Hovels and palaces, presidents and villagers, beseechers and beggars, bedbugs and silk sheets, bearers and ayahs, feasts and cockroaches, foreign travel, riches and squalor, beauty and ugliness, opportunity and temptation, access and denial, such are the quotidian fare of diplomatic life. Add to these the mythical secrecy and subtle ways of international diplomacy and one has the basis for a life often misunderstood by those outside the foreign service. It does, however, create a parade of the sublime and the ridiculous for an interested observer. And opportunity. Travel along on a journey to seek the elusive manatee lazing in a Costa Rican lagoon or climb the Rotang Pass above the snowline north of Old Manali; travel along on a journey to understand the many layered onion called diplomatic life.
This collection of articles and essays explores the vagaries of a peripatetic career: rushing headlong into an Indian posting with two infants; exploring Afghanistan in a rare time of near peace and hope; chatting with bishops and tribal chiefs; paddling a canoe through the Darien mangrove jungle; finding common ground with common folk; living high and learning low; seeking reason and belonging in the unfamiliar.