This is not your grandfather’s, or even your father’s, idea of a travel book. It is, in fact, the most unlikely travel itinerary you’ll probably ever read. Some of the destinations in these pages have rarely, if ever, made it to those high-gloss volumes of global travel literature. And for a good – or at least logical – reason: most people in so-called ‘advanced’ countries looking for ‘exotic’ locales to spend time in, normally wouldn’t want to go here. These are places that we might consider deep in poverty and hopelessness, where civil wars rage, where dictators confiscate land for their own use, where babies starve, and where travel itself is crimped by men in battle fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. On roads paved and unpaved leading to the four corners of the globe, the ones in the Third World are the very least traveled. Where the scent of stability and higher living standards can be whiffed, and tour-guided safaris through safely-made ‘wild’ jungles and nature preserves can be offered for a pretty price, that is when the roads begin to get crowded. This book, then, is testament to the folly of those stereotypical Third World incursions, and the fiction inherent in their premise. It also highlights real danger, moments when less luck or less wise on-the-spot decisions might have been life threatening. However, this is an occupational hazard for any hardy world traveler with a yen to veer off the well-beaten path. Traveling light in the pocketbook, in fact, is one of the rules of this book – the reason being that you don’t want to stand out and become a target, especially in the Third World. Being Western looking enough as it is, you don’t need a sign around the neck reading: “Free money for everybody, right here.”