LAHAD DATU, MALAYSIA

In the outpost of Lahad Datu, 55 minutes from KK by Fokker turboprop, things are a little less 21st century. The very un-air-conditioned terminal, with its greasy snack bar and lazily spinning ceiling fans, looks like a cross between a highway service station and a rural American bus depot.

From Lahad is where I catch the van for the two-hour trip along a dirt logging road to the Borneo Rainforest Lodge.

If you've never been to a tropical forest, you ought to give it a try before the last of them are scorched and uprooted and flattened into parking lots and cow pastures. This is my fifth eco-lodge and I can't get enough of them.

For those not among the initiated, I'm afraid my talents of description will in all likelihood fail to convey the magnificence of standing on a hillside of 300-foot hardwood trees held fast by house-size buttresses, the canopy boiling upward into thousands of colossal green mushroom clouds, slung with countless epiphytes, waist-thick vines and bromeliads. Most splendid of all are the night hikes, especially if you have a thing for dinner-plate-size tarantulas and stick insects the length of Louisville Sluggers. Each evening, in the company of one of the lodge's knowledgeable guides, we choose a different trail and head off through the green (now black) tangle. The array of noises from the jungle, particularly after sunset, is something that needs to be heard to be believed: Gibbons that perform a flawless imitation of an automobile alarm; cicadas that mimic electric razors; giant canopy grasshoppers that emit a shriek so loud you must block your ears when passing beneath their resident trees. These noises, mind you, are not similar to those of our various mechanical contraptions, but nearly exact replications, as if to mock our technological hubris.

Which, if you think about it, begs a meditation on the interplay and mutual exclusion of nature and technology. On a diet of a few leaves and some fungus, an insect can scream the night away at 100 decibels. Sure, humans have made it to the surface of the moon and stolen the atom's secrets, but we've failed to replicate the vast majority of even the tiniest functions of the natural world. The secrets of a life -- whether the smallest forest bug or that luminous tree lichen I saw that can glow in the dark for 14 days -- are still more impressive than the silicon chip or the H-bomb.

Fifty years ago one would have described the bizarre warbled yelping of the gibbon as "unearthly." Today we say "it sounds like a car alarm." Through technology we've managed to completely invert nature, never mind entirely isolate ourselves from it. The unearthly now wholly earthly -- the proud product of some very organic human tinkering, yet simultaneously alienated from all that is natural. Who says of the car alarm: "It sounds just like a gibbon"?

Please excuse the digression. Anyway, having spent the past several days in two Islamic countries, you might be interested to hear that I've encountered not a single moment of any anti-American sentiment. Dubai seems too wealthy and self-satisfied to worry itself with fundamentalist anger (though I'm sure there are pockets of it lurking), while in Malaysia too it feels as though world affairs -- which is to say opinions of the United States -- are seen predominantly as straightforward politics rather than any life-or-death struggle rich with apocalyptic pretense. If any of the people I've met since leaving home have "hated Americans," I figure it's no different from our own domestic antagonisms: Conservatives may hate liberals, but despite all the rhetoric and wrath the Limbaugh set is able to incite, we're not tossing bombs at one another. Yet. (Equal number of Christian churches and mosques on Borneo, I notice in casual airport-to-hotel survey.)

Or maybe that's the rainforest talking. Perhaps you get like this when you've spent five soul-soothing days hiking and watching orangutans laze around in trees.

We'll see how my luck holds out. Two mornings from now I'll be taking off for that somewhat troubled archipelago not far from here. You know the one, if you've been following the news from Jakarta.

I'm less worried about radical fundamentalism than about my return flight home -- from Bali to Newark by way of the KUL, only this time with no layovers. KUL-DXB-EWR promises to be a true circadian ordeal. Elapsed time about 23 hours, nearly all of which will be in darkness thanks to an evening departure and against-the-clock direction.

But I won't ponder the return too much, just yet. Instead, one more nugget: There's a graphic of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on the 10-ringgit bill?

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