These Grannies Are on Safari

And how does monkey taste?

"Not very good," Johnson admits.

This season, Johnson added a new country to her long list: Zanzibar, a spice island off the coast of Tanzania.

"Zanzibar," she says dreamily, stretching out the syllables. "Zanzibar was quite impressive and exotic and a totally new experience for me."

Antarctica, the only continent she has not visited, tops her bucket list.

"I would like to commune with the penguins," she says, "walk out on the ice, get up close, have a little conversation."

Fraser has been to 39 countries. She's the enthusiast who eagerly samples exotic foods (roasted slugs!) and willingly hops aboard any animal that serves as a mode of transport: elephants, camels, even an ostrich in Israel.

Every trip is a learning experience, whether it's visiting new places or seeing new glimpses of places they have been before. They inevitably don the local garb, sometimes with glamorous results, always with good humor. When the van breaks down, or a revolution breaks out, they roll with it.

"Having a sense of humor always works," Fraser says. "There are a lot of funny things that happen while traveling and it helps us when we share them and keep laughing."

The banter and bicker comes naturally. The two opinionated women had different takes on the Taj Mahal, one of their stops this season.

"I thought it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen," says Johnson. "It lives up to its reputation."

Fraser's opinion: "It was just OK to me because it was a memorial. In India, the Amber Palace took my heart because it was a living, breathing fort where people had worked and lived. I could imagine the people going through their daily lives."

Each episode includes stunning panoramas, lush sounds of nature and indigenous music, travelogues, ceremony and customs, and vignettes of local artisans plying their trades: the Moto weavers in Zanzibar, pottery makers in Morocco who still mix clay with their feet, Zulu doll makers in South Africa. Each season, the Grannies have been more intentional about building sustainable cultural bridges.

"We are women who have worked all our lives. We relate to and respond to these people, and understand the difference between eating and not eating, of girls not going to high school because they need an electric olive press," Fraser says.

Their support of the Linking Dreams Committee in Chicago creates educational opportunities for rural youth in South Africa, supplying solar-powered computers and soccer fields.

They have not wavered in their belief that boomers, never content to watch from the sidelines, are raring to see the world. "We're living proof" of that generation's penchant for reinvention, Fraser observes.

"They want to go to that village in Costa Rica and build that school. They want to be productive, to give back, to leave a legacy," says Fraser, who at 68 refers to herself as a "leading edge baby boomer."

"It has nothing to do with age or whether you are traveling or joining a community group or helping people in hospice. We are still productive people with a desire to participate in life."

Beating a life-threatening illness takes determination. Fraser was in her late 20s, with a 1-year-old daughter.

"I was given a blessing to be alive. From that experience I promised myself to never give up, to follow my dreams, to do all the things I wanted to do and try to always show those I loved that they mattered," she says. "I still live my life like this today. Doing this TV show is a result of that pledge I made to myself 40 years ago."