ESPN

Our goal in Season 2 of Wider World of Sports was to find unique athletic events around the world that had a deep history. We wanted stories that spoke to the history and culture of the people we were visiting. I give you: bull penis fighting. Don't judge. They've been doing this in Nicaragua for hundreds of years. It all has to do with the Festival of Patron Saints. I am no biblical scholar, but I don't recall seeing any mention of bull penis fighting, not even in the Old Testament. Yet this Nicaraguan tradition continues. We watched in awe as men struck each other wildly with the tendons of bull penises. Then we ate authentic Nicaraguan stew. Then my producer, Matt Doyle, asked where the hospital is. Our guide in Nicaragua steered him away from any emergency-room visits. Those can take hours and hours.

We needed to climb a volcano.

Cerro Negro is the most active volcano in Central America. It could have gone off any minute. But because we didn't think bull penis fighting would be accepted as representative of Nicaraguan sport (even with all that history), we needed to make the climb. It was not easy -- for me.

It was for a group of super fit Canadian girls, whose expressions of pain were reserved only for how many times they had to slow their pace and wait for the old and out of shape to struggle up the hill. Our group of volcano surfers came from all over the world.

There was me. And the Canadian girls. That takes care of North America. But we also had some folks from Israel and the U.K. Our guide was actually from Brooklyn, but his parents were Nicaraguan. Or at least his dad was. He seemed authentic enough. How much more authenticity can one ask for besides the fact we were nearing the top of an active volcano with virtually no monitoring system to warn us of danger? Seemed pretty real to me. Then came the moment of truth: To say we were surfing was an exaggeration. It was a plywood board with linoleum undercoating. Just as they've done for hundreds (or five) years. No one had to hit me with a bull penis. The steep slope was inspiration enough. We were told to use our feet as brakes. Now that I've done it once, I'd use the brakes less often. Not just because my high tops got scuffed.

There was other danger to be found in Nicaragua. Our two bodyguards had to show their weapons one night when we were at a park taking pictures of a sunset. They told us some hooligans had eyes for our camera equipment. The hooligans could have had the camera equipment for all I cared. Just give us back the little digital chip so we could edit our story. But by then, the security guards had pulled out their bull penises.

Editor’s note: Kenny Mayne embarks on another journey across the world. His first of six stops: Amsterdam. And let’s just say, Kenny had the run of the country.

Usually we have a pretty good idea about which country we are flying to. Are you not supposed to end sentences with "to?" I really don't care. I am more concerned about whether it is called Holland or the Netherlands. One girl told us Holland is part of the Netherlands. This made sense because we saw a map that had Holland and South Holland inside of borders that said Netherlands. Other people told us we could say Holland or we could say Netherlands and everyone would know we were talking about the same country. At one point, Denmark entered the conversation. That was when we asked someone about our problem after he had just exited one of the legal marijuana cafes.

Something else we saw seemed entirely illegal. Every last person we saw riding a bike, except for one 6-month-old, was not wearing a helmet. When we asked why they don't wear helmets, they told us we were soft. I did dumber things on bikes as a kid, but now that I'm all mature and everything I think people should wear helmets on bikes -- especially when there are a million bikes driving all at once on Amsterdam's streets. There were almost as many bikes as there were canals. Thinking of all this and not understanding the lane markings almost made my producer, Matt Doyle, run over a bicyclist at a crossing. Matt was supposed to yield. How do they expect Matt to concentrate on all that when he's also looking for a legal marijuana cafe in order to ask someone else what country we are in?

We took a break from all this chaos and walked the streets one night in Amsterdam's Red Light District. Pretty much anything goes in Amsterdam. Ride bikes with no helmets, buy legal marijuana at cafes and look through plate glass windows at legal prostitutes sitting on lounge chairs. Of the three options, the only one we took part in was riding a bike without a helmet -- and that was only because we didn't want to be called soft and because no one sells bike helmets.

We needed to get the hell out of this anything-goes town and start to work on our real assignment, covering the sport of canal jumping.

Nothing unusual about that. Just a man running full bore down a long-jump-looking runway, leaping onto a pole stuck in the bottom of a canal, climbing 40 feet to the top and jumping off the other side.

This is probably illegal in Amsterdam since something has to be.

Probably murder. There's got to be a law against that.

While covering canal jumping, we forgot to put on sunscreen, and it turns out those global-warming people are starting to hit on something. The sun seemed to be closer to earth than the moon, which didn't appear in the sky because the sun had vaporized it.

The sun burned us beyond recognition. This is probably why we didn't recognize each other on the drive back to Amsterdam. Whatever country that lawless place is in.