The 40-minute drive from Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International to the capital of Port Louis reveals the island’s scattered chains of contorted and jagged mountain crests. After several days traversing Mauritius, the peaks will remind me of the surreal mountaintop drawings of Doctor Seuss. To my now untrained and jetlagged eye, the rolling fields of green sugarcane dotted with plush trees and capped in low floating clouds resemble more the English countryside than my image of the isolated topics.

I arrived to Port Louis inferm with a tracheal infection from the harrowing journey: Shenyang to Tokyo for a night, then to O’Hare for an eight-hour layover, and finally to my first perch in Tampa for three more sleepless nights of full-on meetings and drinking and early mornings conniving in the Hard Rock Casino’s poker room. But it was the Miami-Heathrow-Dubai leg that finally capped me. Upon arrival the hotel room wasn’t ready, so I had to attend afternoon meetings and a late dinner and another drinking session still unshowered and unchanged in a suit I had been wearing since Florida.

The restaurant manager delightfully offers complementary drinks. I graciously order my usual, which is always whatever the bartender feels like making. A colleague asks for a Jack and Coke. The waiter confirms if he’d like it with or without Coke, a question so odd as to become immediately apparent. “A Jack WITH Coke,” he repeats. Minutes later I receive a cherry garnished chute of sparkling wine and watermelon juice. My friend receives a Jack and ice. We look at each other with delightfully brief speechlessness. “Can you please add Coke to this,” he politely but briskly requests. The manager hops to in cordial obedience, and returns only moments later after little more than splashing what must be the remnants from a flat liter bottle. Stephen takes one, maybe two, sips and inevitably recoils, again hurriedly beckoning back the waiter. It will be five minutes or more before his cocktail finally and correctly reemerges, but it is now time to drink up and go to meet Navin, our driver, to take us to dinner.

One of our dining companions that evening is the former Deputy Chief of Police, an aging, bug-eyed, Tamil Mauritian whom enjoys getting sauced on Chivas Regal and boasting about his former prominence in keeping the island safe from Subutex, a synthetic opioid smuggled almost daily onto the island from France, and reportedly the country’s biggest crime issue. Our chatter moves to the hypocrisy of outlawing some substances, like marijuana, that are not connected to death, while accepting liquor, which clearly has a more adverse effect on one’s health and society. He agrees, but the more I pursue the topic the less convinced he seems. Eventually he tells me I’m wrong and I raise my Chivas in a toast of congenial defeat, and we finish the bottle.

On another day, a Wednesday morning, torrential downpours pound the island for hours on end, uncharacteristically closing schools and 90 percent of businesses: an unprecedented rain day. In the dining room water rushes over the aluminum sided roofs and through every crevice being collected in buckets and with rags by the few staff whom have managed to arrive to work. The water taxi that shuttles guests for the 45-second trip around the docks has stalled and floated out to sea, and eventually towed back before wisely ceasing service. My breakfast waiter Neelesh caringly yet casually imparts this news while delivering salmon eggs Benedict and a pot of hot tea and honey. The morning before be proudly announced that in battling my throat virus I had drunk out the restaurant of its entire tea and honey rations which they had managed to restock just before the storm cancelled further deliveries.

On my last morning Navin’s brother Pravin takes me on a half-day jaunt around the South of the island. We briefly investigate the famed Mauritian-made Floreal brand of cashmere wear, soon confirming that I’m not in the market for a scarf or cardigan. We then wind the Toyota Belta up narrow mountain roads to Trou Oaux Cerf Crater, which Pravin claims is one of the two Seven Wonders of the World from Mauritius, but it is closed. He points out the hazy view and says that inside there is a big hole.

We drive along a natural reservoir Mare Aux Vacoas, which Pravin says is nicknamed the Mauritian Ganges. Fluorescent orange and yellow sparrow like creatures flitter about. Further along he stops the car just long enough to peer out the window to snap with our camera phones a towering statue of Lord Shiva erected three years before. We turn around in the parking lot of the Hindu temple, behind it sits along a lake in another crater. Tourists pile out of buses to pose along the banks with the temple and maybe statue in view. Pravin asks if I’d like to get out, but I decline with a smile and he laughs.

Our day takes us to two mildly impressive overlooks, one at Alexander Falls. Inappropriately attired in a long Speedo swimsuit and Kenneth Cole dress shoes, we wind through stalls of souvenir hawkers and navigate the mossy rocks, non-committaly snapping away on our PDAs when a storm hits and propels us and the grove of other tourists to flee from the woods.

We stop along the road at the Chamarel run distillery, and Pravin says that it’s better to buy their spirits at the supermarket. Pravin takes a few photographs for his Facebook page.

Two days before his brother Navin and fellow cabbie drove me and two colleagues to Mon Choisi beach where I floated in the Indian Ocean for the afternoon and cloud gazed in stoned bliss. It is a local beach and it does not have proper show facilities. Instead, I clean myself down with a two liter Coke bottle cut in half, using it to scoop rain water from a plastic oil drum.

On the drive to the airport I know that I’ll not likely return here. I think how I have often sentimentally taken note note of how life is little more than circumstantial fleeting moments. But I am not sad to leave Mauritius. After all, I was only just passing through.

The Hotel Kazakhstan I was told used to be the tallest building in Central Asia. It looks like it was built in the 1950’s. When you turn on the TV station in the room there is old footage of the hotel in its heyday playing in a loop. The narration is in Russian but it is still something to see: the crown-like roof towering 26 floors into the clouds, cheerful men in hats driving old style cars up and down the hills, and in the distance the white peaks of the Steppe stretching across Almaty’s edge.

I am in the mood for a movie. The front desk receptionist calls the one English theatre and confirms that Hitchcock is playing at midnight. She writes the address on a sticky note, and on the back I write how to say 400 and 500 in my own phonetic version of Cyrillic, the maximum she says I should pay for a taxi.

Ten minutes later I disembark from the cab and find my way to the ticket counter. The woman behind the counter says she speaks English, and she does. I thank her for the ticket and my change and proceed to the entrance, but then notice the receipt and my change in hand and calculate the conversion at about 18 dollars. She has sold me two tickets, not one, and to a different movie that ended hours ago.

After enjoying Hitchcock I locate three cars parked nearby the theatre, the drivers are huddled outside in conversation and smoking. One of them approaches and asks “Taxi?” to whom I show 600 Tenge to take me back. Several minutes along the road we stretch towards each other in our hardened loosely bucked seat belts and he asks me something. This time I speak more affirmatively, “Hotel Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan Hotel?” He says something back but the only thing I understand is “Astana,” and I utter the only Russian sentence I know, that I don’t speak Russian, and he smiles. It is the first time I have really looked at him, his characteristically puffy Kazakh cheeks pockmarked and unshaven, eyes glazed with either exhaustion or liquor, he turns back too quickly to tell.

And then he makes a right onto a highway, which I know if not right. He should have stayed straight and then gone left. As we drive under the signs on the entranceway I see the three arrows demarcating the destinations of the lanes but I don’t know what they read. I turn my head back to the city and get nervous and then correct myself because I think it would take hours or even days to drive to Astana.

He soon gets off the highway, which appears to be winding back towards the city, and at the first stoplight he rolls down his window to the only other vehicle waiting there. The driver quickly directs us to go this way and then over there, and when the light turns green the other car jerks into gear and putters off. We go down and across hills and up but there are few streetlights and the windshield is too dusty too see.

At the intersection of two hills a woman hails us to stop, but he doesn’t let her in because she offers him too little money, so he drives away with a slight cackle. Minutes more pass before we stop a man walking into a bar. The driver gets out and calls to him from the curb. They gesticulate to one another in the darkness and I am somehow reassured we are close.

It was all a small thing, I know, but when finally back in my hotel room I don’t turn on the TV. I feel I need to write instead.

At night the cafes dotted along Amman’s Rainbow Street bloom with fruited tobacco from burning sheeshas. I hail a cab to take me across the city. I’m in search of the perfect humus. At the hotel’s recommendation, last night they sent me to an upscale Lebanese restaurant where my waiter boasted, “We have the best humus in Jordan.” Admittedly, had I been back at the Kempinski, I would have spread that dip all over my naked body and danced around the moonlit room to the mysterious and undulating prayer calls echoing through the walls.

In pursuit of my “humus challenge,” I have acquired another name of a restaurant. It is scribbled in Arabic on the back of Starbuck’s receipt where I had fresh-squeezed orange juice at Mecca Mall earlier in the day. This, too, was a whimsical indulgence after successfully replacing the pair of swimming goggles I left-behind at a Crowne Plaza in Changsha, China.

My taxi driver speeds and smokes while pointing to innocuous store fronts, roads and buildings out both windows, meticulously naming each one as if doing so makes them somehow significant: the Al Shabib Apartment Complex, the Fifth Circle Road, Hardees, Grill Nassar, Chili’s, Arab Jordan Bank, H2O Disco, “the California University,” Popeyes, Cafe Naijar, the Sixth Circle Road, Fuddruckers, the Sheraton. He goes on like this for 20 minutes until he plops me off at a night cafeteria.

A departure from the sedated, gardened terrace from the night before, tonight’s establishment is teaming with chatter and the din from glasses of mint tea clattering against saucers. The florescent tubes above burn an unnecessary brightness into an otherwise under-lit city. Gaggles of elegantly turbaned men huddle up and down the rows of lunchroom tables and talk intently. I press between other patrons and against the deli’s glass partition vying for a view of the items on display, beyond which are layers deep with platters of mezza. I shout my order over the counter, and a characteristically stout chef draped in butcher whites scribbles on a square of paper and chucks it back.

I cue up at a booth and present the scrap and pay. The attendant stamps the paper and hands it back semi-signaling to take a seat. I sit down and two waiters quickly descend, one pouring scalding water into a double shot glass filled with mint leaves and a sugar cube. The other takes the stamped order.

Life is a sequence of constant interruptions, allowing rarely more than the briefest encounters in the moment. I think of my wife and son and how far away they are.

Enter the humus. Another waiter bearing a basket of hot pitas drops three pieces onto a plate and hurries off. The tea waiter refills my glass. I tear the bread and dip in: chicpea heaven. This is as good as it gets, for at least for this moment.