Like so many adventurers made small by geography, I was moved to leave my mark on the Pacific. This, of course, is impossible. You cannot climb it, you cannot swim it, and if you were to erect a commemorative plaque, it would sink. But you can toss a coin overboard. And so at 11:15 p.m. on March 23—1,489 miles southwest of the Japanese island of Kumamoto and 2,149 miles east of Manila—I reached over the ship's railing and flipped a quarter off the tip of my thumb. It fluttered up, peaked, and then dove. The splash was not perceptible, and the coin's journey to the bottom—some three-and-a-half miles—would take hours.

The quarter would land in soft muck and form a gentle depression, and soon it would be covered over. There is no oxygen 18,000 feet below sea level, so the coin will sleep in peace for aeons as the muck hardens into mudstone. Eventually, its undersea bed will be devoured by the Philippine plate, which, advancing at three inches per annum, is one of the world's true slow travelers. If it is very lucky, the quarter will be spewed out after millions of years by a volcano on the Mariana Islands and become mingled—with you, with me, with every person who has ever lived—into the earth.

The ocean will still be there.

You can smell Asia before you can see it. China, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan are swollen with humanity, and a day before landfall, the car exhaust, industrial emissions, sweat, morning breath, and evaporated cooking oil of a billion woks descend like a curtain. My first full day in Hong Kong, I lay on my hotel bed and looked at my watch: noon. In New York City, the clock was striking midnight. I was halfway around the world. In New York, people were entering REM sleep and were half a dozen hours away from getting up, showering, and hauling themselves to the office. The news was better in Hong Kong: It was lunchtime.

Procuring dim sum in Hong Kong is easy, I can report—even the 7-Elevens serve polystyrene containers of siu mai. But I wanted the best. I walked the streets, fending off salesmen selling made-to-measure suits (whose tactics were downright genial in comparison with those of the Ukrainian grandmothers), avoided the double-decker buses barreling down the wrong side of the street (even more menacingly than those in London), and scanning the crowded, steamy storefronts. It was at that moment—midway between evading a bus and walking into a bin of dried fish—that I was struck by the following realization: I am not jet-lagged.

There I was, on the other side of the globe, immersed in a culture that feeds itself with slender pieces of wood and writes using a logographic alphabet, and I was as chipper as if I'd woken up in my own bed in Toronto. How strange, I thought—how stupid, really—that a condition of the jet age is that our first impressions of far-off lands are clouded by the near stupor induced by getting there.