Pre-Columbian map makers indicated the edge of the world with vague warnings; either you fell off the edge into an infinite void, or monsters lurked beyond the pale of the known world.
     Hecataeus wrote the first history and geography book in Western civilization; Periegesis, meaning 'Guide Round,' or Periodos Ges, 'Journey Round the World' or 'General Survey of the inhabited world as known at that time.' Hecataeus was far more that a traveler, historian and geographer, he was also the first cultural anthropologist. His work as a historian is often denigrated because he also included descriptions of myths, fables, superstitions and beliefs.
     This is something like disregarding the modern historian because he reports on the fabled existence of Jesus of Nazareth, when it is apparent that no such person ever existed.
     The thing about Hecataeus is that he wandered around the earth and was wonder struck.
     These poems and photographs are in a sense a refutation of cultural xenophobia. After leaving Vietnam, Flo and I traveled around the world looking for sanity and peace. It is my feeling that humans are more related to one another than they are alien. I found both: human empathy and inhuman chauvinism.
     Still, the world is a circular place. Ultimately, it is only your own backside blocking the view.
     The journey takes the reader through Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, England and home across America.
     The travel is the last class underground circuit, life at ground zero, eye-level and in your face. Characters abound: thieves, taxi drivers, saints, poets, monks, artists, dopers, deserters, teachers, monks and assorted scoundrels.
     We bought fake IDs from a sleazy Frenchman in the Thai Song Greet in Bangkok. We sat in the Calcutta monsoons with Swami Abahayananda while the refugees flooded over the border of Bangladesh. We caught a perilous bus full of French lunatics going from New Delhi to Paris.
     We bought a VW bus in Wolfsburg and drove through the European winter. I swam with dolphins in the Adriatic neat Thessolonika and got stuck in the sand with a rising tide on Crete. We froze our appendages off in the ice-water showers in the Crystal Palace camp ground in a London blizzard. We drove home across the US from New York. We escaped a land war in Southeast Asia, the Khan's rape of Bangladesh, Afghani thieves, Turkish bandits and settled down in a cute little beach cottage and began wars of our own.