"You want some grog?" a 20-something Fijian man asks me. He's very fit and is wearing nothing but surf shorts.

It's 10 a.m. and he's sitting with four other local guys on a linoleum floor around a faded wooden bowl the diameter of a large pizza. We're in an elongated, sparsely decorated room with one wall made entirely of open, sliding glass doors and windows. Through the open spaces is a palatial, hammock-strewn wooden terrace, and beyond that blue water spreading to three or four small, fuzzy, green islets. The bowl is on four short, rounded wooden legs and is filled with what looks like dirty river water. I realize these guys are drinking kava, a narcotic beverage that's as famous in the South Pacific for its calming effect and putrid taste as it is for its cultural and ceremonial significance.

I wasn't expecting my first taste of Fijian kava to be in such a casual setting. In my head, kava is supposed to be enjoyed at a chief's house with lots of etiquette in a grand cultural moment. Getting stoned at 10 a.m. doesn't sound particularly appealing, either, but I say yes to the "grog" anyway. Who knows when I'll get offered it again? After 15 years living in Tahiti, where they don't drink kava, I'm ready to give it a go.

I take a seat around the bowl and say hello to everyone.

"High tide or low tide?" the guy at the head of the bowl asks me.

"Um, I don't know. What does that mean?"

Visiting Seoul during a mid-winter freeze isn't something I'd recommend to anyone unless, like me, you go there to eat. The few trees are leafless, the local's faces are sullen with a determination to keep warm and trips to the local sights, such as the beautifully stark outdoor royal palace, only make you want to retreat to a heated room. Luckily, Daniel Gray is there to save us all with his nighttime eating and drinking tour. This is the delicious side of Seoul where you can get as warm and tipsy from atmosphere as from the mugwort beer. And any time of year, the food is excellent.

I don't often take tours but Dan's came highly praised by a foodie friend, so I decided to try it. Dan is a Korean American who started a food blog after moving to Seoul to find his roots. As his blog grew, people began asking him to take them to the places he wrote about, so about a year ago he started a culinary tour company and cooking school called O'ngo Food Communications with his friend and chef, Jia Choi.

The night tour is done using local transport or on foot. On the night of our tour, our first stop is barbecue. Dan leads me through an alleyway thick with steam from food stall workers washing their dishes on the sidewalk. The humble neon shop signs and row of rudimentary restaurants look eerily like futuristic scenes in the movie Blade Runner. Our destination is a basic stall-style restaurant covered in clear plastic to keep out the cold. The small tables each have a charcoal barbecue at their center and the place is packed with locals. It smells like cooking pork and the damp air is warmed by body heat and hot grills.

Durian. No other fruit creates such conflicting opinions. Throughout Southeast Asia the green, hedgehog-shaped "king of the fruits" is appreciated as haute cuisine to be savored like wine or truffles. Westerners, however, are confounded by the hype because, well, durians smell like road kill wrapped in sweaty socks and have the texture of rotten bananas. We nod our heads in approval when we see "No Durian" signs in swanky hotel lobbies and on the Singapore Metro.

I was first introduced to Durian when I was 20 years old in Chiang Mai, Thailand. My Thai friends told me to take it slow and start with durian ice cream or cookies, which capture the flavor but not the smell. They were right -- the absence of the intense odor helps get the stuff down, but I still wasn't crazy about the flavor; the almost-tangy, near-putrid aftertaste lingers for several minutes even after being baked into a biscuit. Durian, in any form, doesn't want you to forget it.

Years went by and I tried durian in several countries. I politely ate small bites when they were offered to me by locals, I once ate a big slab of it at the bottom of an ice cendol (a sugary Malaysian shaved ice dessert) and in the center fillings of chocolates, and I found out that durian means "thorny" in Indonesian and that you can potentially kill a person by throwing one at someone's head. But I still didn't think it tasted very good.

I ended up in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, Borneo, after I had to change travel plans at the last minute. I'd just finished researching a guidebook on the Malay Peninsula and my visa to Myanmar, where I'd planned to go next, got denied, so suddenly I had five days of free time and a day to plan it. A flight to Kuching from Penang was around $60 round-trip on Air Asia and they still had seats, so off I went. I had no clue that I was about to have one of the most tranquil yet exhilarating travel experiences of my life.

The trip started poorly. As the lone patron of my Hostel World-recommended guesthouse, I wasn't meeting a soul in Kuching. Although it was filled with temples and delicious seafood restaurants and cut by a winding river out of a Maugham novel, the town offered little in the way of activities and I was getting dispirited wandering around by myself. My guidebook said that Bako National Park was an hour and a half from Kuching and was packed with wildlife. The sleeping options were reportedly grim ("dank bathrooms" and "torn mozzie nets"), but I had to get out of Kuching or I'd start talking to myself. I wasn't sure I'd meet anyone at Bako, either, but hanging out with monkeys sounded better than feeling like a human loser in Kuching.

After an hour ride to a boat dock in a clunky yellow bus and a wet half-hour in a rusty speedboat, I traipsed from the boat up to Bako's beach through warm waves, pants rolled up to my knees, backpack on my head. The all-local transport made me feel like an intrepid solo adventurer rather than alone and lost, so already I was happy to be there. Bako's park headquarters are in mangrove swamps on a gray stretch of sand littered with rubbish; although beautiful, it's not pristine.

I walked up to the front desk and signed in, then asked the ranger if it was possible to get a hiking guide. She looked at me blankly, as if I was the first person who had ever asked this question.

"Don't need guide," she said flatly. "Sign here when leave. Sign when get back. You don't come back, we go look for you. No one get lost."

To'ata Amphitheater, French Polynesia's biggest Tahitian dance venue, is an open-air wooden stage surrounded by a half-circle of tiered seating for about 4000 people. High-tech lighting on adjustable steel scaffolding surrounds the arena and the stage is backed by a covered, elevated platform for the orchestra. From the stage, the seats seem very close and standing there before the show made me nervous -- would I be busting my not-exactly-professional moves while looking my family and friends in the eye? My 200-woman-strong Tahitian dance troupe had rehearsed nine months for this one-night show but as a newbie, this still didn't seem like enough time to get it right. But here I was, the night of the show and it was too late to change my mind.
While setting up our changing areas before the show, we were told that the maman groups (those of us well-past high school age) couldn't use the dressing rooms -- we'd have to change costumes outside where inevitable lurking spectators could see us. This was not ideal.

Luckily my friend Arvella came to my rescue and said if I helped out dressing the little girl dancers I could use the private rooms. This sounded like a good deal. I got in my first costume, a flamboyant number made out of leaves and vines that made me look like a glamorous swamp monster, then got to work helping the girls. After putting make-up on the first eight-year old, word got around that I had cool sparkly stuff and soon I had a line of wide-eyed cuties asking me for silver eye-shadow and lip gloss; once they were made up I was onto hair and costumes.

We were all ready and could hear the stands a-chatter with people. It got dark without us noticing and soon we were getting called to take our places. My group was entering the stage from the spectator's stands after the Advanced-Pro and teenage girls opened the show with flaming torches. We walked up to our starting place at the main entrance of To'ata where people were still buying tickets. Several tourists took pictures of us, and I reflected on how strange it was to finally be a tourist attraction just before moving back to the States after fifteen years in this country.

It was February and I'd been taking Tahitian dance classes for six months. I was now loving my twice-weekly wiggle as well as hanging out with my sometimes cranky but always lively retired Tahitian classmates. My hips were really starting to move and my rolling ueue shake was getting so fast that the teacher grouped me into the more competent half of our class.

Now the warm-ups were more complicated, with moves like the afata (hips like a box) that I just couldn't get right. At least the previously aloof ladies in class were now being helpful.

"Follow me," Tania would say, bringing me over to copy her. "See you bend the knee, keep it bent, straighten then straighten. Move the hips in a square to the count of four."

We had also started learning the choreography for two aparima, slow, graceful dances with swaying hips and lots of wave-like arm gestures. The dances were less blatantly sexy than our fast otea, but embodied a quiet feminine beauty.

I still was adamant about not performing in the show until the day our teacher Heirani announced that we were going to start making costumes.

Early explorers were struck by its sensuality, Christian missionaries banned it shortly after their arrival, and the open-minded 1960s began to revive it. Today, the uber-fast hip shaking of Tahitian dance is again ever-present in French Polynesia. The best performances can be seen at the Heiva I Tahiti festival at Papeete's Toa'ata Amphitheater in July, when locals and foreigners flock to watch some of humankind's most spectacular dance extravaganzas. Accentuated by flamboyant costumes and live traditional percussion orchestras, the festival's singing and dancing competitions are an unrivaled Polynesian highlight.