The drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City isn’t that big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed it with plenty of eight-lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain of reclaimed land on which the airport is built, swings wide around the stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two exits for Technology City, then turns off at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks—Nipponese behemoths emblazoned with the word GOTO in fat macho block letters. Coming towards them is a stream of other trucks that are identical except that these are fully laden with stony rubble. The taxi driver pulls onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They’re heading up—Randy’s ears pop once. This road is built on the floor of a ravine that climbs up into one of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed in by vertiginous walls of green, which act like a sponge, trapping an eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes visible. Randy can’t tell whether they are birds or flowers. The contrast between the cloud forest’s lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered by the house-sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.