After a certain point, the red-and-white markings of the Lebanese army were nowhere to be seen. Only green and yellow. We were in Hezbollah territory.

All around us were grassy hills flecked with white rocks. Some had traditional stone houses. It all looked very biblical. Our taxi had some engine trouble and the driver got out to check under the hood. I stepped out to take some pictures and the driver discreetly told me to stop.

I want to find the little lying bastard who told me the for $5 you can get a good, clean, comfortable hotel room anywhere in India.

He should suffer for warping my expectations in such an inhumane way.

This is what you get for $5 in the town of Kottayam, Kerala state.

Cairns isn’t just for the Great Barrier Reef. Just two hours north is a rainforest with deadly crocodiles, virginal beaches, refreshing creeks and at least one bat.

In one of the least-traveled islands of Papua New Guinea, you can find virginal beaches, expert-grade diving and surfing, back-flip into an emerald river, and feed a class of friendly eels.

A raw, challenging bush hike that (almost) anyone can do.

When they can’t be bothered with sound discipline, it’s customary for parents to scare their children with fantastic lies.

In Brazil, for example, children are told that if they play with fire they will wet their beds, or that cockroaches will lick their mouths at night if they neglect to brush their teeth.

And there’s the mammoth childhood lie, one that crosses many cultures and is so ridiculous that its survival is nothing less than a miracle: that a fat old man in the North Pole is monitoring every child and delivers obedience rewards on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

A peculiarity of modern video games is that you never truly die. The player is given unlimited chances to succeed, no matter how many times he may plummet down a canyon.

A vaguely related peculiarity of rocks is that they don’t care how soft your flesh and brittle your bones are. This tenuous association was foremost on my mind as I grappled the cubic face of Ormiston Gorge, an ancient geological beauty deep in the scorched red heart of the Australian outback.

The MojoTrotters braved the world’s third-highest bungy jump so you don’t have to. Watch what it was like in this video.

Queenstown is the most convincing proof that governments can profit from the legalization of drugs. This is, after all, the city that deals the world’s most expensive narcotic. Walk around its compact downtown and you’ll see hundreds of addicts, just biding time until their next fix, for which they’ll pay hundreds of dollars.

The drug dealers are registered companies that are taxed and subject to stringent safety standards. There are very few deaths and virtually no violent crime caused by the drug.

When the technician clips the bungy cord on your feet, you vaguely start to realize what you got yourself into.

We had just watched six other people do the jump, billed as the third highest in the world. As thousands have done in the past, they jump, the cord stretches, they bounce. When they’re reeled back to the platform, they look stunned and thrilled, probably wondering what to call the neurochemical sucker punch they just took.