THE ROAD IS VERY UNFAIR IN 1992, I TRAVELED TO Kenya because of something I'd read in the newspaper. A report on an international AIDS conference in Amsterdam briefly mentioned research suggesting that long- distance truck drivers might be spreading the disease, by sleeping with prostitutes along the routes they plied between central Africa and the continent's east coast, on the Indian Ocean. At the time, most Americans knew AIDS as a disease of gay men, junkies, and Haitians. Randy Shilts's important and influential And the Band Played On (1987) focused on the role of a promiscuous flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas, in spreading the disease to several countries, suggesting that Dugas was the "Patient Zero" of AIDS among gay men. But AIDS was a developing story, and five years later, when I read the article on the conference, it was generally thought that the epidemic had originated among people unknown, possibly in central Africa, and that presumably it spread first not by air but by road. My college roommate of two years, Doug Dittman, who was gay, had died of AIDS a year before I read the article. His partner, Mark, my other roommate, had become infected as well; and between Doug's death and Mark's illness, I found myself thinking about AIDS a lot. Other people seemed to be trying hard not to think about it (President Ronald Reagan resisted mentioning the epidemic for years), and that was something I wished I could change.When I read about the African truckers, a lightbulb went on: because of our own trucker culture, I thought, this story might interest American readers in AIDS in Africa (where it was expected to be much worse than in the USA). And it offered the chance to ride along on some trucks and see the life firsthand, which I always preferred. A Kenyan doctor and immunologist who had co- authored the study I'd read about, Job Bwayo, met with me in Nairobi. Bwayo was a tall, soft-spoken, handsome man who had to contort to fit into the small white sedan in which he picked me up at my hotel. At the University of Nairobi, he introduced me to other researchers. Outside of town, we visited a clinic that Bwayo had set up at a weighbridge, where truckers had to stop, and-- a crucial piece-- he tried to set me up with a trucking firm. I was looking for a company that ran trucks from the coast to the interior of the continent and back again--the route along which, many believed, AIDS had spread from central Africa to the rest of the world. But the companies Bwayo had connections to were temporarily occupied with ferrying relief supplies up to Somalia, where a civil war raged. He suggested I might have better luck in Mombasa, the big port on the coast, where other firms had bases of operation, and so I went there. After a couple of days in Mombasa having no success, I realized that the local yellow pages listed not just the main numbers of the big trucking firms, but also their fax lines and the names and positions of the top managers. I faxed off several letters introducing myself and explaining my mission, and the next day got a call back from the man in charge of a large Belgian-owned company called Transami. I was welcome to join one of their trucks, he said. In fact, we soon discovered, the best prospect was a whole group of trucks that had left the day before, headed for Rwanda and possibly Burundi. I took the next bus out of Mombasa and caught up with the Transami convoy on the Kenyan border with Tanzania, at Isebania, where they were waiting to clear Customs. It was a cool, rainy Saturday, and scores of trucks were lined up along the shoulders of a muddy dirt road. Customs was closed for the weekend, and no one would be going anywhere until Monday. It took about an hour to find my truck (called Fleet 19, though it was a single vehicle). Tired and wet, I banged on the door. A man in his twenties rolled down the win Excerpted from The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.