They weren't good. They weren't bad, either. If you closed your eyes and didn't look at the little dead baby partially formed fetus duck pinched between your chopsticks you'd just think you were eating something very egg-y. My dining companion went for seconds but I think he was just showing off at this point.

I thought I'd sworn off eating duck fetuses but a few months later, there I was in Saigon, doing a story on Vietnamese-born New York chef and prolific restaurateur Michael 'Bao' Huynh for a New York Times travel article. The mission seemed easy enough: just go where he goes and eat what he eats. The rub, though, was that he was eating congealed pigs blood, rats, snakes and, of course, those fermented duck eggs.

I'm tired of pork. There, I said it. Pork belly, bacon, pulled pork, pork shoulder, pork terrines, charcuterie, head cheese, roasted suckling pig, porchetta, pancetta. I'm ready for this macho eating craze for all things piggy to finally go away.

I'm a very pork-patient sort of guy. Homer Simpson said it best in expressing his empuzzlement when his daughter Lisa became a vegetarian, asking what she could and couldn't eat:

Homer: "What about bacon?"
Lisa: "No!"
Home: "Ham?"
Lisa: "No!"
Homer: "Pork chops?
Lisa: "No! Dad those all come from the same animal!"
Homer: "Yeah right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical, animal."

Homer is right. But it's time take an electrical prod to the head of this porcine passion. The straw that broke the pig's back for me was when I noticed last week a restaurant down the street from my apartment in New York's West Village opened up called Swine. It's not all pork on the menu but it reads like a farce – a caricature unto itself – of 2012 menu trends, right down to the name of the restaurant itself.

I was blind drunk in a town most non-locals can't pronounce. I'm blaming the waitress for this. Pronounced "Slav-oh-neetzay," this town of 2,500 is too small to occupy the visitor for more than a day, which is one of the reasons I was spending the afternoon in a pub.

A few minutes earlier I had checked into a Spartan hotel on the town's main, triangular-shaped square, where the friendly receptionist almost gasped when I told here where I was from. "New York?!" she said, covering her mouth, reacting as if I said I'd gone on a walk, got lost, and ended up here a couple miles from the Czech-Austrian border.

Which was sort of true. I had just finished a 15-mile walk where I strolled by a plus-sized monastery in the middle of nowhere, around crumbling medieval Landstejn castle, through a field dotted with World War II-era bunkers. I was hiking around the southern part of the Czech Republic, following a series of trails that goes from Prague to Vienna. And what I really wanted at this moment was a beer. I got several of them, thanks to my waitress.

The pounding began at 12:46 a.m., a slow banging that echoed through the courtyard of our tiny ground-floor apartment in the center of Paris.

Boom ... boom ... boom.

I'd been woken up before by the random pigeon cooing in the courtyard or the occasional wine-soaked resident stumbling up the stairs. I'd also been routinely roused out of a dream state by the building's concierge, Madame Dontas, as we were instructed to call her, who insisted on sweeping outside our door at the first light of day. This noise, however, was different.

Boom ... boom ... boom.

"Do you hear that?" Jessie whispered, rolling over to face me. The pounding, louder and more frequent as the minutes ticked on our bedside digital clock, indicated there was a very impatient (possibly deranged) person on the other side. If this were happening back in New York – a place where I speak the language and know the proper procedures in which to deal with an unexpected, possibly inconvenient situation – I could handle it. But being in a place that was unfamiliar and foreign to me only amplified the fear. I barely knew the language – my French wasn't even good enough to transcend eye rolls from waiters and condescending switches to English by shoe salesmen when I made gross mispronunciations or failed to conjugate an irregular verb the right way – and this paralyzed me.

Our apartment was directly across the courtyard from the oversized thick wooden front doors that led out to the Rue des Pyramides in the very center of the city. It was one of only two apartments on the courtyard. The other belonged to the Dontas' who had just left that day for their native Portugal. There had to be other people in the building, but it felt like we were all alone – just us and the thugs trying to get in.

Standing in front of the bus door at Sheretmetyevo airport in Moscow, I steepled my hands at a young woman and begged her to pay my bus fare. I had no rubles and was dangerously close to missing my connecting flight to Minsk. There was supposed to be a free Aeroflot shuttle but it never materialized. This city bus was my only chance of getting to the next terminal. Based on what cab drivers wanted to take me there – $50 – the terminal was in Siberia, or so it seemed.

It was my first time in Russia and it was not a good start. But it was hard enough just getting here. After an intriguing piece about the troubles of getting a Russian visa at the embassy in Washington, D.C., was recently published in the Washington Post travel section, it made me consider my own pursuit to get one. My experience wasn't as bad as writer Ayako Doi's. But for me, having gone through various visa applications a dozen or so times, this was by far the worst.

It was an ominous sign that seconds after hitting "purchase" on the Aeroflot website for a JFK-Moscow-Minsk flight, a big red warning appeared on my laptop screen informing me my credit card had been declined. When I called the bank, they said they just automatically decline relatively large purchases made to Russian companies.

When I called Aeroflot to rebook, Dmitri, the amiable representative on the other end of the line, informed me that I'd needed a transit visa. I was going to have to apply for and buy a $131 visa just to change planes in Moscow on my way to Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

I was lost. Well, not "lost" as in I-can't-find-way-home lost, but in that way where you suddenly find yourself in such unfamiliar territory, you just feel like you've stepped into another dimension. I knew I was in Myanmar, the country still sometimes referred to as Burma. And I knew I was in Mandalay, the second largest city in the country. I was traipsing through a street fair when I happened upon a booth selling posters. Next to images of the Chinese version of Justin Bieber (or is Justin Bieber the American version of this guy?) were displayed posters of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the main thorn in the ruling junta's side.

I took a picture of it. And then someone said to me, in English, "Be careful." I knew what he meant. After all, this was Burma. Government agents, I'd been told, may or may not be shadowing tourists like me.

The founder of Lonely Planet guidebooks espouses a philosophy that through travel, the world can become a more peaceful place. It's true. I can no longer count the times stereotypes have been completely shattered when I go to a new country. The Polish, for example, don't need ten people and a ladder to screw in a light bulb. Likewise, the Mexicans aren't shiftless, sombrero-wearers who use donkeys to get from one bar to the next. Other times, however, a stereotype can confirm a preconceived image we had before going to a country: many Italians really do speak with their hands. And it's a fact that Germans drink a lot of beer. Similarly, the first time I was in Paris, in the early-'90s, I remember seeing designer-clad women walking down the Champs Elysees holding perfectly groomed toy poodles on a leash. I left France, having only spent 24 hours there with this image remaining in my mind.

Ten years later, I moved to Paris. After scraping for as much information as I could about my adopted new home, I kept coming across similar themes: Parisians are rude, they won't help you if you're American and/or speak butchered French, etc. But after a few weeks in Paris it was clear to me: we've been misinformed about the City of Light and its inhabitants. Here's how:

Ask almost any seasoned traveler (or travel writer) about their most memorable journeys and you'll likely get a tale of pain and suffering. "The best trips are the worst trips," is a quip I constantly hear coming from travel writers' mouths. And they're right. Not only because, after the fact, it makes for good verbal consumption at a party but because it does something deeper to us. It almost feels like in those moments – smack in the middle of a desperate what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-now? moment – we're really living. We don't realize it at the time but being out of our comfort zone – even in such dark places we'd never willingly put ourselves – we become human.

As travel has become more accessible to people around the planet and the machinations of the travel industry have grown, experiencing pitfalls along the way are sometimes impossible to avoid. If you have a passport, if you've ever stepped on an airplane or a train or a bus, if you've journeyed beyond your backyard, then you too have had a bad travel experience. I asked a few people for their tales of travel misfortunes and here were some of my favorites:

I wasn't necessarily in Croatia to find an aphrodisiac. But there I was standing on the Adriatic shore just outside of Rovinj on the Istrian peninsula with some local conspiracy theorist/café owner staring at a pile of twigs in the palm of his hand. "Here, eat it," he said. "It's good for, you know, the sex." And then, as I chewed the bitter weed that he'd just pulled from the ground, he began a long tirade about how multi-national banks are controlling our thoughts.

After a little research I realized I was eating rock samphire, also known as sea fennel. It is mentioned as an aphrodisiac on websites – and, as we all know, everything we read on the Internet is true. (The site I looked at also lists bananas, sea snails, garlic and Champagne for "the sex.")

I swallowed the motar, as samphire is called in Croatian, and wished I were back at Batalina instead. Located in the town of Banjole, Batelina is run by David Skoko and his two parents. David has quickly risen to fame in Croatia, thanks to his appearance on the popular Croatian TV show Master Chef.