It won't be easy for TV crews to get inside, and for those who do it will be even harder to operate. But writers (like the Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy, who recently paid Harare a surreptitious visit) should still be able to slip in on a tourist visa. I'm going to pass this time around. But Valpy's dispatch reminded me of my own trip to Mugabe-land four months ago, when the biggest bill in circulation was the $200,000 (Zimbabwean) note. One American dollar fetched 900,000 zimbucks at the time, a figure which was approaching 1.5 million when I left two weeks later. By the time Valpy rolled in, the exchange rate was at 25 million and the government was printing 2-million-dollar bills. Welcome to hyperinflation.

You'll want to bring cash if you go to Zimbabwe-American cash, or euros, or the South African rand-and don't trade it all on the first day. Don't take it to the bank, either; they'll offer you about one thirtieth (when I was there) of what you'll get on the street.

I had some idea about this before I flew in, and considering my experiences in other black market commodities in other third world countries, I wondered how it would work in Zimbabwe. The answer took various forms, but the first example was provided by the local rose farmer who sat next to me on the plane. Ralph-as I'll call him-was a sporting kind of fellow, talkative and surprisingly upbeat considering he was just the kind of figure Mugabe has spent the last eight years trying to purge from Zimbabwe.

A middle-aged white man, Ralph owned three hectares of green houses just outside the capital; he employed eighty-five black Zimbabweans and provided most of them with housing on the farm site, while he lived with his wife and two daughters in the upscale Harare neighborhood of Emerald Hill. He was a rare find: at the turn of the twentieth century, there were about 4000 white farmers in Zimbabwe and they owned roughly 80 percent of the country's farmland. Today, there are fewer than 300 left.

By the time our plane landed, Ralph had befriended me and offered to show me his farm. First, we had to clear customs. Ralph breezed on through, but I was stopped by a young customs agent at the final gate.

"Don't you have anything to declare?" he asked.

"No."

"Are you sure? There's nothing in that bag I should know about?"

I was thinking nervously of my camera, my notepads and voice recorder-I'd declared myself a tourist-when Ralph, who had been watching from the other side of the gate, strode through and grabbed my elbow.

"Na mate, he doesn't have anything to declare," he said to the man, who suddenly became sheepish. He hadn't even finished shrugging when Ralph pulled me along through the gate and we entered Zimbabwe.

"The laws are all set against us now," Ralph told me as we drove his truck in to town, "but socially, blacks are still afraid of us. I could pull over right now and order any one of these blokes on the side of the road to do something, and he'd say ‘yes sir.'"

We stopped at Ralph's house, a sprawling bungalow with a pool in the back yard that was dry now; a team of black workers were busy excavating and expanding it. Buckets full of roses were everywhere-yellow ones, red ones, white and orange, they were in the garage, the living room, scattered about the driveway and in the garden, but nowhere were they planted or even put in vases. Just collected in bundles, as though waiting for auction. I had mentioned to Ralph my concern about getting hold of the local currency, and that was part of the reason he brought me to his house. After introducing me to his wife, a brisk lady drinking coffee with a friend in the living room, and his daughters, cheerful and angstless teenagers who politely stopped their ping pong game to shake my hand, we went down to the guest house he'd converted into an office. It was a cluttered space, full of books and spare furniture, with a desk buried in sheaves of paper.

"How much do you want?" he asked.

"I'm not sure how much I'll need," I answered. "Maybe fifty bucks for now?"

He nodded and retrieved a clear plastic bag from behind the desk. The bag was stuffed full of ziplocks containing crisp new bills, rubber-banded into stacks of a hundred notes each.

"I tell you what," Ralph said, "I'll give you a million per. I could do you better if this was a wire transfer, but it's still a pretty good deal. Probably better than anything you'd find on the street."

He handed me three stacks amounting to fifty million Zimbabwe dollars (in one- and two-hundred thousand dollar bills) in exchange for my fifty dollar bill. I thanked him profusely.

"It's a pleasure," he said, with a nod and a boyish grin. I was to spend a fair amount of time with Ralph over the next few days, and whenever I thanked him for anything, he always said just that: "It's a pleasure." Part of his charm came from the way he seemed to mean it. This wasn't just business, though it was that, too...we belonged to the same class, Ralph and I, part of the same club of outsiders whose pleasure it was to share the advantage of an inside connection. It was my first lesson in Zimbabwean economics.