Word: rains
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...trip down the length of one of Australia's last, and greatest, wild rivers seemed a natural progression from a 10-day bushwalk around Tasmania's tough south coast last year. There I'd trudged for hours through thigh-deep mud, learned to scoff at leeches and icy, slanting rain, come to love instant mashed potato, and fallen hard for the island's wild beauty. If you didn't even have to shoulder a backpack, how difficult could sitting in a raft be? "Don't worry about the paddling skills," the tour company's owner had said after quizzing...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...
Those who do live it describe the experience in poetic and romantic terms reminiscent of Robert Pirsig's philosophical, Beat-biker book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. "You experience everything," says Mike Becar, "mist from a new rain, a meadow of flowers...
...pickup truck and concludes its days are numbered. "It's the ghosts," says 47-year-old Anand. "We have to change our cars every few years when they get haunted." Before he can explain, a static-coated voice issues from his handheld shortwave radio. Several kilometers away on a rain-slicked stretch of Bangkok's Boromratchanee Road, a black Toyota sedan has plowed into the back of a truck carrying sacks of cement. Anand, one of hundreds of Bangkok residents who voluntarily help mop up the city's nightly street carnage, jumps behind the wheel, while his 16-year...
...blinding tropical downpour. Spotting a flyover a few hundred meters ahead on the highway, Raja raced for shelter. A dozen fellow bikers were there already. As three lanes of rush-hour traffic continued to roar past, more bikers squeezed in, huddling together and turning their backs to the windblown rain and the heavy spray from passing vehicles. Raja lit a cigarette, then tilted one of his rear-view mirrors to check just how bedraggled he looked...