It’s Friday. We are leaving tonight at 10:30 p.m., which is 10:00 Thursday morning at home. Change planes in Singapore again, a rest stop in Hong Kong (no time for any joy rides outside the airport this time), and then about 13 hours to San Francisco. But I’ll get home at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, not Sunday, because we cross the international date line. I’m not going to try to understand that right now.

American foreign correspondents have traditionally employed a labor-saving device called “taxi journalism,” in which the reporter arriving at a colorful destination closely questions the driver on the way from the airport to the luxury hotel and then phones in the results as good solid hard-earned man-in-the-street wisdom. As a result, even though I’m not a reporter any more, I still make a practice of never asking a cab driver about anything except his health. On this trip, however, I have not scrupled to stick my camera out the window and let the video camera roll. You could call this my entry in the “taxi photography” genre.