♪ felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪ ♪ found something good in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ i felt the rain getting colder ♪ ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la la ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la laabout tokyo? deep, deep waters. the first time i came here, it was like it was a transformative experience. it was powerful and violent experience. it was as if it was just like taking acid for the first time. meaning what do i do now? i see the whole world in a different way. i often compare the experience, going to japan for the first time and going to tokyo for the first time to what eric clapton and pete townsend must have gone through, the reigning guitar gods of england, what they must have gone through the week that jimi hendricks came to town. you hear about it, you go see it. a whole window opens up into a whole new thing. and you think, what does this mean? what do i have left to say? what do i do now? welcome to tokyo. you are not invited. this is the other tokyo. 12-hour flight and i'm baked. no sleep. might as well -- must -- go out. ♪ the district near my hotel has the advantage of being where the subterranean life, the repressed ids of the japanese male and some females

♪ felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪ ♪ found something good in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ i felt the rain getting colder ♪ ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la la ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la lai went to south africa, 95-year-old nelson mandela was critically ill. in the country he freed from white minority rule was already in mourning. and already fearful of what the future might be without him. >> i pray that he -- somebody takes baton from him. >> i wish him a speedy recovery. and come back to his people. ♪ >> so a good friend of mine, a really great travel writer, said something. the more i travel the less i know. i feel that particularly strongly in south africa, a place i came in a state of near total ignorance. loaded with preconceptions. for the first part of my life, the south africa i knew was not a happy place or a good place. it was a pariah state. outrageously divided into black and white. a throwback to attitudes we thought we'd long learned to reject. ♪ >> the nationalist government in south africa enacted apartheid laws in 1938. who you could marry. where you lived. where you could walk, be educated, everything decided by racist laws backed by police, army and

♪ felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪ ♪ found something good in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ i felt the rain getting colder ♪ ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la la ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la laverything american and great came from. the things the whole world wanted made here. the heart, the soul, the beat of an industrial, cultural superpower. a magnet for everyone with a dream of a better future, from eastern europe to the deep south. american dream, you came here. the one straight ahead with the green roof? >> the big building, completely empty. >> empty? unbelievable. >> the white one is being rehabbed. there's some money coming in. the one next to it on the right is completely empty. the gray pyramid with the spire on top sold for $5 million. >> $5 million for that? you can't buy a garage in the hamptons for that basically. >> $5 million for a skyscraper. >> it's post-apocalyptic. it's like a science fiction film. what the hell happened here? >> well, it is post-apocalyptic except for the fact that there's several hundred thousand people living here. >> detroit 2013. charlie la duff is a writer, journalist, television reporter. he grew up here. >> but it used to be two

♪ felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪ ♪ found something good in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ i felt the rain getting colder ♪ ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la la ♪ sha la la la la ♪ sha la la la la la lautiful places in europe, a place whose roots are very much the roots of the town where i live, but somehow i've never been able to get it right. to tell the story, any story of sicily. it's the biggest island in the head -- mediterranean. two main towns of palermo and catania on opposite sides. i'm done a show in palermo before. it was an epic goat rodeo, an failure of humiliating scale. this time i was going to get it right. there's the sicily we know from films, an evocative, deeply felt history that's not quite reality but cool anyway, right? there's the simple fact of its location, tucked away under the boot of italy, part of but not really part of that country. its own language, culture, its own history of norman, arab, spanish, roman, turkish, egyptian interlopers, all leaving their mark and their influence. i grew up in new jersey which was pretty much sicily on the hudson. the italian-americans next door weren't from milan, i could tell you that much. i guess what i'm telling y