The world arrives in New York every day, but these days, life seems particularly exotic, what with “South Pacific” on stage at Lincoln Center Theater, and the arrival of the 104th annual Explorers Club dinner.

Not to equate the two experiences. It’s one thing to watch a play in which characters sell shrunken heads. It’s quite another to wind up at the Waldorf-Astoria with deepsea divers, mountain climbers, and desert trekkers, perusing a buffet of yak chili, sushi with scorpions, and chocolate mousse with fried earthworms. Now that’s a distraction from the woes of Wall Street.

“Can I just reach in and grab two of those delicious guys?” documentary filmmaker Sam Kretchmar asked as he extended his arm to grab two cockroaches on toothpicks off of a large pineapple. Soon he had given one away to a stranger, Bjarne Mikkelsen, and the two popped them in their mouths simultaneously.

“It’s juicy, It kind of explodes in your mouth, and it’s sweet,” Mr. Kretchmar said.

The scorpions tasted like softshell crab, with a bitterness afterward, Joe Donahue, who works for the company Global Rescue, said.

Club member Gene Rurka oversaw the buffet, which also included fried tarantulas, feral pig, goat, and goat eyeballs.

The event on Saturday offered a tamer global experience too: watching the fashion parade of native costumes, such as kaftans, saris, dresses of Thai silk, necklaces of boor’s tusk, turbans, kilts, lederhosen. Documentary filmmaker and author Julia Whitty of San Francisco, with her bangs dyed light blue, wore a matching blue gown, acknowledging the event’s theme, “Planet Ocean,” and her own work about the ocean (such as her book “The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific”). Some guests dressed in standard black-tie attire, such as Robert Metcalfe, who co-invented the Ethernet; Anne Doubilet, a photographer who has an exhibit opening soon at the National Arts Club; Dr. Elizabeth Grace, whose father, Dr. George Grace, was present when the club first permitted women to join in 1981, and David Reynolds, who raises buffalo in Wyoming.

The collective miles explored by the more than 1,000 guests attending were too many to count. The president of the club, Daniel Bennett, has been on expeditions to Nepal, Madagascar, Kilimanjaro, Greece, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, and Easter Island, all while pursuing a career as an entrepreneur and business executive. He is currently treasurer of ACCION USA, an American-based nonprofit micro-enterprise lender.

Mr. Bennett joked that New York has its share of explorers, “most recently Spitzer.”

agordon@nysun.com