Menus are pretty daunting when you can't read the local lingo, aren't they? And even if there is a menu provided in English, occasionally some of the items get lost in translation, leaving you to choose from tempting servings like savage fungus, reindeer with fresh condom sauce or crap salad.

A handy trick is to cast an eye around nearby diners, find something that looks good and when the waiter comes to take your order, just point, using the old, "I'll have what she is having," line. This can be particularly useful in a Russian restaurant when the menu is written in Cyrillic script and the waiter has a Belarusian dialect.

The other month, while travelling in a rural part of France, we found a pleasant place to eat and ordered from the plat du jour – dish of the day. Playing safe I chose what sounded like a healthy salad. After all, my mum always said I should eat my greens. Salade de Gesiers de dinde, it was called. With my limited French, I didn’t have a clue what I was ordering, but the meal tasted delightful.

When we got back to our hotel room, Monsieur Google provided a translation. It seems my delightful meal, on a bed of lettuce, was turkey gizzards. I have eaten lots of interesting things while in strange lands – elk, reindeer, beaver and other bits of dead critters, but never gizzards.

And there is no better place than China to find weird critters on your plate. At a Beijing food stall, for example, our only three options were ox penis, beef balls or noodles and I think you can guess which one we chose. We've seen menus in China offering snake, caterpillar, dog, cats, carp, sheep eyes, earthworms, silkworm cocoons, grasshoppers, bees, cicadas, gnats and more. Anything that moves really.

Once we stumbled into an unpretentious looking restaurant in Portugal. Although we had been in Portugal for weeks, neither of us recognised a thing on that hand-written menu, until I spotted a pasta dish – muito mal passado com batada – pasta in a mushroom and basil sauce, we decided. So I ordered confidently. Alas, when the plate arrived, I was looking at a huge lump of blood-rare steak served with potatoes. There wasn't a mushroom, piece of pasta or leaf of basil to be seen.

My favourite though, is a fellow Aussie travelling in New Caledonia last year, who thought he knew enough of the local language to order his meal in French. 

The waiter just smiled and responded in perfect English; "Excuse me Sir, but are you aware you have just ordered a medium rare yellow pencil box?"