The basic elements, perhaps: a tenfold increase in the global population in the last century, a vast expansion of industrialization in the Western postwar model, and considerable corruption in the Woodstock-to-Wall-Street generation that followed the generation of giants who built the place.
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Not to use the interwebs for grousing or chuntering excessively, but this journeying isn't easy. Away from the highways of air travel and proper hotels, one does land in the place itself. In the pond, which is much more different from the last pond than one sunlit upland hill varies from another.
No simple highway.