IF YOU REALLY WANT to understand how much travel—and especially travel in Asia—has changed Anthony Bourdain, you need to watch the episode of No Reservations called "Into the Jungle," which was filmed in Malaysia and aired in August 2005. Tony goes through the typical motions, huffing and puffing his way up hundreds of stairs to receive a blessing from a Hindu high priest, later washing down spicy bull-penis stew with a coffee concoction that's supposed to work like natural Viagra. But something is off. He appears uncertain, as if his usual life spark has been snuffed. Some days later (a few minutes in TV time), he makes his way upriver to a longhouse. He kills a pig with a spear and gulps down rice liquor with local villagers. But he still doesn't seem to be fully Tony. The episode closes with a wistful monologue in which he asks if one can be "enriched and hollowed out at the same time."

"Oooh, Malaysia," he says when I bring it up, sitting back in his chair. "I was generally in a really dark place. I was really sad."

What was going on?

"A lot of personal stuff had been going on. I was coming out of a marriage and I had other relationships out there," he says. "And I had a lot of history in that part of the world by this point. My expectations for the day—my expectations of life—had been so altered that it happened to come home during the show. I looked around and realized that there's no going home 100 percent anymore. I was never really going to go back and be a citizen of the USA the way I had been. It was a problem."

Now he's telling me that he and his second wife, Ottavia, an Italian whom he married in April and until recently the general manager of Manhattan Japanese-fusion restaurant Geisha, and their four-month-old daughter, Ariane, are moving to Southeast Asia in the next few years. He's going to write a book about the experience. This is not a midlife crisis, exactly—more like an evolution. A catharsis. Once Tony was a creature that by his own reckoning could exist only in the closed ecosystem of a kitchen. Now he was seeing things—learning things—and Tony could see his own transformation right there in the jungle. The final shot of the Malaysia episode has Tony waving off the helicopter sent to fetch him back to civilization. It is about as close as No Reservations gets to a dramatic metaphor.

"No one will ever understand, or fully get, or be able to share … There's no describing this," he tells me. "The only people who understand me now are the people in my crew. I stepped outside of my life and not all of me could come back. I've defected, I've betrayed, I've crossed some line. I can go back and fake it, but there's always going to be a piece of me that expects that of life. Visuals that lush. It's like the movies, only better."