But one little tale paints the whole picture, more so than the Mindil Beach Market, the Toad mustering, the amazing meal that Ungun and her friends made me on the shores of the billabong, more than the amazing Steve Sunk, the Walkabout Chef, more than Sean and I driving across The Track ...

We spent a night at the Noonamah Tavern, and in the show we arrive, we eat, we leave ... and if you are observant you see the sort of depraved hellhole this place really is. But lemme digress ...

We arrive at the Noonamah Tavern, which is a bar, a restaurant, a gas station, a liquor store and a motel for truckers, roustabouts and bar customers. It rents rooms hourly. Enough said.

The drunk topless customers sitting outside by the gas pumps, skirts and pants hanging so low you could see their nasty tramp stamp tattoos in all their glory, insisted we come back the next night for the Prawns and Porn night where they serve steamed shrimp baskets, and the bartenders go topless. For an extra 50 cents a draft they dip a boob into the glass after they pour it. I kid you not. Look, I have been in some sordid places in my day, have been on Patpong Road after dark, cruised the Red Light zone in Amsterdam, and grew up in NYC ... I have seen it all. Until I feared for my life at the Noonamah Tavern.

We arrived and the local customers did not want us there, let alone wanted to see us point a camera in their direction. The sadness and depravity, the lost lives that all the lonely drunkenness represented, the anger that finally could find a target, it was all a little overwhelming. We got the finger, a moon, a frontal moon, and threats of an ass kicking ... and that was from the first 60 year old lady we encountered. I am serious as a heart attack.

Anyway, the Outback was an experience like no other. Wild, untamed and thrilling to eat my way across. You won't be disappointed.

Seoul's largest market is Noryangjin Fish Market, a 700,000 square foot facility that houses over 700 shops selling the most insanely diverse product from 15 fishing ports around Korea. The complex includes numerous restaurants, an auction floor, and an adjacent produce market but everyone comes for the fish. Octopus is a popular delicacy here and is eaten cooked or raw. If eaten raw, it is either eaten whole (and very much alive) or it is sliced up, its tentacles still wriggling as it goes into your mouth. You'll also find local flower crabs, prawns, abalone, clams, oysters, sea snails, sea cucumber, sea slugs, and sea squirts. And of course, live fish can be seen swimming in tanks all over the complex. You point at the fish of your choice and the seller weighs it and informs you of the price. You can take the fish home with you whole or have it gutted and cleaned. On the floor above the Fish Market, you'll find several seafood restaurants. You can buy your seafood from the market and bring it upstairs or have it delivered upstairs for your dining pleasure. Awesome. The restaurants will provide the side dishes, liquor and prepare hot soup from the carcass of the recently deboned fish. Of course, if you don't want the hassle of doing it yourself, you can just order at the restaurants and the ladies will yell your order downstairs and it'll be on your table in a couple of minutes. I love this place.

Koreans love spoiled and fermented foods, and have developed fermented food recipes in order to preserve foods that would provide essential nutrients throughout the lean winter months. Fermented foods are healthy (think sauerkraut!) and they show the wisdom of ancestors who sought the secret of longevity. Fermented sauces made of soybeans were created, kimchi was made and stored for winter when it was hard to grow vegetables, and fermented seafood was developed as a way to deal with the all the food that comes from the sea and couldn't' be consumed immediately. Now hong uh wae is fermented skate, left to rot at room temperature for several days before being eaten raw. Skate spoils faster than almost any other seafood and because the animal is loaded with uremic acid and pees through its skin the flavor the rotted skate flesh makes other rotted seafare taste like cotton candy. Yummy. But I loved the kimchi in Korea and got to eat plenty of it with every meal, as well as big piles of all my other fave fermented foods.

o Jangajjis - A dish of dried or salted vegetables and herbs pickled in bean sauce or bean paste or peppered bean paste.
o Ganjang - Korean soy sauce.
o Doenjang - Fermented soybean paste. Doenjang is made from the solids left over after Gangjang is drained from its fermentation vessel.
o Gochujang - a hot paste made from soybean powder fermented with boiled rice, flour, and sticky rice powder and seasoned with salt and spicy peppers.
o Cheonggukjang - a fermented soybean paste that contains whole as well as ground soy beans.

Everyone in Korea dines out and it is a common habit for people in Seoul, so there are thousands of restaurants scattered throughout every neighborhood. Unlike restaurants in the US where you pick a meal off a large menu with endless choices, restaurants in Seoul tend to specialize in one or two certain foods. Eating out is a group activity and you don't see many people dining alone. You want soup? Go to a soup restaurant. Want BBQ? Hit a BBQ joint, and Korean BBQ is superb.

I made sure to check out a Sutcama, a sauna emporium where you bake in a hut heated by hundreds of pounds of wood and charcoal. Friends go here together for a sweat and then a shower. Afterwards, you eat the house specialty: 3-second pork belly. The pork is placed on a grate and put in the coals and cooks in seconds.
I also went to a BBQ restaurant in Seoul for intestine, ox-liver and omasum (pork stomach). All these extremely popular restaurants have grills set into the table and each specializes in a certain kind of meat. Typical choices are beef (bulgogi), beef ribs (galbi), pork (samgyeopsal), or chicken (dak) but there is a type of BBQ joint to suit every taste.

There are many unusual soups and stew eateries in Seoul. Since soups and stews are such a big part of everyday eating, and the majority of restaurants in Seoul specialize in amazing meals in a bowl. I even got to try a soup called Dead Body Soup ... dont ask!
I made sure to try as many other soups as I could and here is the list:

o Loach soup
o Sunji Haejangguk (clotted-blood soup)
o Potato with pig backbone stew
o Knuckle bone soup
o Ox tail soup
o Tripe soup
o Sea mustard soup
o Doganitang - soup made with jellified cow's knee cartilage
o Haejangguk -- a favorite hangover cure consisting usually of meaty pork spine, dried cabbage, coagulated ox blood, and vegetables in a hearty beef broth
o Seolleongtang -- ox leg bone soup simmered for more than 10 hours until the soup is milky-white. Usually served in a bowl containing glass noodles and pieces of beef.
o Maeuntang -- a refreshing, hot and spicy fish soup
o Gamjatang ("pork spine stew") -- a spicy soup made with pork spine, vegetables (especially potatoes) and hot peppers. The vertebrae are usually separated. This is often served as a late-night snack but may also be served for a lunch or dinner.

o Cheonggukjang jjigae: a soup made from strong-smelling thick soybean paste containing whole beans

o Samgyetang: a soup made with Cornish game hens that are stuffed with ginseng, a hedysarum, sweet rice, jujubes, garlic, and chestnuts

But here is the best advice I can give you. Head to Seoul, and see for yourself. You will love it. Especially the food.

We landed in Tanzania after a crazy airplane journey from halfway around the world that had me sitting on the tarmac for 6 hours in Khartoum in the Sudan. "Please stay away from the windows at all times," said the voice of the flight attendant over the loudspeaker, a chilling reminder that air carriers based in the USA are not welcome sights on some tarmacs, especially in Northeastern Africa. Anyway, I ended up not getting shot at and spent the rest of the day flying into Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, shooting there for a week, flying to Kampala, Uganda, shooting there for a week and then moving on to Tanzania. We were tired, and we all missed home, and 3-week, 3-show shoots in third world countries are the hardest trips imaginable. There are no days off, no time off and endless days of shooting and living in some very harsh conditions. I love it.

But boy was I psyched to land in the relative peace and quiet of Arusha, and overnight in an actual hotel after crawling out of the Uganda jungle on fumes. There was a lot of great storytelling to be had in Tanzania but we eschewed all of them in favor of spending the majority of our time living in a tent city on the rim of the Ngorogoro Crater, living and hanging with the Massai and watching the great migrations of exotic African animals parade along the crater floor.

The crater itself is steep and impenetrable except for several cut outs through which the animals migrate. The hills around the crater are thousands of feet high, cold and damp and windy up top, warm and humid on the crater floor. Savannah below, forested temperate jungle above. We spent our first few days in the crater, standing next to an endless parade of zebra, warthog, wildebeest, lion, hippo, elephant, orangutan, assorted monkeys, birds, snakes, lizards and every other animal you can imagine.

The rest of the time we spent chilling with Edward Ngobi and his tribe. These are not the Disney version of the Massai, this was the real thing. Up early in the morning, tend the herds, release the herd from the corrals, repair the things in the village that need fixing, hunt, collect wood, corral the animals and eat dinner. We beaded with the womenfolk, weaned goats with the men and got plenty of warrior training in on the side. Remember these are the guys who kill lions with spears and their bare hands and are ritually circumcised at an age when you remember it for the rest of your life. Ouch.

Breakfast was fresh cow's blood, hot millet porridge and 2-week-old sour milk, curdled. Lunch was a reprise of breakfast and dinner was arguably the best BBQ I have ever taken part in or eaten. You see for as unimaginative as a Massai breakfast cook is, the guys who cook dinner really know how to bring it in the kitchen. The recipe? Butcher one goat, one lamb and one cow. Save the skin for tanning into leather and making their world-famous beds. Save the blood, bones and tendons for other uses. Eat the liver and kidneys raw. Skewer all the primal cuts on green sticks and grill it all over a white hot bed of mountain hardwood coals, squat, slice and serve, charred rare.

So I have spent the last 6 months trying to pitch the idea of an all-you-can-eat, kill your own, Massai-style whole animal BBQ chain. Anyone else but me think this is an idea long overdue? A carnivore's IHOP for the 21st Century? You betcha!