarch. "Where do you wish to go?"

"Well, it's a pub that a friend of a friend told me about, but I'm not sure if you would know where ..."

"This is my city!" Mr. Ibrahim bellowed happily, giving me a start. He grinned intensely as I attempted to continue.

"Oh, right. Well, I'm looking for a ..."

"Where are you from?"

"I'm from America."

"America!" Mr. Ibrahim yelled, his voice echoing through the street. Still grinning, he pulled out his wallet and produced a dollar bill. "What is this?" he asked me.

"Um, it's a dollar."

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For starters, the movie on the big screen isn't "Die Hard," as I had expected, but a black-and-white '70s-era Arabic film starring a polyester-clad protagonist with sideburns the size of Brillo pads. I go back out to the foyer to inquire about "Die Hard," but the doorman just waves me back inside. Figuring a little patience and curiosity can't hurt, I find a seat near the aisle and try to make sense of the film.

The plot proves to be a mesmerizingly bad mix of action, romance, mystery, slapstick comedy and social commentary. So broad is the premise that the hero seems to spend most of his time racing from genre to genre. In the span of a few minutes, we see him running down the street shooting a gun, breaking up a squabble between his enormously fat neighbor and her improbably skinny husband, making an emotional phone call to a worried-looking woman and sitting in jail while his cellmate dreams of belly dancers. The token sex scene -- no more than 30 seconds from foreplay to cigarette -- features no disrobing, no stylized fadeaways and no changes in facial expression. After a while, I can't help enjoying it.

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The blood was from the streets of Cairo, which at the time had been in the midst of celebrations marking the Islamic Feast of the Sacrifice, known locally as the Eid al-Adha.

As with everything in Cairo, the Eid al-Adha was an inadvertent exercise in chaos. For the entire week leading up to the holiday, the alleys and rooftops of the city began to fill up with noisy, nervous knots of livestock brought in for the feast. Cairenes paid little mind as cattle munched clover outside coffee shops, goats gnawed on empty Marlboro packs in alleyways and skittish sheep rained down poop from apartment building balconies. For Egyptians, this preponderance of urban livestock was part of the excitement of the feast -- and it was certainly no stranger for them than putting a decorated tree inside one's house in anticipation of the winter holidays.

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I'm not sure what he wants, but since the blue jacket gives him a vaguely official air, I just assume he's a train worker. He doesn't speak or look back as I follow him into the next car, which is largely empty and quiet.

Stopping in the middle of the car, the boy motions me over to a window. "Look," he whispers, gesturing outside. "Beautiful!"

I see that he's talking about the sunset. Just above the horizon, a red sun streaks the surrounding sky with bars of pink and yellow. Beyond the train tracks, the mighty Nile glitters with orange spangles of light. It is indeed beautiful.

As I gaze out, taking in the quiet colors, I wonder why the boy has gone to so much trouble to show me such a simple moment.

I don't have to wonder for long. Leaning in confidentially as the sun slips below the horizon, the boy rests one hand on my shoulder, as if he has some fatherly advice to share with me.

"Please," he whispers to me, holding his other hand in front of his face and rubbing his fingertips together. "Baksheesh."

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Though it seemed innocuous at the time, this was probably the act that turned the next 10 hours of my life into a wearying mix of self-loathing and dull paranoia.

Up until that moment, my hike into the sandy fringe of the world's largest desert had been full of simple discovery and fascination. In the utter emptiness of the landscape, I found myself vividly aware of slight details: telltale irregularities in the texture of the sand; the metallic ping of the odd rocks beneath my boots; a lone ant marching up a dune, its abdomen tilted skyward. I noted a complete lack of odor in the air; I watched the rippled shadows of the landscape dissolve at midday, then deepen again in the afternoon.

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In this manner, I have collected sights like souvenirs: men in alleys building lattices, baking bread, butchering chickens; a herd of goats toddling through a public plaza; Berbers in donkey carts stuck in traffic jams. I have seen the incense man swing his censer through a fruit market, collecting 10-piaster tips; I have seen women in full ninja-style chador dive onto speeding buses; I have seen pious Muslim men selling vegetables, their foreheads black with welts from praying to Mecca. I have seen garbage choking rooftops and raw sewage flowing through the medieval gate of Islamic Cairo. The call of the muezzin from the mosques -- at first a strange, haunting cry -- has now blended into the music of my day.

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This is not a fear of existential belittlement in the presence of the ancient megaliths, nor do I fear some presumed Pharaonic curse. Rather, I fear letdown. I fear I won't see the grand old monuments with the proper degree of awe or historical perspective. I fear that in the process of comparing reputation with reality, I will be disappointed. I fear that the pyramids -- which have been perused, praised and plundered for thousands of years -- will prove, in experience, to be little more than a static tourist cartoon, devoid of genuine inspiration or beauty.

The most irritating part of this pyramid phobia is that I will ultimately be forced to confront it. After all, going to Cairo without seeing the pyramids is like a marriage without consummation: You can try it, but ultimately the obsession with what you're missing will get the best of you.

I can procrastinate, however -- and that's what I've resolved to do. Taking a taxi from the Cairo airport to Orabi Square at midday, I unsling my pack at a park bench, do a bit of reading and let the city soak in before I look for a place to stay.

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"I am from Iran," he said. "I think you are not from Cyprus."

I smiled at both the man's abrupt introduction and his unusual appearance.
He looked like he'd just come in from bow-hunting deer in Idaho: dark-green
coveralls, heavy boots, a bright orange stocking cap. He wore thick
glasses and looked to be about 40 years old.

"Yes, I'm not from Cyprus," I told him. "I'm from America."

"America!" the man exclaimed. "I have an American nickname: Harrison.
Like Harrison Ford. I made up this name because I like Harrison Ford, and I
love America. In my mind, I think that America must be like Paradise. Is
it wonderful to live there?"

"Well I wouldn't call it Paradise, but I like living there."

"I wish I could go to America, but I cannot get a visa. So last week I came
here to Cyprus instead."

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In honor of this cinematic occasion, I have traveled across the globe to a beach that epitomizes what, over the course of the movie, Leo's Richard character grows to despise. This particular beach has long enjoyed a reputation as a laid-back stop-off for weary backpackers and drug-addled hipsters. Recently, however, it has started to show growing pains, as a unified, high-turnover vision of Western leisure has begun to take over.

Admittedly, there is still plenty of charm to this place. In the morning, travelers can sit in the sun and stretch a $1 breakfast into a blissful three-hour idle while seabirds soar over the bay. At night, when brownouts don't kill the local power supply, the beach-side palm trees glow with Christmas lights as travelers chat and sip tea around restaurant bonfires. During the day, these travelers occupy themselves with snorkeling, diving, wilderness trekking, card games, warm beer, marijuana or simply staring off into space along the warm waterfront. In the shadows, an occasional stray cat flicks its tail and languorously squeezes its eyes shut. Here, a reed hut near the beach rents for about $2; a slightly nicer accommodation with a bathroom starts at about $5. Food is cheap, facilities are adequate, drugs are plentiful and days are unstructured.

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On Page 80 of the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey, there is a passage entitled "Turkish Knockout" that reads:

"Thieves befriend travelers, usually single men, and offer them drinks which contain powerful drugs that cause the victims to lose consciousness quickly. When the victims awake hours later, they have a terrible hangover and have been stripped of everything but their clothes. The perpetrators of this sort of crime, who are usually not Turkish, often work in pairs or trios."

Bad fortune tends to magnify and mythify these innocuous little details and oversights. That I never read Page 80 of my guidebook during my first four days in Istanbul is one of a thousand factors which, in retrospect, seemingly conspired to leave me unconscious and penniless one night in the middle of the city.

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Instinct told me to stand up. Shaking like an addict, I drew myself up to my haunches and pushed with my legs. I rose to my full height for just an instant before something malfunctioned and my whole body veered rigidly to one side. I fell over like a wind-up toy on a rumpled bed sheet; my shoulder hit the pavement first, then my face.

Blood welled on my cheekbone as a hazy understanding began to form. I patted down my pockets: My petty cash was gone, as was my wallet, my leather belt and my Swiss Army knife. I felt along my belly for my hidden money belt, but it was gone, too -- passport, traveler's checks and all. Oddly, my red spiral notebook and my recently purchased Penguin anthology of Middle Eastern mythology were still jammed into my back pocket.

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Tourist brochure perfect.

Fortunately, I have just the plan to keep things from getting overly quaint and predictable. "Let's stay at the Pink Palace tomorrow," I say.

Valentina raises her eyebrows. "Sounds romantic."

"It isn't," I tell her.

I first met Valentina in Innsbruck (where she goes to university) and we've been traveling together ever since. Though our love affair is just over one week old, it has already consisted of several canonical romantic experiences: hiking together through the mist in the Italian Alps, walking the canals of Venice at sunset, taking the night train down the Adriatic coast to Brindisi. This morning we sat together on the lifeboat deck of a ship that took us down the Albanian coastline to Corfu -- a Greek Ionian resort island that features historical Venetian fortresses, Byzantine churches, British palaces and a French-styled esplanade in its colonial Old Town district. We strolled the narrow streets this evening until we found a tiny family run restaurant that gave us a sumptuous introduction to moussaka and yemista and choriatiki.

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Regardless of where you are in the world, hitchhiking comes with its own set of basic procedures: choosing a safe roadside hitching spot where traffic is slow enough to stop; refusing to accept rides from drunk or suspicious or crazy people; staying wary, bringing a map, using common sense. Patience, that mossy old virtue, is central to all of this. With the proper amount of patience, hitching can be a safe and interesting way to see Europe and -- most importantly -- it can allow you to interact with the kind of people you'd never see on the tourist routes.

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Until that moment, I had been quietly enjoying myself on the cobblestones in the heart of Riga's medieval Old Town. Plastic tables had been set up at the edges of the square near the enormous, German-styled Dome Cathedral, and scores of people had gathered to relax, drink beer and chat. A string quartet was playing on the grass in front of the cathedral; an accordionist squeezed out a tune on the opposite side of the square. Children raced across the cobblestones into narrow alleys. Young couples embraced in the shadows.

I'd met the Latvian fellows just 20 minutes earlier, when they'd hailed me from another table (where I'd been sitting alone) and gave me a glass of beer. They were all big burly guys in their early 20s, two blond and one dark-haired.

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The problem with kissing Natasha was that, being a librarian, she was overflowing with interesting factoids and observations about the universe. Since she didn't speak English, we had to stop kissing and summon Daniil every time a new epiphany struck her. Oiled, no doubt, by several hours of drinking and dancing, her epiphanies came at the rate of about one every 90 seconds.

"Daniil!" she called for the fifth time in 15 minutes. Daniil, a recent St. Petersburg University graduate, was hosting our after-hours party at his cozy, rundown, second-floor crash-pad near the popular Nevski Prospekt district. The ceilings of the old apartment were tall and grimy, empty beer bottles lined the table and an anti-hangover tea kettle boiled on the living room hot plate. The old Soviet-era wallpaper was covered with magic-markered graffiti, some of which was our own.

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While in the perfumed death-grip of such optimistic sincerity, many a scribe has misled his readers with dandied visions of trans-continental reverie. Some wayward writers have committed this error by weaving the view from their train window into moony reflections about how Russian literature changed their lives. Others have tried to capture the mood of the country itself by minutely analyzing everything from their new Russian acquaintances, to whimsical encounters with the dining-car staff, to any experience involving obligatory vodka-shots.

A few rail-diarists -- the desperate -- try to validate their long hours on the train by bringing in marginally relevant trivia from the sights outside: how Tomsk is full of radioactive waste; how Taishet was once a Stalin-era forwarding camp for Siberian exiles; how Perm is home to a bicycle factory; or how Krasnoyarsk churns out refrigerators and car tires.

All of this is fine. But it falls far short of the train experience itself.

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This is my only theory, aside from generic rancor, as to why the provodnitsa encouraged me to return to Naushki Station at 4:00 for a train that left at 3:15.

A "provodnitsa," as Russian-rail veterans know, is the female attendant responsible for overseeing the passengers in a given train car. Formally, the duties of a provodnitsa include taking tickets, vacuuming the berths and attending to the upkeep of the toilets. On the surface, this seems like an innocuous job description -- until one realizes that, in Siberia, these duties fall under an obsolete model of customer service.

Years ago in the United States, service industry workers wore lapel-buttons that read "The Customer is Always Right." As far as I know, their employed-for-life Soviet counterparts were never required to display a customer service philosophy -- but if they were, I'd suspect the buttons would have read "The Fact That You Exist Annoys the Hell Out of Me."

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"Kansas!" the Russian tank officer exclaimed. "Moskva!"

"Yes, I grew up in Kansas," I said. "And I'm headed to Moscow."

"Moskva!" he continued, acting as if I didn't understand him. "Kansas!" He held out his hands and pressed his palms together. Unsure what to do, I smiled and mimicked his action, pressing my hands together.

Behind us, three old Soviet tanks sat, temporarily mothballed, in the rail yard of a Siberian-Mongolian border town called Naushki. Mark and James, my British cabinmates from the Trans-Siberian train, were clambering on the tanks -- peering down the barrels and tugging on the hatches.

The Russian officer, who was trying to communicate something about Kansas with Lassie-like persistence, paid no heed to my companions' informal tank-inspection. "Parlez-vous francais?" he asked, his palms still pressed together in front of him.

"Nyet," I said. "Hanguk-mal haleyo?" The tank officer gave me a blank look. I expected as much: My fractured Korean language skills had yet to help me in any international situation.

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Once he'd fired through an entire roll of film, the man looked back at me sheepishly. "Sorry to be so vulgar," he said, slurring his words a bit. "This just looks like something that needs to be photographed."

"It's your world," I told him.

Ten meters beyond the restraining cord, a white-frocked pair of Mongolian veterinarians jogged up to assess the scene. The horse's rider, an exhausted-looking 10-year-old with lather-slicked legs, stood by tearfully.

Beyond the dying horse, the broad, grassy plain hummed with other child riders spurring their horses toward the finish line. Thousands of Naadam Festival spectators crowded the final stretch for half a mile in both directions. Purple thunderheads rumbled above -- lending a grand, vaguely sinister air to the scene. I watched as one of the veterinarians plunged a syringe into the horse's throat.

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Out in the street, young travelers from countries such as Switzerland, Israel
and New Zealand nurse beers at plastic tables, while others line up at
food stalls to sample sliced pineapple, vegetarian noodles and banana
pancakes. Tuk-tuk drivers hail passengers at the corner, while Indian
tailors pace the sidewalk in front of their stores, chanting their standard
mantra ("Sir, try a suit. Very good price, sir."). Sidewalk vendors hawk
jewelry and cigarette lighters, bootleg tapes and fake press passes;
storefront vendors sell souvenirs ranging from Nepalese jackets to Balinese
masks to novelty T-shirts that read "SEX INSTRUCTOR (First Lesson Free)."

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