Inside a Korean restaurant in busy downtown Seoul, I spied what looked like a bowl of freshly prepared guacamole.

A few seconds later and I’d heaped a generous sized dollop of the green stuff onto my rice bowl, decorated with BBQed beef pieces, and … down the hatch!

The ‘guacamole’ that instantly set my mouth ablaze with the power of a thousand suns turned out to be none other than the cleverly disguised undercover agent that is… wasabi.

For those who’ve never experienced a wasabi ‘wake-up call’ before, allow me to say – if chili peppers are a slow-building campfire, then wasabi is nothing short of a precision-guided thermal missile aimed directly at your entire central nervous system.

A few days later when my wife remarked about the ‘avocado’ fighting back and how I’d wanted more greens in my diet, I’d finally ‘cooled down’ enough to enjoy the joke.

This post was composed for a weekly travel writing competition that asks readers to share a travel experience in 150 words or less (with or without photos).

The comp runs in a travel magazine called ESCAPE, found inside the Brisbane (Australia) newspaper, THE SUNDAY MAIL. There’s a monthly prize (something usually to the value of around $500) for the best story published. The address to send entries to is escape@news.com.au if you’d like to have a go. Click HERE to find out more details.

That picture of ‘me’ on fire and fleeing the restaurant was, very obviously, courtesy of our silicon friends at Skynet, or as most folk refer to it …A.I.

Wanna see some images from the reject pile? The instruction to A.I (Nano Banana) was “Create a cartoon image of an Aussie guy in his 50’s running out of a Korean restaurant with his mouth on fire.” And this is what I got –

I’m Aussie for sure, but not THAT Aussie, so I changed it to ‘guy in his 50’s’ and got this –

This was still a little too grandpa vibe for my liking, so I then opted for ‘guy in his 40’s’ –

I may not want to admit it, but these days I’m probably closer to the 50’s look than the 40’s one, however I’m clean shaven, so the ‘Jim Carrey’ version of ‘me’ was the one that got the nod.

How’s this for a literary flavored story plot – six struggling authors find themselves on a remote island where they race to complete the final chapter of a famous, recently-deceased author’s unfinished novel. The competition turns deadly over a tense 72-hour period in what critics have called a “clever locked-room thriller which is also a biting satire of the publishing world.”

Released last week, THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF is written by ‘Evelyn Clarke’, which is the pen name of co-authors Victoria Schwab (American, aged 39) and Cat Clarke (English, aged 47).