These are two great paragraphs that give a flavor<p>We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign,
sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having
a couple of beers – “the only ferangs here,”
as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily
is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious,
absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall
is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry.
Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end
of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer,
paying no attention whatsoever to the industrial-scale whorehouse next door.
Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions
and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any
kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a
stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition
of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress
toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the
Malay Peninsula.<p>Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have
much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a
general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth
countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing,
rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives.
They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to
a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would
probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch
intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand,
if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a
burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of
Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal
with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.