Well it took nearly a decade after completing my service, but that’s exactly what happened to me last January, when a producer from the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” asked me if I would guide their star and crew around Nicaragua.

“Yes,” I said.

What followed was one of the craziest, most intense whirlwind tours of Nicaragua I’ve ever taken. My job was to help portray the “real” Nicaragua, by presenting serious themes wrapped in entertainment — i.e. the fun of watching someone eat cheese worms, raw bull balls, and iguana eggs.

Culinary shock value aside, I made suggestions and, incredibly, they listened to me — so we filmed acts on a Nicaraguan chicken bus, at a fair trade coffee cupping,  “snout-to-tail” pig dining, and a Creole family dinner. Also featured in the Nicaragua episode — which will air on June 2, 2009, on the Travel Channel — my Peace Corps site, La Trinidad, Estelí. Yes, my dear “La Trini” makes a quick appearance, representing small pueblos off the beaten path across the country; it comes off as kind of a Panamerican truck stop, but nevertheless, there it is, for the world to see — because someobody loaned me a film crew.

“In December 2006, we left our secure jobs and comfortable lifestyle in Prague, Czech Republic for a creative sabbatical: traveling the world, taking photographs and sharing stories about people from all walks of life…. blog, photo gallery, videos, and audiocasts … where we share our experiences. We aim to humanize the places we visit, drawing our readers in through photographs and stories, so they connect with people and places they might otherwise never hear about or actively disregard.”

I’ve never tweeted before, but if I’m ever going to try, I would start with Dan and Audrey’s Twitter travel feed, currently following their trials and travails in Spanish school in Xela, Guatemala (”Just told Guatemalan host mother that we are an ‘equipo de cocinar’ - Dan for savory & me for dulce. The fun of learning a new language”).

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A decade later, I’m still writing guidebooks, travel articles, and, most recently, serving as a guide and “location specialist” for the Travel Channel. I’m a full-time cross-cultural liaison, teaching Spanish part-time at home (Boulder, Colorado at the moment) and seeking cultural oddities and practical advice for my readers and viewers.

In 1942, a TIME magazine article entitled, “Join the Army, See the World,” highlighted the cross-cultural foibles of U.S. soldiers abroad:

[In South America our boys] learned to be careful about approaching Brazilian women, whose men are touchy. They were puzzled by the bidets in hotel bathrooms . . . at Leopoldville, Belgian Congo, the doughboys impressed the natives with the ‘magnificence’ of their equipment . . . In Trinidad soldiers ate plenty of American beef and pork chops shipped especially for them, while the native population often couldn’t buy beef for days on end. Doughboys . . . paid a dime for Coca-Cola on Panama’s Far Fan Beach.”

Rough, imperialist encounters to be sure, but during World War II, cultural sensitivity was not the point. The Peace Corps Era, which began in 1961, provided a tranquilo alternative for Americans with a desire to ship out — without a weapon in their hand. Traveling to far-away lands to immerse oneself in a foreign culture became a hip possibility, a new approach to travel which begot budget backpacking, which begot ecotourism, and so on.

Who among us did not join the Peace Corps, at least in part, because of the pure travelicious excitement of the unknown? It was a chance to play travel roulette! Signing up was literally spinning a globe and letting a stranger in Washington put their finger down, deciding the next two-and-a-half years of our lives.

I was always impressed by my fellow Volunteers who had never traveled before their Peace Corps service. In my training group, there was a girl from Iowa who had never seen the ocean before; I remember watching her first tentative steps at the beach in Pochomíl, watching as she gained confidence and waded farther out into the surf.

That TIME article was amazingly prescient:

As millions of long-isolated doughboys stream abroad, a new kind of international relations . . . is in the making. In the future, conversation around the U.S. cracker barrel and thinking in U.S. heads will be conditioned by a knowledge of peoples in far corners of the world, which the U.S., with all its yearning for world peace, has never known before.”

— Josh Berman