2002, NEW ZEALAND

Our pilot picks us up from a spit of land between lakes and mountain. In our flying bubble, we zip up a waterfall, skim atop an inky crater lake, then set down on a rocky coast dotted with tawny-colored sea lions. Then it's up, up, up to a glacier 10,000 feet above the sea, in the shadow of an icy ridge. Our boots crunch into the crusty snow as we tramp about the top of an icy netherworld, then dash to our bird before the sinister mists obscure it, and us too.

2003, MALI

Leather fringe dangles from the tricorn hat topped by cowrie shells, goat horns and plastic wrap-around shades. The singer sways in close, leaning the neck of his gourd-guitar across a visitor's shoulder. Teasing. Flirting.

We had expected the usual just-for-tourists cultural performance -- small stage, pressed costumes, a 30-minute canned spiel for the benefit of a half-dozen white faces in zip-off trekking pants. Instead, we are getting the real thing -- a once-in-a-lifetime all-night ceremony when the bent, white-haired head of the Hunters Society passes his powers to his successor-son.

2004, GALAPAGOS

ISLANDS

A tawny sea lion sprawls in the path leading from our Zodiac to the crest of this arid isle. To get to the nesting grounds above, we'll have to go around him.

A few steps into the skeletal incense trees, we spot a blue-footed booby. From a distance of a few yards, we see the baby-blue webs -- not some watery pastel, but a Day-Glo hue right off the fashion runway.

A blue-footed booby, on our first day! And then we see another, and another, and another -- so many we're playing hopscotch. In Hour One of our week-long cruise tour, we've snapped hundreds of digital images and stood nearly nose-to-nose with blue-footed boobies sitting on nests, boobies feeding their babies, honking and lifting their oversized cerulean feet in a mating ritual disguised as a can-can. We've stared down tough, spiky headed land iguanas the size of schnauzers -- the paunchy hunchback punkers of the lounging lizard clan. Male frigate birds hoping to snag a date for the mating season have puffed out the huge female-attracting red pouches beneath their chins, as mindless of ogling tourists as the snoozing sea lion along the entry path.

2004, BHUTAN

A dancer in an elaborate cow mask twirls into the temple courtyard, tossing his head, twisting, stepping high to ripple the layered scarves of his skirted costume. Security guards motion the crowd aside, making way for cymbal players and drummers and the red-masked clowns who hand out condoms -- the government is waging an anti-AIDS campaign -- and pester festivalgoers for money. Crimson-cloaked monks watch from a wooden gallery festooned with yellow and red banners in the Buddhist festival that marks each autumn.

Like most festivals, this is as much social outting as religious rite: part pageant, part education, part heritage-retention program. For the handful of tourists like us, it's also a step into an extraordinary universe where traditions hold fast and the government measures success in a matrix of economy, literacy, democracy, culture and ecology called GNH - Gross National Happiness.

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