[fable]

I don't know how much of the information would check out under scutiny, but it would be pretty sloppy to write something fake and have serious factual errors in it.

The problem isn't whether there are serious factual errors, or not. After all, when you're as vague as O'Rourke is in the piece, who can call you on it? I can turn out something as believable and accurate as he did about this trip on just about any place in the world, given one hour's advance search on the Web--and that's no boast, simply the truth. His piece is as empty as the coffers of a televangelist's church one hour after the purchase of a mansion in Beverly Hills.

The problem is whether O'Rourke went, or not. I still get no sense from what you posted that he actually took the trip. The additional "details" you provided were as generic as the few references you'd already posted. O'Rourke is a writer. Writers are eternally hungry for detail, especially where people are concerned. I would have expected incident upon incident that was unique, vignettes that brought out the human context of a visit into an alien culture. Travel writers offer all this secondhand, as in Brian Hall's Stealing from a Deep Place, but they offer it, nonetheless. What I get instead here are a few stale jokes in a generic put-up frame...so, no, it doesn't ring true to me.