Mark traveled, via Regent Seven Seas Cruises, to Antarctica, with his partner, Kathleen. They brought along their friends Mark and Suzie (Mark and Mark have been friends since they were two, according to their mothers), because they thought it would be more fun. (They were right.) Here’s part one of Mark (Bittman)’s travel diary.

As he winds down, in Morocco, Mark thinks back on his three month trip as a whole: “It would be weeks until we could get a grip on what this trip might mean, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen while we were still traveling. The only thing to do was to keep going.” Plus, lots of oysters, a lunch that was among the best of the whole voyage – including a b’stilla, “which just killed” – and absolutely not resisting the urge to go to Casablanca. Because it’s Casablanca. 

Mark finds his happy place, in Fes. “The Moroccan salads, served with almost every meal and usually featuring eggplant, tomatoes, bell peppers, sometimes beets, onions, and more, suddenly had zing. The tagines had spice. The brochettes were dusted with flavorful spices and properly cooked.” Plus, the requisite camel ride in the desert, a calm and relatively uncrowded maze of streets, lots of wandering, visiting a tannery and a local baker, and just straight up enjoying the city.

Mark and Kathleen take a terrifying and exhilarating car ride to Magdaz, where the houses are built into the hillside, everyone tends animals (and animals live on the ground floor), almost everyone gardens, most of the trees bear edible fruit, and foraging and bartering are common. “It’s not the first place we visited that I want to go back to,” Mark writes, “and visiting here isn’t a picnic. It’s at 6000 feet, the main activity for a visitor would be hiking and, although I’m tired of making jokes about it, I’m getting old. But what a place.”

“No matter how much time I spend here,” Mark writes about Delhi, “it’s not enough.” Sackfuls of marigolds; tons of spices and every ingredient imaginable; seemingly unlimited customers and tourists; and a vast array of carts, bike rickshaws, hand-trucks, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, and cars, all jammed into a nearly five-hundred-year-old city that also includes mosques, temples, shrines, and residences for a couple of hundred thousand people.

Mark in Meghalaya: mountains devastated by mining; virgin forests; villages in lush valleys and verdant mountaintops; towns streaming with cars and people and shops, with an intensity that rivals that of Delhi; food everywhere. Plus, cooking lessons, a big school lunch cook-off (everything local and organic!), and learning about how farming communities feed themselves.

Mark and Kathleen spend ten days in Meghalaya, in northeast India, where they spend most of their days visiting villages both near and far, getting to know farming communities, learning about tons of new-to-the-visitors ingredients, making rice bread — and, of course, eating.

Tokyo is endlessly fascinating, from its extreme livability, to the feel of true community, to the terrific food. Mark and Kathleen try it all – kushiage, high-end sushi, Neapolitan pizza, and lamb merguez. Plus, thoughts on Japan, which “appears to be the most cooperative, communal country I’ve ever visited,” Mark writes, and a bittersweet departure for India.

Mark and Kathleen visit Kyoto, the first “real” city they’d spent significant time in since leaving New York — now six weeks ago! — and at first it was pretty overwhelming. Traffic lights! Westerners! Swarming taxis! Nightclubs! Streets filled with restaurants, pizza donuts, shops selling ridiculous things no one needs, overpriced coffee — the works. It’s an ancient city that hides many of its charms.

Mark and Kathleen continue their travels, now in Japan. Here, they explore lunches at the Chijiwa School Lunch Center, visit some fantastic farmers, and eat a ton of food (most of it excellent).

The Jagalchi Fish Market is huge and has just about every kind of water-based creature imaginable. Downstairs holds stall after stall, usually tended by women; we also discovered that the streets outside the markets were packed with stalls, too. Plus: Our amazing meal.