The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon on his undercover tour of duty in Zimbabwe:

Chamu was the first Zimbabwean I met, but it was an opinion I'd hear repeated over and over again during the week I spent reporting in Zimbabwe undercover.

Chamu isn't the tour guide's real name. Most of the names in this story have been changed. Publishing real names might earn those concerned a potentially fatal visit from the Central Intelligence Organization. Such are the stakes in Mr. Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Even identifying the town Chamu and I were driving through might endanger the few other foreign journalists still in the country – I left yesterday – since it would reveal the route some of us used to get in and report on last week's one-man “election.”

My journey through the disaster that is modern Zimbabwe began as soon as I crossed into the country. Posing as a tourist – camera, binoculars and Indiana Jones hat at the ready – I entered overland and headed straight for one of the country's spectacular national parks.

I spent the first two days trying to do nothing an ordinary tourist wouldn't do, hiking through parks and photographing the carefree monkeys, baboons and hippos that were sometimes the only other creatures there. With most sensible tourists giving Zimbabwe a wide berth these days, I had some of the world's natural wonders almost completely to myself. At night, I'd retire to my room and surreptitiously e-mail what I could of the day's events using my BlackBerry.

Even while hiking deep in the parks, I couldn't escape the sensation that I was drifting through the wreckage of something potentially wonderful that had been destroyed by spectacular mismanagement and crude tyranny. ...

After two days of keeping a low profile in the countryside, I met up with an American journalist who had also sneaked into the country, and we nervously made our way to the capital. We both understood well how high the stakes were. After Mr. Tsvangirai stunned the country by outpolling Mr. Mugabe in the March 29 first round of the election, the government began hunting for unaccredited foreign journalists who it was deemed were helping the Movement for Democratic Change's cause by exposing ZANU-PF's attempts to intimidate opposition supporters.

One journalist from The New York Times spent days in jail for what the authorities here refer to as “committing journalism.” A British reporter was reportedly stripped and tortured for 38 hours.

My colleague and I anxiously rehearsed our cover story as we travelled toward Harare. We were going to a friend's wedding. It was on Saturday, the day after the election, and we'd come a few days early to see the city.

Fortunately, our journey into the city was surprisingly easy. Police and army roadblocks that had been set up around the country a few days before had been taken down. Speculation was that the authorities wanted to ensure the security services were in their bases in case there was trouble on election day. ...

That night, I “committed journalism” in the back of Nelson's car as we drove aimlessly about town at high speed. He had done some interviews on my behalf with people I couldn't meet myself because of my precarious situation, and I needed him to tell me what was said. Nowhere but the car was deemed safe enough to meet, and through the whole 40-minute drive, we kept looking behind us for signs that we might be being followed, making random last-minute turns whenever we felt a car had been behind us for a suspiciously long time.

The rest of the week went much the same way. After two days in one place, my American colleague and I switched safe houses. We gleaned what information we could about what was happening in the country using a shaky Internet connection and by doing interviews over roaming cellphones.

Our ability to do our jobs was badly restricted. Every time one of us proposed going somewhere or meeting someone, the other shot it down as too risky. Our best glimpse of life in Zimbabwe, a nation of poor billionaires, was gleaned from a trip to the Spar supermarket, an absurd world where a 600-gram box of Rice Krispies cost more than 819-billion Zimbabwean dollars, the equivalent that day of $51 (U.S.). A bag of Lay's potato chips sold for $109-billion ($6), while 300 grams of sliced cheese cost $212-billion ($20). Astonished – though we're far more affluent than most of the locals – we picked up only a few staples and forked out an incomprehensible $832-billion at the cash register.