It's a funny thing about epiphanies - you never know when or where you'll have one.  This particular one of mine came appropriately enough in a church - but this was a church in a village called Tuk Tuk on an island in a lake in Sumatra. It was the joyous singing of the congregation that triggered it, a congregation composed of families, of men and women and children of all ages joined together.  The contrast between this seemingly ordinary Sunday service in a small Christian church with that of a mosque -men only, chanting like joyless robots, their children not with them, nor their wives whom they force to hide behind veils and burqas, was overwhelming. For these courageous churchgoers live on a Christian island surrounded by a Moslem sea.  Sumatra is part of Indonesia, a country with the world's largest Moslem population.  My heart went out to these people happily singing and celebrating their faith.  Tears began streaming down my face and they would not stop. They were tears of gratitude and hope - for I believe these people will not succumb to Islamization but triumph over it.  Here in Sumatra there is a Christian sunrise.  I am going to encourage you to come here, to Lake Toba, and experience this yourself.  After all, in what other magical paradise on the planet can you get a good meal for a dollar and a hotel room for $25?  A spacious room with a balcony that has this view:

This is a tale of tattooed headhunters and white rajahs, of fantastically rich sultans and weirdly demented princes, of spectacular natural wonders and their destruction, of Chinese Christians, Malay Moslems, and Javanese imperialists, of impossibly beautiful sunsets in the South China Sea. This is a tale of Borneo.  It is also a tale of Christians under siege.

The Indian Ocean is the world's third largest (after the Pacific and Atlantic, larger than the fourth, the Arctic), and far less known than its two big brothers.  Close to two dozen countries border it, with the ancient land of India so predominant the ocean itself is named after it. Yet there is another country that has for centuries dominated the ocean far more than India ever did, a country that doesn't border it but lies thousands of miles away in Europe:  France.  So much so that it should be more appropriately labeled the French Ocean. Most people think that Western colonialism and imperialism ended in the three decades following World War II, that the term "Western colonial power" is a quaint anachronism.  This is not true of France, which has maintained its worldwide colonial empire by direct or devious means right through to today. From St. Pierre & Miquelon off the east coast of Canada;  to St. Martin, St. Bart's, Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, to French Guiana in South America;  to Corsica in the Mediterranean;  to New Caledonia, Wallis & Futuna (between Fiji and Samoa), Tahiti & French Polynesia, and Clipperton off the south coast of Mexico, the sun never sets on the French Empire. Yet it is in the Indian Ocean that French colonial influence most clearly dominates an entire region.  And given the threats the region faces, it could be in our interests that it does.

Picture an idyllic beach on a tropical island.  The water is an intensely pure cobalt blue, gentle waves softly foaming upon the sugar soft sand.  People are picnicking under the coconut palm trees that line the beach, children are happily playing, it's 75 degrees and sunny, the azure sky dotted with puffy little clouds. The beach is set in a small cove, and built along the rocks on one side of the cove are picturesque little homes of the local villagers, whose livelihood is fishing.  A number of them are doing just that in their outrigger dugout canoes a few hundred yards offshore.  With the clear sky, you know it's going to be a spectacular sunset.  Then you'll have fresh fish for dinner, caught by one of those fellows in the outriggers. Paradise, no doubt about it, you think.  Then you notice those picturesque homes are all in a state of filth and decay, even though they are lived in.  The beach is littered with tires and other refuse.  Under the swaying palms are vast piles of garbage and trash. In fact, everywhere you go on the island, along every road (which have more potholes than pavement), in every village and town, there's trash and litter.  Not dumps of garbage, but the villages and roadsides are garbage dumps of plastic bags, foil wrappings, pieces of cardboard boxes, trash, trash, trash every place you look.  The whole island, it seems, is one big garbage dump. Welcome to the Comoros.  More precisely, the Union of the Comoros, a prime candidate for the world's most screwed-up country and object lesson for how to ruin paradise. So settle in your favorite chair with a glass of your favorite beverage (with refills at the ready), and let me tell you a true mind-blow of a weird adventure story about a lost corner of the world you never heard of. Yet in this tiny remote spot, we can also learn how to deal with illegal aliens, how to have a peaceful and tolerant Islam, and how to save a paradise instead of wrecking it.

Marco Polo (1254-1324) knew where the end of the world was.  He never went there but he heard about it.  It was a "great red island" in the vast unknown sea far to the south of India, and it had a strange name:  Madagascar. Although near Africa, folks here - known as Malagasy - are not from Africa.  They came from Indonesia 2,000 years ago.  For a thousand years they lived in isolation from the world. Then strangers started appearing on their northern coast calling themselves "Moslems." The Malagasy wanted no part of them or their strange and offensive religion.  Persians ("Shirazis" from Shiraz) and Arabs were sailing in their dhows down the east coast of Africa enslaving and Islamizing as they went.  But when they crossed the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar, they discovered people very different from Africans. Arabs had found the islands of Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, Borneo, etc.) easy Islamic pickings for converts.  Somehow, the converts' distant relatives weren't.  This is an important mystery. Ever since they invented Islam, Arabs have forced their religion upon peoples throughout the world, most of the time with little or no resistance.  The exceptions are among people who have a competing religion like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.  It's very hard to think of any place without a strong competing religion already in place that resisted Islam. Madagascar is that place.  That's one reason it is a light at the end of the world.

Maseru, Lesotho, Southern Africa.  My son Jackson and I arrived here in a snow storm.  It soon became a raging blizzard.  Inches of snow, accidents all over the place, for most people here (they all belong to a tribe called Basotho) have never seen snow, much less know how to drive in it. An African blizzard may seem a joke, but that southern Africa is suffering through one of its coldest winters isn't.  (Remember that it's winter now below the Equator.) It's just another one of the blizzard of problems that a place like Lesotho (luh-soo-too) is enduring, none of which is a laughing matter. In fact, There's no way around it, for Lesotho's fate is baked in the demographic cake.  Lesotho is doomed.  The real African Blizzard is going to sweep it away. What a tragedy - for it had such a heroic start in the 19th century...

You disappear into the African bush for over two weeks, only to emerge back into the world to discover everything's the same.  Bush is still commiserating over the dead horse of the immigration, people with 2-digit IQs are still paying attention to Paris Hilton, Palestinians are still killing each other in Gaza, Moslems are rioting around the world over some perceived insult to their religion of intolerance (in this case, the knighting of Salmon Rushdie by Queen Elizabeth), and good news from Iraq is not being reported. What really got my attention, though, was a news bulletin from Cologne, Germany.

Sleeping in a tent with a half million wildebeest nearby on the short grass plains of Africa's Serengeti is like sleeping next to an eight-lane freeway at rush hour - with all the cars honking their horns. The incessant snorts and grunts of the vast herds vibrate the leaves off the trees which fall like rain on the tent.  They are punctuated by the whistling barks of thousands of zebras, and interrupted by the cackling cry of hyenas on a kill.  One hyena pack's cries are so close they must be less than 100 feet away. In the short breaks of silence when the hyenas cease and the wildebeest resume, there are lions coughing in the distance. With the coming of dawn, things quiet down.  The wildebeest and zebras emerge out of the relative safety of the trees where we are camped and onto the plains the Masai call endless - for that is what Serengeti means in their tribal language, "endless plains." I have had no contact with the outside world now for going on two weeks.  Not a single phone call or email, not a newspaper or short-wave radio.  I'll be posting this once I reach the town of Arusha, which is the jumping-off spot for safaris to the Serengeti, but as of now I haven't the faintest idea of what's been happening in the world. The world seems very far away from where I am writing this, on the veranda of my tent with a plain of endless grass spread before me, countless black dots of munching wildebeest covering the dark green all the way to the horizon.   It seems a perfect place to discuss just how we all got out of Africa and into that far away world so long ago - for it is an astounding and fascinating story.

The Exchange Bar at the Stanley in Nairobi is arguably the most famous watering hole in Africa.  Named after Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the Dark Continent's greatest explorer, the Stanley Hotel was built in 1902.  Teddy Roosevelt drank here, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, and a long long list of European "crowned heads." It was a great place to find out what the Soviets were up to in Africa during the Cold War, so I hoisted many a Tusker Lager here years ago.  And here I am again.  With no intrigue going on, just a lot of folks ensconced in leather chairs engaged in friendly talk about safaris or business.  I've got a mug of Tusker, of course, but I've also got a wireless Internet connection on my laptop.  What would Hemingway have thought? Yet what keeps coming to my mind is a picture I once took out in the bush not too far from here.  It's of a palm tree: You'd never think it was anything special until you realize that palm trees are not native to the East African bush.  You're looking at real and awful history here.  This is a slave palm.