THERE'S TREPIDATION, just a bracing shot, as I shove off from the muddy tip of Ocracoke, the southernmost barrier island in North Carolina's Outer Banks. While an extravagant 11 feet six inches long, my stand-up paddleboard always seems even more capacious in my imagination, a houseboat to be outfitted with a lounge chair and wet bar. But as I bend to my seven-foot paddle, my feet working for equilibrium, the shore recedes and the SUP suddenly assumes its true dimensions, insignificant in the vastness of Pamlico Sound—and pretty darn tippy with sharks about.

But that's just anxiety short-circuiting the mind-feet relationship. I'm a beginner, but I know this much: SUPs respond to every ripple; you just have to talk back with your toes. Relax and the motion becomes caressing, addictive, the board an extension of the feet, the paddle an extension of the hands, the whole a harmonious unit standing tall and making good time. That's the theory, anyway.

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After the brutal climb to the village of Radda, with only ten kilometers to go, I was about to bonk, nary a revolution left in my legs. Then I heard the cheers from the crowd: mama, papa, and daughter in kneesocks. “Bravo!” they shouted. I nearly burst into sobs of gratitude. Of the roughly 3,000 riders in Italy’s 12^th annual Eroica, an epic, old-fashioned cycling tour up and down the hills of Tuscany’s Chianti region, I must’ve been nearly last. All well-wishers had abandoned their posts save these three, the patron saints of slowpokes.

Eroica

Rest stop

Eroica riders in Chianti

Scenes from a love affair: L'Eroica riders celebrate il grande ciclismo on the rural roads of Chianti

Eroica riders in Gaiole

Late starters in Gaiole

My spirits soared.

And then I was plummeting down yet another motherfucking gravel hill. I foolishly hoped it might be the last in the 205-kilometer route I was following in skinny-tire travail. Over the rural strade bianche, or “white roads” of shale and limestone, the dying October sun cast magic-lantern shadows from behind a stately colonnade of cypress trees. That and the violent drubbing of my tires over the white washboard nearly strobed me senseless. Yet here on the other side of exhaustion, a mere floating head of witness, I instinctively, effortlessly dodged potholes and washouts at a speed that would surely have wrecked me earlier. Then the road flattened out through a good long stretch of plowed and fragrant farmland, and I thought, for the hundredth time, Che bella!—and, there being no other riders in sight, that I’d missed a sign.

I stopped and rotated my torso to look back, my neck being no longer operable. A-ha! Here came some other poor bastards, on venerable old bikes like mine, rattling down the hill. I wasn’t last, or lost, after all. I set to it again, spinning a favorite, honey-smooth middle gear. “Piano, piano,” I said, gently coaxing the lugged-steel bones of Lola, my dauntless 1978 Trek, and echoing the signore at the previous night’s Heroes’ Feast. In the host village of Gaiole in Chianti, my glass had been kept brimming with Chianti Classico as we roared and toasted all things ciclismo. At my table, a local coach had offered a strategy for the next day, making gentle pedaling motions with his hands: “Piano, piano…”

That is, “Slowly, slowly…” Easy does it.

But now it was starting to look as if easy wasn’t going to do it after all. Nearly 14 hours of grinding up and banging down steep gravel had taken its toll on my Lola: a spoke sproinged; derailleurs in dire need of adjustment; wheels out of true; taillight long gone, rattled clean out of its bracket. But she was still the belle of the brawl to me. Her lightweight American steel had absorbed countless bone-rattling blows on my behalf and kept on rolling, past many a mechanical breakdown. As for me, I’d had my brains knocked out of true. Like a visionary in the desert, I was running on soul.

Night crept from behind distant purple vineyards. A brief steep climb and then the strade bianche T’d into tarmac, the sudden ease like a jolt of espresso. Cars whiffed by, lights on. A van slowed—my tablemates from the feast. Done, celebrated, and heading home, they shouted “Almost there!” and left me to my pain. So the long-dreamed-of finish line in Gaiole’s cobblestone piazza was close. I looked and thought I could see the hilltop village’s lights blooming down below, but the route swung away, back into forest.

Darkness. I toggled Lola’s headlight. Dead.

L’Eroica, it should be noted, is not a race but a randonnée, a road trip for the pleasure of the ride. Still, it’s a point of considerable pride to finish the longest route within the “heroic” time frame of 5 A.M. to 7 P.M. That deadline was minutes away.

As I flew downhill through a landscape like a vast black-on-black Rothko canvas, I glimpsed below me the red taillight trails of three riders streaking for Gaiole and glory. If I could catch them, I might beat the deadline on borrowed light.

WHEN I’D SIGNED UP for L’Eroica two months earlier, I had no idea what an all-day ride with extreme elevation changes entailed, but it had seemed the perfect challenge: to transform a middle-aged surfer/tennis player with declining mobility and a bad back into a far more resilient athlete, one who could, for instance, ride hard all day in the Chianti hill country. And it would all be for a good cause.

A dozen years ago, Giancarlo Brocci kicked off the tour to celebrate the strade bianchi and rally support for their preservation. Some, citing the dust and wear on their high-end roadsters, craved blacktop. Brocci and his fellows in the Parco Ciclistico del Chianti foresaw that asphalt would not only ruin the character of the countryside; it would also pave over a lot of the history of il grande ciclismo, the midcentury era of mud and blood that saw the rise of national heroes like the legendary Fausto Coppi, Il Campionissimo, “the Champion of Champions.” The event they created is part costume ball, part battle reenactment, with a sawtooth profile resembling a mountain stage of the Tour de France. The first Eroica drew about 100 faithful, but last year’s event attracted thousands of cyclists from more than a dozen countries, many of them riding beautiful antique bikes and kitted out with period gear and clothing. Lugged steel, wool jerseys, leather saddles, etc.—all of this is encouraged, but I also saw carbon-fiber frames and people wearing as much spandex as Spider-Man. With four courses to choose from—38, 75, 135, and 205 kilometers—you can randonnée through the Chianti well into your dotage.

Speaking of which, at age 53, and with zero road-bike experience, I might have chosen one of the shorter courses. But committing to an event far beyond my abilities was just the sort of psychological jump-start I needed. I was already following “a sensible program of exercise and diet,” and it had me firmly mired in mediocrity. In tennis, for instance, all too often I heard myself saying “Too good” rather than pursuing an opponent’s would-be winner as I’d once done, with the mad fury of a Jack Russell terrier.

I needed a bike. I soon found a well-preserved, Eroica-appropriate ten-speed: silver and maroon, with full Campagnolo, downtube shifters, a burnished leather Brooks saddle, and 30 years on her. I named her Lola after the swift and tireless heroine of the German cult film Run, Lola, Run. I’m six-one, 185 pounds; at 25 pounds, she’s svelte for her age. We meshed biomechanically right from the start. She seemed to have an invisible motor, a get-up-and-git that made me want to ride and ride.

I soon contacted an Eroica veteran, San Francisco wheelman Bob Freitas, seeking advice. His response was terse: “My condolences.” He added, “Florida ain’t Tuscany” (I live in flat Tallahassee) and “Those elevations are in meters, not feet.” My friends were even more skeptical. One, well-versed in the physiology of exercise and recovery, opined that 127 miles of hills would kill me outright. I feared an Italian bonk, and I feared an Italian sag wagon, just waiting to scrape my sorry bonked ass off the gravel, the way Irish peasants once feared the banshee’s coach. I found the only hills in town and started putting in my miles.

By September I was clocking 50-mile loops, returning home broiled the color of steak tartare and having off-gassed surplus pounds into the atmosphere. I’d dropped nearly 20 of them, to 167, had a spring in my step, and had no more back troubles. Old and slow, maybe so, but I was hungry for that ghostly gravel.

I WAS ALSO JUST PLAIN HUNGRY. That first night in Gaiole, I went to a café with some other riders and destroyed a plate of tagliatore in a wild boar sauce. I was already looking forward to the tour’s ristoro stops, which promised traditional fare: salame, prosciutto, riboletto stews, and the original energy drink, Chianti. I was eager to gourmandize on the fly. The affable Eroica director, Claudio Marinangeli, dropped by our table with his beautiful daughter, whose name I didn’t catch. “Ees very far,” she said with a lovely pout when I told her I was doing the long course, “but good you try!”

By Saturday, Gaiole was hopping with cyclists signing in at the gymnasium, which had been transformed into a museum of the bicycle, with turn-of-the-century Peugeots and 1950s Bianchis hung on the walls. In an adjacent park, vendors hawked pre-derailleur bikes with Rube Goldberg manual shifters and all manner of other catnip for the cognoscenti. Anticipating the chill of Sunday’s pre-dawn start, I picked out a pair of gloves and a tri-colored cycling cap with earflaps. One or the other, not both, I chided myself, budgeting. Like a dumbass, I tossed the gloves back.

Mingling as best I could monolingually, I managed to bump into some vintage Brits, one of whom, 72-year-old Trevor Smith (“international courier and lover of women”), was a national champ who’d once raced against Coppi himself. “I have a story to tell,” he said with a rhetorical flourish of his Guinness. “It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, and we’re all coming down the mountain like the blazes when I feel a spatter of raindrops. What’s this? I say to myself. Then I see up ahead: It’s Fausto Coppi with his johnson out, raining piss all over everybody.”

Five hours after that night’s Heroes’ Feast, I sprang out of my bed at the B&B and was soon stuffing my face again: pani santi (“little pastries”), various regional pork products, and plump, ineffably wonderful Chianti grapes. In the village square, a throng jostled under harsh klieg lights. Some riders had a tweedy Roaring Twenties look: slouch caps, goggles, aluminum water flasks clipped to the handlebars. Eddy Merckx–style striped caps and canary-yellow Cinzano jerseys were favored by sixties aficionados. Wool-clad Italian iron men with handlebar mustaches and tree-trunk legs pushed squat little bikes, spare tubes wrapped in figure eights around their shoulders or slung across their chests like ammo belts. We got our brevet booklets stamped, mounted up, and were off under a black, star-pricked sky.

PIANO, PIANO! But there was no denying the adrenaline surge of my first peloton. I was part of a great dragon of illumined cyclists six riders abreast, the head of the beast perpetually disappearing around the bend ahead, the tail still flowing out of the piazza behind. We made a hissing sound like gentle surf, spokes whirring, tires snicking smooth wet pavement. The first bit was all descent, a ten-kilometer/six-mile coast south toward Siena, but cold! I shivered so hard my whole bike shook. My fingers burned, then went numb, so I alternated hands on the bars, shoving the other into my armpit to restore sensation. I was passed by a lot of riders with gloves.

At last an official with a flashlight appeared, waving us off the highway and onto the first section of strade bianche. The limestone seemed to glow in the dark. It crackled, was both grabby and suddenly not. The workout brought blessed warmth. Over this first long, undulating climb, the pack spread out single-file to a long, thin thread. By the time the sky showed pink, I was sweating contentedly, and with the first red sliver of old Sol upon the horizon, the countryside erupted with shotgun blasts, the gentry out shooting birds.

Had I done the math at the first control point, the 40-kilometer/25-mile mark, I might’ve noted I was kind of dogging it. But I was happily gobbling more pastries and grapes and slurping hot coffee. Besides, there were at least a hundred of us! I was right in the thick of things. Too many minutes later, I was back at it in high spirits.

But soon the first of the 15 percent gravel climbs rose up like the pale brow of Moby-Dick. It looked insurmountable, like you’d just bounce off. I shifted to my lowest gear and hit it out of the saddle, surging all the way up on sheer audacity. But the next section was even steeper. (Some hit 18 percent.) A few cranks into it, I spun out, spitting gravel. So I walked.

At the top of every hill was a prize: the ruins of a castle of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, a 14th-century fortress, a grand villa commanding a noble view of vineyards and olive orchards. Then came the tunnel vision of a roller-coaster descent, every bit as demanding as the climb and much more dangerous. At the checkpoint, a sixty-something South African on a mint ’63 Raleigh described the course as “very sporting.”

“Quite,” I said around a mouthful of salame sandwich.

After a crash at zero kilometers per hour that bloodied a knee and an elbow, I developed a strategy: Stand up, sit down, spin out, get off and hike. At a forced march I could nearly keep up with the young dudes with cannonball calves and 27 speeds grinding out the steepest sections. But of those who never walked, there were also riders much older than me, pedaling bikes even older than themselves. Talk about heroic. A great many featured only one gear, and it was no granny.

AT THE FIFTH CONTROLLO—and my fourth lunch of the day—I noted a higher percentage of English-speaking riders. The Italians were smoking us Anglophones like so many salami. The consensus, voiced with good humor, was that we’d fallen hopelessly behind shed-yool. We of course toasted this development.

Back in the saddle, my quads protested vehemently; a slow burn traveled from tailbone to skull. Every sinew stretched tight, I vibrated like a tuning fork. Still, I reeled in one rider, who turned out to have a badly taco’d front wheel, then crept past a young American who told me we weren’t going to beat the deadline.

Whaddya mean “we,” compadre? I still had something left in the tank.

The climb to Radda siphoned that off. One moment I’d been a mystic of the wheel, endlessly pedaling, remembering no other way of being. I’d even thought of the great French sailor Bernard Moitessier. In 1968, he’d abandoned the Sunday Times Golden Globe, a race to become the first man to circumnavigate the earth solo and nonstop—only to keep sailing. He ended up traveling the distance of one circuit and three-fourths of another. Why stop at the finish line?

The next moment I was just a desperate doofus about to bonk.

And soon it was dark. Planetarium dark. Below, those three red taillights arced across the blackness. The only thing missing was the Pink Floyd. Yet through the phenomenon of persistence of vision, the lights left lingering streaks that showed me the contours of the turns. It was purely conceptual riding, ridiculous at high speed. I held on through the first curve and the next, but rather than gaining on them, as I knew I must, I fell behind a little each time. And then they were gone. I couldn’t see past my handlebars. Slowing way down, I could just make out the difference between road and not-road.

A car came roaring up behind me, flashed its brights, hit the horn. My pulse shot up. On I rolled, piano, piano.

Half an hour later, I was still in the dark, in the cold, in the forest, creeping along, wondering what a night out would do to me. Up ahead I saw a light, a couple of buildings—surely the outskirts of Gaiole—and what looked like an ice cream truck. I pedaled up to it, shivering, and tapped on the window. Inside was a woman in green scrubs.

An ambulance, a sag wagon if ever there was one.

“Do you know which way is Gaiole?”

She pointed back the way I’d come. I’d kept on going all right—right past the finish line.

But I wanted that finish line. I turned around and began to creep uphill, near to grieving. I was grinding along, beginning to shiver convulsively, when the lady in the sag wagon pulled up next to me.

“You want a ride?”

To give up the cobblestones, to leave the thing unfinished, was like an amputation. I’d like to tell you that I declined, asked her to lead the way as I retraced my tracks, found the turn I’d missed, and made my own little triumphal entry. But I did not.

A moment later, the EMTs were treating me for hypothermia. Lola sat in the back.

I tried to explain: It wasn’t as if I’d bonked; it was just that I was lost, see? I lurched off the stretcher and switched the odometer to total distance: 212 kilometers.

Seven over the top. But, alas, past seven o’clock—and far from the finish line.

“Non capisce,” said the lady, trying to get me to settle down.

Soon the ambulance pulled into the piazza. I climbed out the back, wrapped in a blanket, and the organizers clustered about me, murmuring words of sympathy and concern. I tried to tell my story again. The broken light! The missed turn! Duecento e dodici! Not a bonk! No bonk!

“Ees very far,” someone said, “but good you try!”

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“The next ten years will be the most important in the next 10,000,” says Sylvia Earle, speaking to a spellbound audience on the luxury live-aboard dive boat the Seven Seas, which lies at anchor in the remote Indonesian archipelago of Raja Ampat. Here, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, the night is primordially dark, utterly silent except for the breathy, gently maternal voice of the prophetess, and when she evokes the astronauts, their epiphanies from space—how it is the sea, the sea that is life itself!—it almost feels as if the Seven Seas has lifted off and is flying among a billion stars. The wine helps, too.

Dr. Earle, who began diving in suits that are now in museums and who first achieved fame in 1970 with NASA’s Tektite II all-women mission, which spent two weeks living beneath the Caribbean Sea, has had the ears of presidents and World Bank officials. At 72, she’s still exploring, still diving—still beautiful, too—and still shouldering the burden of a Cassandra who knows that the oceans are everywhere dying.

“We’ve gone from eating ‘the big, the slow, and the tasty,’ in E.O. Wilson’s words, to consuming everything else, too,” she says. “Krill paste is catching on in Europe. Krill paste! We’re eating it all!” Dr. Earle has shown us a short film about fishing debris, with teams of volunteers hauling up a huge amount of shredded nets and monofilament longlines, a madman’s ball of twine. But it’s not the starving masses predicted by Malthus who are depleting the sea. The deadliest offender is the luxury seafood market—we of the gourmandizing West. “But it’s all bushmeat!” Sylvia says, eyes flashing. “We do nothing to cultivate it; we just extract it as if the supply had no end.” Worse still, the assault with trawler and fork is only part of the problem. What with pollution and global warming and coral bleaching, marine habitats are tipping domino style. The Great Barrier Reef is a shadow of itself, the Galápagos fading fast. “We’ve got a limited time to make a difference,” she tells us.

Which brings her talk full circle, back to the Seven Seas and my trip mates, many of whom are board members of or big donors to Seacology, a Berkeley-based environmental organization dedicated to protecting islands and their surrounding waters. The ten-day cruise has taken 27 experienced divers on two boats—the Seven Seas and my boat, the Citra Bidadari, which are both well-appointed, 100-foot-plus modified Balinese schooners—on a vast loop through Raja Ampat, a group of islands northwest of Papua New Guinea. It has certainly been a pleasure cruise, the itinerary chock-full of dives and excursions, but it’s also been a fact-finding mission for Seacology, which is touching base with several of its grassroots projects in tiny villages.

Already the culture shock has been extreme. I’m talking about my culture shock getting to know my fellow travelers. These are some rich folks, mainly from the upper strata of California’s Bay Area and Silicon Valley—CEOs, IT wunderkinder, A-list attorneys of various stripes—many of whom have inherited wealth or else finished their work early and gone out to play, and who seemingly have no worries in the world, except the worry about the world. And while it may be easier for a dolphin to pass through the mesh of a tuna net than for a rich environmentalist to avoid the, um, inconsistency of a Sasquatch-size carbon footprint, the question remains: If not them (us), then whom? And if not here, then where?

Raja Ampat, after all, is the final frontier, one of the least fished, least populated, healthiest marine environments on the planet. It’s also a place where worlds collide—politically, geographically, ethnologically, zoologically—every which way at once. Located just east of the famed Wallace Line (named for the great 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace), which separates the fauna of southern Asia from that of Australasia, the archipelago is part of the 131,000-square-mile transition zone known to modern biogeographers as Wallacea. Scientists call Raja Ampat “the epicenter of marine biodiversity,” where there are a number of endemics and where new species are discovered nearly every time a marine biologist straps on a tank. Properly protected, it could serve as a kind of evolutionary laboratory and maritime seed bank to jump-start recovery for the whole region and, potentially, in a pinch, the world.

But it’s crunch time on the frontier. Historically, the four main islands—Misool, Salawati, Batanta, and Waigeo (“Raja Ampat” means “Four Kings” in Indonesian)—and more than 600 smaller islands and numerous cays have been protected by their remoteness. The tiny population of ethnic Melanesian Papuans, mainly subsistence fishermen, have been excellent conservators. But when they see big commercial boats from Sulawesi and other populous Indonesian islands whose own local waters have been depleted anchor offshore and wipe out the fish stocks with dynamite, they are tempted—indeed, forced—to blow up the reefs themselves to keep at least some of the profit at home. The genius of Seacology has been to cut a better deal for the villages by offering a customized quid pro quo: whatever they need—schools, community centers, solar power—in exchange for long-term protection of the priceless environment. Still, the pressure to extract the islands’ wealth, coming from Indonesia’s east-looking manifest destiny as well as multinational timber corporations, has been relentless. Seacology, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy have all entered into this war of wills as the situation in Raja Ampat has heated up.

“I prefer the term hope spot to hot spot,” Dr. Earle says. “What I’m asking you to do now is hold up a mirror—see who you are, what you do best, how you can help. This is a big place. If we can save it, there’s hope for the sea.”

But it fucks you up, hope does. You internalize all that bad news about the planet, and then you see something like Raja Ampat, a place obviously still being born, and you don’t know what to feel. Happy? Anxious? Exposed for a doom-and-gloomer, as the old armor of pessimism begins to crack and a whole new attitude raises its curious head? I felt stirred up from the very first dive—before the dive, really, when we were motoring to a site called Cape Kri, near Waigeo, and saw a Spanish mackerel leap out of the water, jaws inches from a desperate silver-shiny fusilier, predator and prey gracefully arcing ten feet into the air. Everybody in the skiff cheered. The sea was full to bursting with life, and we, like explorers in a time warp, were about to plunge into waters as wild as those of the ancient past.

About a thousand yards up-current from a classic mushroom-shaped islet, our Indonesian boatman cut the motor and we scrambled to sort out the gear heaped at our feet. Stop and drop: That’s the drill for this sort of high-speed drift-diving. As soon as whoever’s fins were on top of my fins got out of the way, I back-flopped into the blueberry-colored sea, kicking hard to catch up with my fleeing companions. We zoomed straight toward the island at a good three-knot clip, the water warm and uncannily clear. We could see the prow of the reef far ahead, where immense schools of barracuda and long-nosed emperor fish were balled up for feeding. Then we were among them, part of the collective chaos. The best critter finders among us searched out such masters of camouflage as the Papuan scorpion fish, its featherlike fins mimicking crinoids, and tiny oddities such as the orangutan crab, a fuzzy orange dead ringer for the great ape.

During the pre-dive briefing, Dr. Mark Erdmann, a marine biologist for Conservation International and a volunteer guide on this trip (his wife, Arnaz Mehta, is Seacology’s Indonesian rep) with nearly 20 years’ experience diving Indonesian waters, told us the currents that carve these Raja Ampat mushrooms are so strong that from the air the islands look like ships trailing wakes; in fact, one such island, mistaken for a Japanese ship, was bombed by U.S. pilots during WWII. We also learned that in 2001 Erdmann’s friend and fellow marine biologist Gerry Allen set the then world record at Cape Kri for the most species of fish identified during a single dive: 283. So we were ready for the current and we were ready for the fish. But nothing can really prepare you for your first dive at Raja Ampat.

There are about 60 species of coral in the Caribbean; there are closer to 600 in Raja Ampat. And the reefs here support more than 1,000 species of fish, which means if you latch on to a good handhold and start counting, mental fatigue sets in long before you’ve stopped seeing something new. I hadn’t realized just how low my diving expectations had sunk, kicking around hard-bitten, bleach-stricken, fished-out seascapes. It was as if I’d been diving for years on the undersea version of a prairie, and here at last was the rainforest.

After the dive, all of us aboard the Citra Bidadari had the same idea: Ransack the ship’s library and put a name to some of the odder creatures we’d just seen. “I love it,” business consultant Kris Billeter said. “Everybody’s just totally nerding out with the fish-identification books.” On the sofas of the saloon, we kibitzed and conferred, Macs on laps, UV cables downloading underwater shots to Paint Shop Pro. Bob and Rosie Heil had just come from China and Tibet; this was their second—or was it third?—trip to Raja Ampat. Suzanna Jamieson, from Düsseldorf, was nuts about nudibranchs. As my roommate, Eric Kanowsky, an IT-startup wizard, put it, “The more you dive, the smaller the things you look for.” Everybody had done a ton of diving, and everybody rated Cape Kri among their best all-time.

During the morning’s second dive, Sardine Reef, we drifted right into a school of bumphead parrotfish, four-foot monsters, about a dozen of them ripping at the coral like blue buffalo and totally oblivious to us. Sardine Reef is also a good place to see the green turtle—a parrothead with a shell—and the giant clam, a creature with no face at all but in a class of its own when it comes to color. Taken together, the two dives were like an entire career—and all before lunch. Kinda gets your hopes way up.

And this is the thing we shouldn’t have believed but already half expected: Raja Ampat just kept topping itself. At dawn on the third day, the two Seacology boats, which had kept apart to avoid overcrowding the dive sites, steamed together into Mayalibit Bay, essentially unchanged since Wallace’s three-month collecting expedition in 1860. At its southern entrance, the bay is as narrow as a river winding between mountains, an equatorial fjord, before opening up to an inland sea nearly dividing Waigeo into two halves. When Seacology had first approached Waifoi village in 2007 to see what they’d like to have in exchange for limiting fishing in the bay to traditional subsistence catches, they said they wanted sidewalks—nice, wide cement walkways to replace the dirt tracks that held puddles and mosquitoes and disease. And so, that noon, Seacology’s board members and donors, festooned with crowns of trumpet vines, were given a hero’s welcome, parading into the village center along that cement path at the head of a marching band of drums and fifes. Everybody was given a piece of cake and a seat in the shade. Babies cried, elders speechified, hands were shaken, and then all feasted on a spread of fish and swimming crabs and local mussels.

Ever the scientist, Sylvia Earle carefully examined an odd-shaped, snakeskin-textured fruit, took out her camera and photographed it from every angle, and then ate it for dessert. She was more effusive than anybody about the diving we’d enjoyed so far, though with a caveat. “This is the way it’s supposed to be everywhere,” she said. “A coral reef is a true metropolis, with millions of interconnected lives.”

At Aljui Bay, on the west side of Waigeo, the oddest beast I’ve ever seen came crawling out of the dark in the weirdest place I’ve ever dived. The dive site, a shallow patch of muck, lay underneath the dock of a pearl farm, a far-flung place, to be sure, like a trading post out of a Conrad novel. A moonless night set the proper mood for poking about with dive lights. The first creature my scuba buddies illumined was a giant sea snail caught in the act of extruding a gelatinous string of Ping-Pong-ball-size eggs onto one of the dock’s outer pylons. Just inside the first row of pillars, a fire urchin, the size and color of a jack-o-lantern, with short spines and what appeared to be feathers, lay cheek by jowl with a sea hare—a grandiosely proportioned sea slug, a regular Jabba the Hutt. Mesmerized, I watched a certain flatworm, trying to figure out how something flat could appear to be revolving like a barber’s pole in two different directions, when suddenly I felt a prick and an electric jolt. While I’d been gaping at the worm, a battalion of urchins, the mobile kind with long, wicked spines, had crept up to see if I was edible. The bravest of the lot had pronged me in the ankle.

I kicked away in haste. About then I saw someone waving his light, a signal to come have a look. It was Erdmann, our go-to guy on the cruise for all the rare or hard-to-find stuff.

The nearly three-foot beastie had the face of a newborn puppy, and it moved with the contorting waddle of an antique wind-up toy, walking—yes, walking!—on the tips of its pectoral and pelvic fins. It was the walking shark, of course, which we had been looking for all along, not quite believing in it. The discovery of two new walking shark species in 2006 by a Conservation International expedition had made international news and had occasioned more than a few waggish SNL-inspired blogs: Walking shark? Candygram! This one performed for us under half a dozen dive lights, lurching over the rubble—right fins forward, push! Left fins forward, push!—like a patient undergoing painful physical therapy. It was amazing to watch, and we would have until we ran out of air, but at last, annoyed by the attention, it swam off quite briskly.

There’s an evolutionary riddle for you: Why does the walking shark walk when, like any self-respecting elasmobranch, it can swim just fine when it chooses to and, in fact, it walks rather poorly?

The question stuck with me as we steamed south for Misool, where I had my own little Darwinian crisis. I’ve said that we were all advanced divers on this trip, but I was the least advanced, the one who saw everything last and used up his air supply first, and at a site near Misool’s Wayalibatan Channel I was nearly naturally deselected for my lack of fitness. It happened at a spectacular wall called FantaSea, an enchanted forest of gorgonian sea fans waving in the five-knot current. As we had traveled south, the visibility had declined from incredible to merely very good, owing to nutrient-rich upwellings, and the density of fish had just gone crazy. These southern reefs were loud with life—the clickings and scrapings of claw and tooth like the din of cicadas—and visually furious, gouts of color flung and splattered.

On this dive, though, everyone was looking for pygmy sea horses, a Raja Ampat specialty. The creature is tiny—about the size of a grain of rice—and mimics perfectly the tint and the texture of its favorite hiding place, the screenlike grid of the gorgonian sea fan. To find the animalcule, you must comb through the leaves as if looking for fleas on a great shaggy dog. Even when your keen-eyed dive guide has found one for you, it’s hard to see without a magnifying glass. Yet, with those anise-seed eyes, the blunt plumped muzzle, the cunningly nubbed pastel hide, it has its own curious charisma, equal to the whale’s. So people said, anyway. I still hadn’t seen one.

I was determined not to be shut out, so every time one of the guides rapped on his tank, I kicked like mad to get into viewing position—up, down, back, forth—until at last: Bingo! Excellent! Tiny! Cool! And then I noticed my Suunto dive computer flashing, warning me I was about to go into decompression mode—a big no-no, especially in a strong current. I also noticed I was nearly out of air. So I signaled to my group that I was heading up and began kicking for the surface. I spent my three-minute safety stop at a depth of 15 feet congratulating myself on having, almost definitely, seen a pygmy. When I broke the surface, the Citra Bidadari was nowhere in sight; the Zodiacs were elsewhere as well, and the current was still motoring me toward Antarctica and kicking up four-foot haystacks, which would make me nearly impossible to find. Fortunately, I had a signaling device—a bright-orange inflatable “sausage,” for which I silently thanked Seacology’s executive director, Duane Silverstein, and his pre-trip checklist. This I held above me at arm’s length. It barely topped the waves. I yelled “Help!” a couple of times. That was dumb. Five minutes later, I dropped my weight belt, the first time I’d ever taken that drastic measure, and five minutes after that I began to think I’d really been forgotten, and what a long and lousy death I was going to die.

Of course, the able boatmen of the Citra Bidadari would never lose a customer. Twenty-one minutes after surfacing, I heard the growl of an outboard and soon saw my very good friend Dewey racing to the rescue. But in that interval of treading water, I’d had ample opportunity to hold up a mirror, as Sylvia Earle had asked, and see who I was and what I did best. I’m someone who expects the worst, is surprised by the best, and somehow survives to tell the story. So if the worst comes to pass—as I expect it will—and Raja Ampat is blasted to smithereens for frozen fish sticks, and the seas all die and all of us along with them, there’s a certain shark in Aljui Bay that’s ready to crawl up the beach and start the whole thing over again.

ACCESS + RESOURCES
Raja Ampat and beyond

GETTING THERE: Singapore Airlines flies to Singapore from LAX and JFK (round-trip, $1,150; ); from there you can fly via domestic carriers to Manado, on the island of Sulawesi, or to Bali’s Denpasar International Airport and connections to all outer-island destinations. Cathay Pacific flies from LAX and JFK to Denpasar via Hong Kong (round-trip, $1,250; ).
WHEN TO GO: The dry season, from May to October, is the best time to visit (and dive).
GETTING AROUND: Garuda Indonesia, by far the country’s best domestic carrier, flies daily between Denpasar and Manado (from $100 one-way; ). Merpati Nusantara Airlines () and Lion Air () also fly many routes to remote islands.

Raja Ampat
WHAT TO DO: Seacology runs dive trips to numerous international destinations but does not plan to return to Raja Ampat before 2010 (). However, you can book the same luxury live-aboard that Sea-cology chartered to Raja Ampat, the Seven Seas (from $340 per night; ).
GETTING THERE: From Manado, fly Merpati to Sorong ($120).
WHERE TO STAY: In one of the boat’s eight staterooms, all with en suite bathrooms and A/C.

Baliem Valley, New Guinea
WHAT TO DO: Here you’ll see Dani men in headdresses of boars’ teeth and vibrant bird of paradise feathers. Hike to the village of Kilise and stay in a grass hut overlooking a canyon.
GETTING THERE: Hop a daily flight on Garuda from Denpasar to Jayapura ($253), then one of ten daily Trigana Air flights to Wamena ($110; ).
WHERE TO STAY: In Wamena, bunk at the Baliem Valley Resort (from $110; ), a stylish bungalow property. In Kilise, sleep at the village guesthouse ($6).

Togian Islands, Sulawesi
WHAT TO DO: These limestone islands are home to spectacular coral reefs and plenty of wildlife, including reef, hammerhead, and the occasional whale shark, plus dolphins and dugongs. There’s even a sunken B-24 bomber.
GETTING THERE: It takes about two days no matter your route. From Manado, fly Merpati to Gorontalo ($70), where you’ll board a 15-hour ferry to Wakai, the main harbor on the Togian Islands.
WHERE TO STAY: Kadidiri Paradise Resort, on Kadidiri Island (bungalows, $32, all-inclusive; 011-62-464-210-58).

Balikpapan Bay, Kalimantan
WHAT TO DO: Dive recently discovered WWII wrecks— Japanese military cargo boats torpedoed by the U.S. Navy during the 1942 Battle of Balikpapan—at this industrial port. You’ll descend into holds housing coral-encrusted bombs and torpedoes.
GETTING THERE: Garuda flies daily from Bali ($124).
WHERE TO STAY: Blue Marlin Dive’s luxury teak sailing vessel, Ikan Biru ($1,550 per week, all-inclusive; ), drops anchor by the wrecks, enabling you to dive as much as possible.

Banda Islands
WHAT TO DO: Archipelago Resorts & Fleet’s luxury live-aboard dive yacht, Archipelago ºÚÁϳԹÏÍør II, sails from Ambon on six- to 14-day trips around these ten tropical gems (from $325 per day, including dives and meals; ).
GETTING THERE: Fly to Ambon from Denpasar on Lion Air ($274).
WHERE TO STAY: In the ship’s swank staterooms, with plush mattresses, private bath, and A/C.

Roti
WHAT TO DO: Just 300 miles north of Australia, this remote, dry Indonesian isle is the sweetest surf spot you’ve never heard of—with perfect lefts and rights on empty beaches.
GETTING THERE: Merpati flies daily from Denpasar to Kupang ($62). You will have to stay overnight, then board a ferry to Roti (four hours; $12).
WHERE TO STAY: The Malole Surf House (from $100, including surf guide and excursions; ), a boutique property managed by a South American couple. (He’s an accomplished surf guide from Uruguay; she’s a European-trained chef from Argentina.)

Gili Trawangan, Lombok
WHAT TO DO: For decades, backpackers have made the hop from Bali for a dip in the warm, turquoise waters of the tiny Gili Islands, off the coast of Lombok. Gili Trawangan (pop. 1,000), the farthest out, has the best dining and lodging options. Paddle the Gilis with Karma Kayak (half day, $32; full day, $48; ).
GETTING THERE: Take the daily two-and-a-half-hour fast boat, the Mahi Mahi, from Serangan Harbor, on Bali, direct to Gili T ($70; ).
WHERE TO STAY: Kelapa Luxury Villas offers plush one-, two-, and three-bedroom homes with private pools (from $185; ).

Gunung Rinjani, Lombok
WHAT TO DO: At 12,224 feet, Indonesia’s second-highest volcano is a pilgrimage site both for the Hindus of Bali and for Lombok’s Muslim Sasak people. From the summit you’ll look down on a 3.7-mile-wide caldera with a crescent-shaped cobalt lake, hot springs, and Bali in the distance.
GETTING THERE: From Bali, fly to Mataram on Merpati ($51).
WHERE TO STAY: In your tent. The most established outfitter on the mountain, Rinjani Lombok, offers a four-day trek ($270; ).

Canggu, Bali
WHAT TO DO: Canggu is home to the island’s least trampled beaches and most accessible surf breaks. Challenge yourself at Echo Beach, where you’ll paddle out with local and international pros. Beware: The water gets big, riptides tug, boards snap, and a few lives are lost each year.
GETTING THERE: Canggu is an easy 40-minute, $15 cab ride from the Denpasar airport.
WHERE TO STAY: Book a luxe beach pad through Bali Ultimate Villas (four- to six-bedroom villas, $400–$2,350; ).

Ubud, Bali
WHAT TO DO: Bali’s cultural hub is home to painters, craftsmen, musicians, and dancers and is a base for year-round yoga retreats. Balispirit () is the island’s online clearinghouse of all mind/body classes and events.
GETTING THERE: The $20 cab ride from Denpasar takes about 50 minutes.
WHERE TO STAY: Ubud Hanging Gardens (doubles from $270; ), 15 minutes north of town in tiny Buahan, is hard to beat. Guests stay in two-story villas with heated infinity pools overlooking the jade Ayung River.

The post Where the Walking Shark Lives appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

OVER THE YEARS, having read hundreds of adventure stories, interviewed many wilderness survivors, and experienced my own near misses with waterfalls, avalanche chutes, and venomous snakes, I’ve delineated a few major reasons why things go wrong out there: (1) Hubris. The ancient Greeks knew this as insolence toward the gods. I call it the “Dude, I can handle this, no problem” problem. (2) Ignorance. Some people should simply stay home until they know better. (3) Treachery. Rare, usually found only on high-stakes expeditions, but disastrous when it occurs. Examples: arsenic in the coffee, abandonment on ice floes, cannibalization of expedition mates for nutrients. (4) Shit happens. One of the essays that follows is a fine tale about human feces literally falling from the sky, which goes to show that some events are impossible to predict. (5) Miscalculating the risk. I find this last reason most interesting, containing as it does complex and ambiguous human motives. Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, famously said that the whole point of an expedition is to avoid adventures, which are the result of poor planning. But Amundsen, who was a mechanistic, plodding kind of guy, had it wrong. I believe that some of us—many of us, maybe even all of us—head into the wild secretly wishing for things to go wrong. We’re all seeking a worst moment—up to a point.

Think of the great stories you’ve heard. No one remembers much about Amundsen’s trip to the pole, except that he arrived with icy efficiency and, as carefully planned, his team ate their sled dogs on scheduled days during the return. In contrast, what helped immortalize Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance is that he failed in his goal. His genius lay in his skill at escape.

Likewise Livingstone. No one in Victorian England hankered to hear the mundane details of his endless slogs—lasting up to four years—across Africa. Rather, the doctor dined out in London (and raised scads of money) by recounting how a charging lion shook him like a rat in its teeth—this because he’d stupidly approached the hiding beast after wounding it. Or take Lewis and Clark: In two years and four months, they safely traversed about 8,000 miles of the American West, but what we recall best from their countless journal pages are the mishaps: when grizzly bears kept coming despite fusillades of bullets; that night along the Two Medicine River when the Blackfeet attacked. The misadventure is the story.

Granted, it’s doubtful any of us will embark on such epic trips, but we all want stories to tell. What makes a good adventure tale is the unexpected. Most of us are not Amundsens, prepared for the tiniest eventuality. Rather, we place ourselves in spots where the unexpected can ambush us. We’ve all had this conversation: “Carry a compass, map, and matches? Oh, come on, we’re not going to get lost on this little trail.”

On a subconscious level, we need these mishaps. We understand that they pack powerful medicine. They’re antidotes to the quiet desperation of modern life, reminding us that we—as individuals, as a species—are survivors, showing us how truly extraordinary it is what humans can endure, how much we can outwit, outflank, or, with clenched teeth, simply withstand.

We need to know that, lifted out of our bubble-wrapped lives, we aren’t the delicate, ineffectual creatures that governmental institutions and toilet-tissue ads would have us believe. Sometimes we have to set out—presumably innocent of our interior motives—and go have a really bad time.

Peter Stark’s book Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival will be published in March 2014 by Ecco.

Narc Passage

Warning: Convicts in mirror are closer than they appear

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I AM OVER SIX FEET TALL, and my first love and co-conspirator was almost seven feet tall. I mention this because, in the context of danger, size matters. In 1971 and ’72, we hitchhiked through Europe as if in a security bubble. We saw great art and viewed the landscape. Our backpacks remained unstolen; the average European gave us a wide berth. In addition to being extra-tall, we were Marxist, or, rather, he was Marxist and I was the fellow traveler. He was always trying to make contact with the working class but was too intimidating to succeed.

When we got back to the States, the revolution, such as it was, seemed to be passing us by. It was August, sunny and hot, and we were on a trip from Iowa to Wyoming by way of the scenic wonders of South Dakota. We were doing 73 with the windows down and chatting about the labor theory of value. Two hitchhikers appeared. My companion slowed down to pick them up, since we’d gotten rides so many times in Europe.

They ran to the car. They were wearing black and did not look like respectable members of the working class but, rather, charter members of the lumpen proletariat. They got in back—the tall, skinny one behind me, the shorter, heavier one behind my friend. We began talking; it turned out they were just out of the state penitentiary, where they’d served time for drug-related offenses. This was not, on the face of it, a negative. Theoretically, they had something to teach us about aspects of the revolution that we were less familiar with, but we didn’t overhear them making political plans, only talking in low voices about old associates.

My friend and I exchanged a glance. As he turned off I-90 toward the Badlands, I pulled down my sun visor, angling its mirror so I could see the hands and face of the guy behind me. His face was animated. In his hands was a knife. I angled the visor toward the other fellow’s hands. He had a knife, also. I tried to communicate this to my friend by means of gestures, but he was busy drawing them out about their prison experiences.

As we entered the Badlands, we saw that they were truly bad, from our point of view: desolate, beautiful, strange, and isolated, one cliff face and jutting butte after another, in wildly striated and colorful layers. Why were we taking ex-cons with knives into the Badlands, anyway? Well, because we felt we owed them the benefit of the doubt, and also because, since we had talked about how we were headed for the Badlands, we didn’t want to seem to be prejudiced or modifying our trip out of fear.

Beyond that first impression, I don’t remember the Badlands, but I remember perfectly how graceful and slender the skinny guy’s hands looked as he played with that knife. My friend kept talking in a relaxed, friendly manner, but he drove faster and faster. Pretty soon, the colorful rock faces were zipping by, and by late afternoon we were back on the highway, doing 85. As Marxists, we gave no thought to stopping and kicking them out. As big, tall people, we gave no thought to asserting ourselves. We drove. Evening drew on. We approached Rapid City.

“Say,” said the shorter guy, “so-and-so lives here. He’d put us up for the night.”

“I don’t know—” said the skinny guy, but my friend, ever helpful, crossed two lanes and the apron of the exit ramp, bouncing the Chevy over the curb. We paused at the stop sign and whipped around a corner into a Howard Johnson’s. “Need some money?” said my friend. “You could eat here.”

The guys sat quietly, not moving. I watched their hands. Finally, the short one said, “Yeah. We do need some money.” My friend emptied his pockets. He had about 30 dollars, all our money. It’s what they would have gotten if they’d killed us.

As we drove away, we waved. We drove fast, in case they thought to pull out their six-guns and drill us from afar.

Scared Sockless

Stupefied and frozen in a hornet’s nest of hot lead

THERE I WAS, STANDING BAREFOOT in a field of fire with my socks and boots in my hands, obstinately refusing to run for cover until I had put my socks on. Jim was yelling something, but the machine guns kept drowning him out. Then came a brief lull, and I heard his voice loud and clear.

“Jon, fuck the socks! Run!“

It was the spring of 1983. Photographer Jim Nachtwey and I had teamed up to make one of the first trips inside Nicaragua with the CIA-backed contra guerrillas, who were fighting against the left-wing Sandinista regime. I was 26, and I’d never been under fire before. We had just spent an uneventful week with a contra platoon on an intelligence-gathering mission in the hills of northern Nicaragua. We moved around by night and, by day, hid and catnapped in thickets outside villages where the leader of our band, a tall, gangly, mustached man called “the Sparrow,” rendezvoused with peasant collaborators.

Before we set out one evening, the Sparrow told us that at dawn we would reach a road where a Sandinista military convoy was expected to appear. He intended to ambush it. That night it rained torrentially, turning the ground to a mass of slick mud, and in the darkness I fell repeatedly. Before long I was completely covered in mud, and both my trouser legs had ripped all the way up to the crotch. They hung like a split skirt, and I felt miserable and ridiculous.

When we reached the road, the contras fanned out on a bluff, taking up ambush positions. The sky was just beginning to turn blue-gray. Everyone whispered and moved very softly.

I began changing out of my wet and ruined clothes. I took off my boots and socks and had just put on my spare trousers when a terrifying noise erupted. I looked up and, directly above my head, saw red tracer fire sweeping through the trees. It took me a moment to comprehend that we were being ambushed and that everyone around me had vanished. Getting ambushed is a shocking occurrence. When you’re with people lying in wait, you have a sense of immunity to harm. But that was all turned around in a deadly second.

I finally spotted Jim and the others hiding in a shallow trench nearby, urgently motioning me to run and take cover with them. These instructions bewildered me; I still hadn’t put on my socks, and I was determined to do so. So I yelled, “But my socks!” In that moment I learned a lesson that’s served me well ever since: War, in all its manifestations, is essentially about fear—your own fear, collective fear, and how you handle that fear. Nobody knows until they’ve been under fire how they’re going to react. In my case, the sock fixation was a form of shock.

Jim shouted something back, but I couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. “What?” I said. He yelled back, but his voice was again drowned out. This exchange went on for what seemed like a long time, until I finally understood him telling me to run. I ran, barefoot, joining Jim and the others in the trench. When I got there, I realized that I’d brought my socks but left my boots behind. Jim retrieved them for me. And then we all ran like hell for the next five hours; we didn’t stop until we reached the safety of the Honduran frontier.

Surf or Die

Chewed up and spat out by the world's most ferocious wave

JAWS WAS A CIRCUS, spewing 60-foot waves like Neptune was on a rampage. This was last December 15, and a dozen tow-in teams were battling for position at the famous monster break, off Maui’s north shore; 50 more jet skis and a half-dozen boats sat in the channel watching; and five helicopters were flying overhead. No one was following any rules, but despite the crowd my partner Ryan Rawson finally whipped me into a six-story bomb.

The 14-pound board I’d been testing in 30-foot California surf was way, way too light, and I couldn’t hold the line. I fell, and I knew I was in for the beating of my life. I closed my eyes, went Zen, and… baboom!—the wave exploded on top of me.

When I surfaced 20 seconds later I saw a dude on another 60-footer breaking right in front of me. I took a deep breath and dove, but I had two problems: the pair of life jackets I was wearing. I couldn’t get under. My legs were sticking out, so I got “scorpioned”—folded in half backwards, my left heel ramming into the back of my head—while being dragged underwater for about 150 yards. For 30 seconds, it felt like King Kong had me by the feet and was just going apeshit rag-dolling me. I relaxed and took a dozen breaststrokes, but I was still down deep. Stars flashed in the corners of my eyes. I finally broke the surface, gasping for air. A film-crew chopper buzzed overhead, and I thought, I’m saved! But they just sat there filming me die. I prayed for them to harpoon me in the leg and fly me away.

Then the third wave hit. I figured since I was so far in, it would be weaker. Wrong. I surfaced, my left eye temporarily blind from the impact. When Ryan finally came around to pick me up, I thought it was over, but that warm and fuzzy feeling soon vanished. The fourth wave avalanched us both off the jet ski. I came up and saw Ryan swimming, about 30 yards away, with yet another big wall of whitewash pounding down. The rocks were straight ahead. That’s it, I thought, but someone—I still don’t know who—rescued me.

Back on the boat, I hurt everywhere. Squirming with pain, my knee wrapped in ice, I popped a heavy painkiller and chugged a couple of beers. Then I sat back and watched, dazed and confused but wishing I could shake it off and get back in the game.

I’d sustained a concussion, hyperextended my back and hip, yanked a ligament in my knee, and had my ego shattered. I surfed Jaws again last March—and used a heavier board.

Pinto Mean!

The perils of raising a grumpy colt

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS A GRAD STUDENT in northwestern Florida in 1990 when a breakup with a girlfriend exiled me and the dogs to a trailer on several acres in the country. Wandering the adjacent Apalachicola National Forest one afternoon, I encountered a lone horseman, Stetson pulled low, .22 snugged in a scabbard, a string of bloody squirrels dangling from his saddle. My yapping mutts craved those rodents, but the rider reined in his mount, wheeled, and scattered the dogs. Then, with a terse nod, he moved on, like a knight of true country can-do. I wanted what he had: competence, confidence, mastery. At least, I thought, I could get myself a horse.

I found a real beauty—and cheap—a pinto colt with mismatched eyes: one dark, one lunatic blue. I called him Kidd, but from the get-go my equine scion reminded me all too much of myself, the big crybaby. He whinnied for his lost mother all that first day and night, blubbering in the corner of the pasture, and he clung to his resentment as he grew into a half-ton adolescent.

Despite his no-account ways, I made a mount of him—but soon found that galloping a spooky, green horse was an excellent way to break your freaking neck. And he was no fool. He knew my dogs’ deal: no work, nobody sitting on them. After a ride during which I was stuffed into a turkey oak, I threw in the towel and let him chase trucks along the fence with the rest of the pack.

Around this time I began to receive sinister phone calls. Some of my students, disgruntled and dark-intentioned, had to be behind them. I was teaching five freshman English classes—badly—and my dissertation was overdue. My life was a mess. Yet I took great comfort in the proximity of the big beast. Hunkered down in my studies, I’d hear the trailer suddenly begin to crackle like a beer can crushed in a fist. But it would just be the Kidd, scratching his ass with my house.

Returning from school one day, I saw the screen door hanging from one hinge and the front door gaping. My God, I thought, they came for me! Vengeful students! Terrible paranoiac fear gripped me, and behind every tree I suspected maleficent laughter being muffled. Everything—everything—had been dashed and smashed. Such spite! Broken glass, groceries shredded and busted, my possessions torn, strewn, and stomped. Stomped! The den had been more perfunctorily trashed—but unmistakably signed, as it were. On the shag, a halo of bluebottle flies buzzing above, lay a great steaming pile. Of horse manure.

So much for competence, confidence, and mastery. I found the culprit at the very back corner of the property, dozing the doze of the righteous.

Snowplowed

A guided tour through an avalanche, where fear and fascination collide

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

IT LOOKED LIKE A HEARD of white buffalo stampeding down on me. I just had time to yell down to the others, “Avalanche! Hang on!” before it hit me with the force of 10,000 pillows. It was shockingly painless. I catapulted backwards, and my mechanical ascender held briefly to the fixed rope. Then it snapped and I sailed off into space.

Five of us were climbing 20,298-foot Parchamo, a Nepalese peak about 30 miles west of Everest. For the past ten days we’d been trekking up the Thame Valley to reach our 18,500-foot high camp, on the Tesi Lapcha Pass. Now we were going for the summit, and my altimeter had just clicked over to 20,000.

I accelerated to the speed of the avalanche and could do nothing but softly tumble, arms and legs flailing. In spite of my speed, time slowed. I traveled deep inside the mass. Snow pressed me down and held me up. I thought, This is different.

I had time to understand that it was beautiful. The light was a soft translucent blue that became brighter or darker depending on my depth. I never saw sunlight, but could periodically see the surface. The snow looked like tumbling blue dumplings. I watched as one large block skidded beside me for what seemed a long time. It was squarish at first but disintegrated as it slowly rolled over, then veered away. The snow blocks were not malevolent. It was as if they were escorting me, emotionless companions, as we traveled together on the road to hell.

I didn’t think I would die, but I hoped I wouldn’t. This thought never left my mind. Objectively, I realized I could die; subjectively, I wouldn’t allow it. I had to live. Plummeting, I fought to reach the surface, but I couldn’t. I forced my head up and gasped for air. I’d fight until my last breath.

Ultimately we slowed. The deceleration happened suddenly but softly, like a truck plowing into a snowbank. I was facedown, headfirst, thinking, Uh-oh, dead people stop facedown.

Then there was a second surge and I was propelled forward again. It flipped me over and sideways. We lurched to a stop with an audible crunch, the first sound since impact, and I finally saw daylight. I wasn’t surprised to find myself on the surface, but I did feel an eerie satisfaction. I had been swept a thousand feet down and now lay at the very toe of the slide. My ride lasted perhaps 30 seconds.

The fight left me exhausted, with that creepy feeling of coming out of anesthesia. With the little strength I had left, and before the snow totally cemented me in, I struggled to free my arms and legs. I lay as if on a crucifix, arms spread wide, hips high, back arched inelegantly. After freeing myself from my pack and digging out, I realized that I was alive—and alone.

The fleeting rush of having survived was preempted by concern for the others. I saw one friend partially buried nearby and dug out his face. I thought surely some of the others were dead, and I held my head in my hands, inconsolable and utterly spent. But slowly, miraculously, everyone was found or dug out. As we collected ourselves and what was left of our gear, I glanced at my watch: It was 7:45 a.m. The day had barely begun, yet it was already defined for a lifetime.

Itchy and Scratchy

When nature calls in the woods, think before you reach

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I LEARNED TO DEFECATE in the woods while I was still in single digits. Our small Wisconsin farm was surrounded by hundreds of acres of swamp and forest, and my siblings and I were often out of washroom range when the urge struck. We became precocious connoisseurs of organic cleansing media. Wipeability factors varied: Oak leaves gave good coverage, but their slickness limited absorption. Pine needles were worthless, even injurious, but had the benefit of smelling like tree-shaped air fresheners. Moss was fragile, soggy, and sandy, but had a decent swab factor. Finally, I can say without reservation that a fat handful of poison-ivy leaves did the job quite nicely. The initial job, that is. The sequelae, to use a physician’s term, were untenable.

I was 14, which, given my experience toileting alfresco, made my mistake doubly knot-headed. Grandpa had taken a passel of us to a riverside swimming hole. I still remember squatting in the bushes before jumping in, prospecting for leaves after it was too late to relocate. The only trees within reach were pines. I groped behind me and felt a clump of flat, wide leaves. Bingo!

It took a while for the itching to commence. Early on, while still in the water, I felt squirmy twinges of an intimate nature, but, hey, what’s new? Back home two hours later, I was race-walking around the living room, fully prepared to drop my shorts and do the naughty-puppy carpet scoot. Cross-eyed and panting, I racked my brain and reviewed the day. When I got around to reenacting the outdoor toity session, I blanched.

I wound up with such a blistering case that I was taken to a clinic for corticosteroid shots. The doctor also prescribed a topical cream and instructed my mother (a nurse) to apply it daily. Florence Nightingale herself wouldn’t have shown up for that gig. I spent a week sleeping on my stomach, fitful and straddle-legged. Standard bathroom procedure went out the window, replaced by a wincing gavotte in which I lowered myself to the seat, did the deed, drew a baking soda bath, and delicately cleansed and patted myself dry. One misstep and I would collapse into a seizure of spastic monkey-scratching. Years later I came across a poster in a print shop that said IT’S NOT THE BURNING, IT’S THE ITCHING, MAN! and I thought, Amen.

For a long time, the fact that I’d wiped my butt with poison ivy was my little secret. I have to believe Mom had her suspicions, even though I explained it away by saying I’d backed into the stuff while changing into my bathing suit. She kept a log of my childhood illnesses, and the entry for August 7, 1979, says, “poison ivy, lower trunk.” Delicately put, don’t you think?

Cannery Woe

A salmon butchery goes from bloody routine to living hell

BETWEEN JOBS A FEW YEARS BACK, I decided to work in a southwest Alaskan cannery in Dillingham, which is not so much a town as an open-air boat garage by a tent city near Bristol Bay. Shifts ran 16 hours, 24/7. I had not been on the slime line five minutes that day, my fifth, when I was pelted in the throat with a salmon heart. It lay near my boot—a fleshy, violet organ the size of a Concord grape. Across the conveyor belt, a man steeped in piscine vital fluids grinned. “Come on, take a shot,” he said. “Have some fun or you’ll lose your fucking mind.”

Back then I was a great believer in easy money. One day a friend had said he’d gotten a little bit rich gutting salmon in Alaska—and it was a piece of cake. He’d told me to expect “at least five grand.” I’d bought a plane ticket instantly. My new job (cake, indeed, compared with a slot at the beheading station, where a guy had just chopped his hand off) involved wielding a dildoesque wand, vacuuming blood from the spines of flayed fish at a rate of 80 tons per day. The goo bore a disquieting resemblance to blackberry preserves, and the gelatinous rattle it made as the chrome tool inhaled it kept my gorge on the rise.

To ease my horror at having cashed in my summer for a life of gore-strewn monotony, I chatted up the girl beside me, who eviscerated her salmon with a vigor I admired. Her face was luminous with scales, and she wore a skein of golden roe in her hair. I tried to curry her sympathy by showing her my hand, swollen big as a catcher’s mitt from endless vacuuming. She looked at me and said, “I guess this work is tough—if you’re a pussy.”

The shift ended, and my colleagues and I, looking fresh off a Haitian-zombie-powder binge, dragged ourselves to our tents. But sweet sleep was impossible. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds roared under the rain fly. Next door, a couple, unhappy with how their Alaskan “vacation” was turning out, screamed at each other for hours before being interrupted by some bad news: The cannery had announced it was going bankrupt.

The whole place went insane. Armed fishermen stormed the offices. Someone boosted a front-end loader and tried to ransom it for lost wages. With nothing else to occupy them, the drunks and felons I’d worked alongside passed the time by rioting and assaulting one another. Fearing for my life, I skipped town.

I was never paid a cent for my labors, but the experience did no irreparable damage—except to my faith in the notion of a fast buck. My bloated hand returned to normal, and with a lot of scrubbing I banished the slaughterhouse aroma from my skin. I rarely think back on those days, but at the occasional dinner party, when somebody serves me a salmon puff or a lox crostini, I quietly push my plate away, as if there were a scorpion on it.

Belly Dance

Loose of bowels and out of luck in North Africa

FOR A WEEK I’d been laid up in Jerba, a run-down resort isle on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, with a ghastly stomach bug that had liquefied my innards. Even so, I was determined to visit Tataouine before leaving the country. This dusty southern settlement at the edge of the Sahara is renowned for its ksours—ancient Berber strongholds built into the rocky hillsides—but Star Wars nerds know that it sits in an area filled with locations used in the first movie. I wanted to go there and poke around. “Tataouine is only a two-hour drive,” I whined to my traveling partner, my then-wife Jackie, as a Jerban doc named Borgi poked my distended gut and scribbled a prescription.

Next morning, I gulped down a handful of mystery pills, rented a car, and hit the road. By the time we got to the vicinity of Tataouine, I was so cramped and feverish that we scrapped plans to return to Jerba and decided to make the daylong trip to Tunis, the country’s bustling capital, in search of an English-speaking physician and a decent hotel.

On a barren stretch of highway, our car’s oil light flashed red. I pulled over and yanked the dipstick: not a hint of oil. Another mile and the engine would’ve seized. After a 25-minute walk in the blistering sun, we found a rickety roadside kiosk. A freshly slaughtered goat hung from the awning, its blood pooling in the hot sand. On a shelf behind the counter I spotted motor oil, which the merchant happily sold me for about $10 a quart.

In Tunis, we checked into a hotel and I set out to return the car, braving the Tunisian rush hour, a snarling mayhem of cars, buses, motorcycles, and pedestrians. Two blocks later, a bus bashed my left front fender. The driver leaped out, waving his fist and shouting in Arabic. His passengers were irate, shrieking and pointing at me. After jotting down a phone number, he darted back to the bus and drove off.

The car was barely drivable. I parked in an alley and staggered to the rental office, making several stops at restaurants along the way to relieve my tumultuous bowels. Nobody at the car place spoke English or grokked my stick-man drawing of the accident, so I indicated to one of the agents to follow me. When we reached my car, it had been booted. The agent scolded me in Arabic, shoved the car keys in my breast pocket, and ran away.

By now it was dusk, and I felt utterly helpless. I returned to the car office and pleaded with the agent to help me, but our language barrier was insurmountable. Rational thought ended right there. I hurled the keys, dashed out the door, and sprinted the eight blocks back to our hotel in the dark.

Breathless and frantic, I told Jackie to pack. We barricaded ourselves in the room, certain that the Tunisian police were scouring the streets for the evil, auto-smashing Americans. At dawn we flagged a cab to the airport. Three hours later we were in Geneva, and by morning I was cheerfully handing stool samples to a Swiss doctor. He wondered why we ever went to Tunisia in the first place. Damned if I could remember.

Kamp Soggy Bottom

Atop storm-raked Mount Washington with a big, useless drip

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS 16 AND TRAPPED in a thunderstorm on a mountain known for some of the worst weather in the world. Next to me a grown man lay sobbing, whimpering, pounding the mud with his fists. He was my counselor.

It was 1987, and I’d been sent to a tough-love camp in Vermont, a place where they promised to teach resourcefulness and self-reliance. The camp had dispatched us—seven teenage boys plus a pudgy career graduate student I’ll call Wayne (the mud-hugger)—on a three-week hike through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Things went bad right away. Wayne was clueless, so we’d lost the trail and wolfed down all our rations. Next it started raining—first a drizzle, then a deluge. After three nights in a wet sleeping bag, Wayne was talking to himself.

“Yo,” one of the campers whispered. “I think Wayne’s lost it.”

“Give him time,” I said, feeling increasingly unglued myself. “Maybe the rain will stop.”

It didn’t, at which point the expedition, strung out by hunger and the gathering dread that none of us would ever know dryness again, descended into madness.

On the worst day, halfway through, we reached the top of Mount Washington, the 6,288-foot peak that, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, is the site of the highest sustained surface wind speed ever recorded (231 miles an hour).

As we summited, the rain broke, and a complex of buildings—a mountaintop observatory and cafeteria—materialized in the thinning fog. Desperate and dehumanized, we invaded the cafeteria like crazed animals, foraging in the trash for soggy French fries and half-chewed pizza crusts, slurping ketchup straight from the packets, and raiding the salad bar with bare hands. Meanwhile, Wayne telephoned the camp director and tried to weasel out of the last ten days of the hike.

“Suck it up and get back on the trail,” the director barked. Which we did, just in time to get walloped by a reconstituted storm that seemed like a Hollywood special effect.

“Run!” people on the trails shouted. “Find shelter!” When the storm climaxed in a fusillade of breathtakingly close lightning bolts and hurricane-force winds, we were still above tree line, scrambling to get off a naked ridge. That was how I ended up hunkered in the mud, next to an all-but-catatonic Wayne.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he whined. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” I said.

That night, when I crawled inside my wet sleeping bag, I’d absorbed an important lesson about self-reliance: Adults aren’t actually in control, and they can be just as weak as children. The next day the sun came back, and it didn’t rain again the entire trip. Wayne, however, was no longer our leader. He was just another body on the trail, and when the hike was over and we returned to camp, he quietly slipped away.

Incoming!

On El Capitan, there’s nowhere to hide when things fall from the sky

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? That one man’s bare behind, hung off the Long Ledge bivouac near the top of Yosemite’s El Capitan, could deposit all its foulness directly on our heads, with us 600 feet lower and dangling from our ropes? I mean, really, when you consider the powerful crosswinds, the ubiquitous updrafts, and the rather loose character of most big-wall bowel movements, it’s got to be one in a million.

But that’s exactly how it happened. My two climbing partners and I were 2,000 feet off the ground, three days into a five-day ascent of the Salathé Wall, widely considered the finest pure rock-climb on earth. Reuben Margolin, our mad and jovial visionary, had just led a very hard pitch, and I stood a rope length below, with our Fish haul bag and our steely-eyed enviro-warrior, Jonathan Kaplan. Then we heard a whistling sound, the terrifying evidence of an object hurtling down from above. Instinct told us it had to be a rock, so we hugged the cliff and awaited the worst—and the worst certainly came, though it took the form of countless fecal asteroids splattering across our heads and shoulders.

Stunned, Jonathan and I stared at the wet brown pie on the bright-red nylon top of our haul bag. Our next bath was 48 hours away. We had no soap, water was in short supply, and that instant hand-sanitizer stuff hadn’t even been invented. So we were screwed, and we suddenly started screaming like stuck pigs, cursing the careless bastards high above and then cursing them some more. After that we dug out a pocketknife to cut every soiled sleeve off our shirts and to snip big locks from each other’s hair. With a few lukewarm drops of water we made a hopeless attempt to scrub the fresh human feces from our already filthy skin, and then we did the only thing we could do: We climbed onward, muttering bloody murder.

But the next evening, when we reached Long Ledge, we found something surprising: a plastic bag with an apologetic note (SORRY, DUDES, WE DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE THERE) and a peace offering that included a box of Lemonhead candies, a can of chicken meat, and a joint. We had plenty of treats of our own, and I’d stopped smoking pot in the 11th grade, but I loved the gesture. Lame though it was, it conjured the guilt they must have felt, their sense of common cause with us, and the bond we still shared, simply for having been on that spectacular wall at the same time, together.

Tour de Farce

Some mountains just want to be left alone

AS AN ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER, every time I take a trip, I’m thinking, This could be the one, the one that makes a million bucks, the one that brings fame, fortune, enlightenment—something. In April 1997, I was part of a group that got permission to traverse the Rishi Gorge, in the Indian Himalayas, and ski 23,360-foot Trisul, where no foreigner had been in at least 15 years. A dream trip.

The plan was to take the peak’s mild north face, but when we got to Delhi a bureaucrat informed us, “You will climb from the other side.” Instead of powdery slopes, we’d be attempting sheer icefalls on the weather-whipped southwest face. With skis. We decided to go for it, cramming seven of us, a cook, a helper, two drivers, a guide, and a month’s supplies into a minibus.

Two days later, we were in Rishikesh, where the Beatles got enlightened. I was in my hotel room when a friend hit the floor—face first. Seizure. Holy shit! Turned out he wasn’t just your typical party animal/ski junkie; he was literally a heroin addict, and he’d quit cold before we left. Maybe he thought the trip would cure him—I don’t know. But as we’d been going up the mountains, he’d been going into withdrawal. We nursed him back to health and moved on. It’ll get better in the mountains, I thought.

But this was just a taste. One day everything self-destructed. We’d made base camp early and sent the porters packing—with our gear. Supplies had disappeared. One group had stolen our kerosene; in the distance, we saw them furtively leaking it to lighten their loads. A while later, smoke wafted up from the valley below. They’d started a wildfire with our fuel! Whether it was the result of sabotage—two of them had been savagely bickering—or a cigarette, we never found out. We watched in horror as acres burned. Once we’re higher up, I thought, it’ll get better.

At 20,000 feet, we saw snow leopard tracks, and for about a minute it seemed like things might turn out OK. But the route was dangerous, the climbing over our heads, and most of our food had been pinched. As we ate our soy nuggets, we pictured the cook’s goat on a spit. Moving on, we soon saw that a huge slide had wiped out our route. Then monsoon clouds rushed in, as if on cue. That was it. Cursed! Our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. We never even saw the summit.

Vanquished, we returned to camp, where the cook dispatched his goat. Within ten minutes we finally saw the sign that told us once and for all to get the hell out of there. It was a sign in the heavens: lammergeiers, vultures with ten-foot wingspans. They knew dead meat when they saw it.

Paddling Fool

On the dark waters of Brooklyn, only a nut goes out at night

I WAS HOME ALONE some years back on a gray and misty Halloween. My girlfriend had gone to Manhattan, leaving me to face the sticky-fingered procession of ghosts and goblins ringing our doorbell. Fifteen lollipops later, I desperately needed to get away, so I bolted to my kayak club, on the western edge of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, for an early-evening paddle.

Jamaica Bay consists of nearly 10,000 acres of brackish water crisscrossed by shipping lanes, and this time of year I usually stayed off it past 4 p.m. Wise policy. I was about five miles out, feeling smug and at peace, when a ghoulish fog descended. In about five minutes I was lost—with no food, water, compass, or foul-weather gear.

Two hours of fruitless meandering later, the sound of traffic drew me to a garbage-strewn beach. I emerged dripping from the shadows, paddle in hand, and slouched toward the road like an escaped kayaking felon. I should have flagged down a car, but as I hopped in place under a streetlight’s spooky glow, I hesitated. Assuming some naive or bizarre soul would even stop to pick me up, would I want to get in? Besides the risk of meeting Hannibal Lecter, it would mean leaving my expensive racing kayak unprotected in a neighborhood of high funk.

Several cars sped by before I spied the flashing red light atop the World Trade Center. Ha! I knew that if I paddled toward the beacon on top, I would hit my home channel. So I jumped back in the boat and started hammering.

Unfortunately, at water level the light vanished, and I ran smack into a labyrinth of islands. Wending my way through the narrow channels like a nearsighted lab rat, I ran aground.

As I pulled my boat through knee-deep mud, a hard rain began to fall. The temperature was 44 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was in shorts and a T-shirt. I blundered onto a hummock and started running in place to warm up. I ran all night, in ankle-deep water. When the rain finally stopped, just after dawn, I sat down and nodded off, head between my knees like a Bowery bum.

I eventually pulled up to the dock at 8:30 a.m., 15 hours after I set out. Standing there were my parents, the commodore of my kayaking club, a few law-enforcement types, and my girlfriend. Do you recall the scene in The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs of Tom Sawyer when Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper come back from the dead and everybody’s happy? Well, I didn’t get much “happy.”

The commodore said it best: “It’s not easy to break that many rules on one paddle. Nice going, dipshit.”

Bleak Streak

Trapped! On the tundra! and having a cold, hard time…

A FEW YEARS AGO, a magazine approached me to write about a quirky and very rich British adventurer who was determined to cross the ocean by car. He planned to put in at the Bering Strait, a 53-mile-wide gap of ice-choked sea. The story sounded like fun—Shackleton meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—and I went to the British countryside to observe a test of the adventurer’s customized floatable steed, which looked like a Zamboni mounted on barrels. I should have known something was off. The vehicle entered a farm pond and sank. I spent two days standing in a muddy field while the adventurer, undaunted, struggled to drag the machine ashore. I petted some sheep.

Two months later, I arrived in a tiny Inupiat village on the strait. In short order, I learned that the adventurer had offered a documentary film crew exclusive access to his trials and triumphs, and that my presence in the village was little welcomed. I was tempted to high-tail it home, but the weather—lashing horizontal winds, whirling snowdrifts, sub-zero temperatures—meant that planes could be grounded for weeks.

No doubt the remoteness of the setting influenced my mood. But I experienced a crushing flare-up of the kind of childhood wound that comes from being left off the team. I had some practical problems, too. The adventurer and his crew had taken over the only guesthouse in the village—the weapons-studded compound of a bearish Vietnam vet—and I wandered the outpost’s single lane in search of accommodation. A sorrowful-looking man of around 40 opened his door to me. His name was Echo. He could offer me an old, stained mattress on the floor of a storage room. It was as cold as a meat locker.

I liked Echo. He was as depressed as I was. He spent his days in a monotony of idleness. At night his friends would drop by and play cards until dawn, chain-smoking. I smoked a good deal, too, and did nothing to discourage the card players’ mockery of the adventurer.

So it went, until one morning, a few weeks into my stay, I woke to find clear skies and still winds. I strayed from Echo’s house and trudged to the frozen beach. The sea looked like the world’s biggest, most dangerous Slurpee. I was elated to be outdoors, and to know that the clear skies meant my plane would come soon to take me away. I decided to celebrate by climbing the hulking, ice-encased mountain at the edge of the village.

The footing was a bit tricky, but as I climbed, the view of the strait was glorious. I saw Russia, floating on the sea below. That’s when I slipped. My boots flew out from beneath me. I slid, and kept sliding, and accepted that my last moments on earth would be spent as a missile sailing across tundra.

A few hundred feet down, my backpack got snagged on some stones, and I came to a halt. I traversed the slope on all fours in search of a safe place to stand. In this proud posture, I heard a sound overhead. It was the adventurer, hovering in his helicopter. He shouted down to me. “You OK, mate?” I gave him a thumbs-up. He looked toward me with his toothy, charismatic smile. “Join us for dinner tonight, mate?” I nodded and waved him on. Then I crawled back to the village, packed my bags, and whiled away the night with Echo, the card players, and a giant bag of Doritos.

Tragic Tomes

Great books about bad luck

1907:
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo , by John H. Patterson — Two lions savage a railroad work gang in East Africa.

1919:
South , by Ernest Shackleton — His ship crushed by ice, the explorer rescues his men from certain doom in the Antarctic.

1939:
Wind, Sand, and Stars , by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Tales from the pioneer of perilous flights across the Andes and the Sahara.

1955:
A Night to Remember , by Walter Lord — The RMS Titanic‘s final hours.

1974:
Alive , by Piers Paul Read — Stranded high in the Andes by a plane crash, Uruguayan rugby players survive by cannibalizing dead teammates.

1988:
Touching the Void , by Joe Simpson — Injured by a fall on the Andes’ 20,853-foot Siula Grande, climber Joe Simpson is dropped into a crevasse and must crawl down the mountain or die.

1992:
Young Men and Fire , by Norman Maclean — The 1949 Mann Gulch wildfire leaves 12 smoke jumpers in ashes.

1996:
Into the Wild , by Jon Krakauer — Chris McCandless walks alone into the Alaskan wilderness, destined to starve.

1997:
The Perfect Storm , by Sebastian Junger — The six-man crew of the Andrea Gail is lost in a deadly October 1991 nor’easter off Nova Scotia.

2000:
In the Land of White Death , by Valerian Albanov — In 1912, a Russian sailor, stranded in Arctic pack ice for 18 months, leads 13 men to seek help, but only two survive.

2000:
In the Heart of the Sea , by Nathaniel Philbrick — In the event that inspired Moby Dick, after the whaler Essex is destroyed by an 85-foot sperm whale, the crew resorts to cannibalism.

2001:
The Proving Ground , by G. Bruce Knecht — A storm decimates a fleet of boats in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race, drowning six sailors in the Tasman Sea.

2002:
Over the Edge , by Greg Child — Kidnapped by Islamic guerrillas in August 2000, four American climbers plot their escape in Kyrgyzstan’s rugged Pamir-Alai Mountains.

2004:
Shadow Divers , by Robert Kurson — A World War II U-boat wreck becomes a deadly seven-year obsession for a diving crew.

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The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

Sure, fear itself has plenty of fans—people with the good sense to be terrified when the rope snaps, the elephant charges, or the boat capsizes. But what about PHOBIAS, those singular, irrational, often inexplicable anxieties that lurk even in nature’s happiest scenes, waiting to creep you out and propel you into the panic zone? In the confessions that follow, our 13 unlucky writers reveal the things that give them the waking nightmares—from time-tested classics like snakes and vertigo to oddities like engorged ticks and beady-eyed armadillos. But don’t fret! There’s nothing like the shivery pinprick of dread to make you feel truly alive.

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

HYDROPHOBIA NAMES NOT ONLY A FEAR but a disease—a generally fatal one, rabies, whose agonies of swallowing are stimulated by the sight of water, hence the name. Of course most phobias have at their root a fear of death, and my fear of water began, I believe, when my father, treading water in a swimming pool, invited me to jump from the tile edge into his arms; I did, and slipped from his grasp, and sank, and inhaled water for a few seconds. It felt, when I gasped, as if a fist had been shoved into my throat; I saw bubbles rising in front of my face as I sank down into a blue-green darkness.

Then my father seized me and lifted me back into the air. I coughed up water for some minutes, and my mother was very angry with my father for his mistake. Even then, it seems to me in the wavery warps of this memory, I took my father’s side; he was, after all, trying to teach me to swim, a paternal duty, and it was just bad luck, a second’s slip-up, that in fact he delayed my learning for several decades. Part of our problem, that traumatic summer day, was that we had little experience of swimming pools; not only did we have no pool ourselves, but no one in our neighborhood or circle of acquaintance did, in that blue-collar Depression world. We were not country-club people. It is a mystery to me how we found ourselves at that particular pool, in bathing suits. Nor do I know exactly how old I was—small enough to be trusting but big enough to surprise my father with my sudden weight.

Henceforth I knew what it was like to look through a chain-link fence at a public pool, its seethe of naked bodies in the sunshine, and inhale its sharp scent of chlorine, but not to swim in one. At the local , the pool was a roofed-in monster whose chlorinated dragon-breath, amplified by the same acoustics that made voices echo, nearly asphyxiated me with fear. Aged twelve or thirteen now, I tried to immerse my face in the water as the instructor directed, but it was like sticking my hand into fire; nothing could override my knowledge that water was not my element and would kill me if it could. At college five years later, where one had to pass a swimming test to graduate, I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool, my face straining upward out of the water while a worried-looking instructor kept pace at the poolside with a pole for me to grab in case I started to sink. I think I did sink, once or twice, but eventually passed the test, and stayed dry for years.

In the movies of my adolescence, smiled through the hateful element, using it to display her rotating body, but other movies, glorifying our wartime navy, showed sinking ships and sputtering submarines. One of my nightmares was of being trapped belowdecks and needing to force myself through adamant darkness toward air and light. My lungs felt flooded at the thought; my hydrophobia extended to a fear of choking, of breathlessness. Life seemed a tight passageway, a slippery path between volumes of unbreathable earth and water.

And yet, graduating from college, I took the Coronia to England, and contemplated the ocean calmly from the height of the deck, and slept behind a sealed porthole. Adulthood strives to right the imbalance of childhood, and to soothe its terrors. My fear of water eased as, in my mid-twenties, I moved with my wife and children to a seaside town. Paternity itself, with its vicarious dip into the amniotic fluids, made me braver, and the salty buoyance and the shoreward push of seawater were marked improvements over perilously thin fresh water. We bought a house by a saltwater creek in the marshes, and that was better yet; I plunged into our private piece of creek as if I were one with the grasses, the muddy banks, the drifting current, the overhead vapory clouds—one with the water, my body mostly water. By middle age I had learned to swim and take pleasure in it, but still tended to float on my back, and to keep my face averted from the murky, suffocating depths beneath me.

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

BECAUSE I WAS THE GOALIE, when I fell through the ice it wasn’t simple. My homemade foam rubber pads became two huge sponges. That it happened in a cemetery didn’t help, or that I was at an age when I pointedly ignored things even if they could hurt me. We were there because we didn’t fear death, nonchalantly tromping between the headstones and over the snowy hills into the far heart of the place and down into the bowl that held the pond. In summer, fat goldfish slid under the lily pads, but now it was solid—or so we thought.

I screamed before I realized I was standing on the bottom. The water barely came to my waist. I still needed help getting out, and then the wind hit my wet clothes and skin and I began to shiver.

I had to get inside and get dry, but first I had to take my skates off. The laces seemed tighter now that they were wet, and my fingers didn’t work. A friend had to help. I didn’t think to peel my wet tube socks off (cotton, worthless), just jammed on my Pumas and ran.

The running was uncool, and if I’d been out in the middle of nowhere it would have been dumb. Fortunately, my friend Smedley’s house was only a couple blocks away, and I made it easily.

But in my worst nightmare, I don’t. I’m out in the woods by myself. The shivering turns to even larger involuntary contractions as my body tries to create heat through muscle friction. I lose control of my hands. I stumble like a drunk, my speech slurred, muscles stiffening. The initial pain gives way to numbness. I get foggy and make poor decisions, like walking the wrong way or sitting down at the base of a tree and going to sleep. In the end, I pass out and die in the snow without a struggle, frozen solid, my skin hard as wood.

It didn’t happen—it couldn’t have—but I still have trouble walking on ponds, and forget about hauling a bobhouse out and then sitting in it waiting for a nibble. On shore, I can hear the ice creak, and know that someone’s going in. Not me, I’ll think. No way.

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

ON THE WHOLE, I love sleeping bags. When I got my first, a slippery orange thing lined with images of ducks and shotguns, I quickly discovered that no matter where I slept—the haymow, the back forty, the living room—I felt like I was lighting out for the territory. I took immediately to that snug, toasty, flannelly embryo feeling. You know the one: After a long day of hiking, you crawl in the bag and give out an involuntary little happy-shiver and hug yourself. And yet, a claustrophobic bugaboo lurks in the coziness. As a child, I once wound up head-down in my sleeping bag and went frantic, crazy-ape bonkers trying to escape. Later, I slid from the top bunk in my orange bag, panicked because I was unable to throw out my arms. Even now, I find myself opening the bag before I push my legs in, just to check for teensy wolverines hidden in the toe end. I think of bears arriving, and me unable to escape. Freud would draw conclusions based on the male preoccupation with issues of zippers and entrapment.

After years of cheapo bags, I treated myself to a military-issue mummy sack. “FOR EMERGENCY EXIT,” read a tag sewn inside, “grasp each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly, forcing the slider downward.” Sweet reassurance for the claustrophobe. That night I slept in a farmhouse owned by a pair of photographers. Not wanting to muss the vintage quilts, I unrolled my new sleeping bag, slid in, zipped to chin level, hugged myself with the happy-shiver, and dozed off. It was July, and I woke up 15 minutes later drenched in sweat. Grasped each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly. Nothing. The zipper was jammed. Be calm, I thought, and commenced thrashing on the bed like a prodigious eel. I jammed an arm out the face hole and, with one particularly contorted bounce, wrenched into a sitting position. Deep breath. Think. With one hand waving uselessly at the sky, I grabbed the interior zipper pull with the other. Bit down hard on the liner. Yanked and yanked. When the zipper finally gave way, cool air rushed across my skin.

Love your sleeping bag, I say, but do not trust it.

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

I HAVE A DEEP, incapacitating fear of lightning. On occasions too numerous to count I’ve actually, involuntarily, shrieked aloud at the terror of being struck down by a shimmering electric bolt from the sky.

The first such instance occurred the summer I was eight. My sister, grandmother, and I were alone at our cottage on a lake in Ontario. It’s a great old wooden barn of a place, a hundred years old and drafty, surrounded by pines and junipers and blueberry bushes. It could burn down easily—the cottage and the whole island with it.

One night it decided to storm. My sister and I crawled into bed with Granny while long, terrible spears of lightning lit up the sky like daylight, one after another. The thunder was deafening and constant. Through a screen door that opened onto a veranda, we watched a boathouse on the opposite shore take a bolt to the roof and catch fire. I was speechless with horror, envisioning our doomed evacuation should our cottage go up in flames. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, a solid crash of thunder shook the house. Then someone screamed, a long, fearsome howl. It was me.

In the morning, we inspected the damage. A 60-foot white pine, with a fresh smoldering scar through the bark, lay wedged between the kitchen and the laundry shed, having barely missed both.

Twenty-two years later, lightning no longer scares me when I’m safe inside four walls (cars count), but catch me outside as a storm moves in and the reflexive terror is always the same. With the first fork comes a silent dread, then a panicky, futile attempt to plot my getaway, followed by the grand finale: my scream.

Jumping

Sometimes the scariest thing isn’t out there, it’s inside you

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID OF FALLING; it’s that I’m tempted—unbearably, almost irresistibly, tempted—to take a leap. I don’t know how or where this developed, but at some point I realized that, whenever I was on a rooftop, all I wanted to do was take a run and then a jump, and feel myself sailing through empty space. I’m not afraid of the emptiness below; I’m afraid of my lack of fear. Some necessary inhibition that most children acquire never seemed to take hold in me.

Fear is, of course, the most irrational, even unreasonable of impulses: Heights and depths are what I tell myself I crave. I grew up in a house on a lonely mountain ridge. I drive, by choice, along ill-paved mountain roads in Ethiopia, Bhutan, Big Sur—a huge drop, and certain death, on one side of me. Yet none of that unnerves me like a hotel room with a terrace, which invites me to go out and look over the wall, see the cars down below, and imagine how I could turn my life around (and the lives of those around me) with a single radical act.

It’s bewildering to me that what I fear is entirely within my control. A few months ago, I gave myself up to fate by driving through the pitch-black mountains of Yemen, a precipice on one side, the man at the wheel furiously chewing qat to keep himself awake. Kidnappers prey on foreigners in those peaks, and teenagers waving large guns occasionally loomed out of the dark to flaunt their power at us. I was ready to surrender. But put me on a rock, a ledge, and all I want to do is act, irreversibly. I’m torn the way you are torn when drawn to a woman you know will undo you. I don’t want to get too close because I want to get close too much. I feel, I suppose, something of what an addict feels.

My phobia of heights is inherently different from the fear of spiders, or of cats or crowds, because what I’m afraid of is not what some malign outside threat will do to me; it’s what I will do to it. What fear can be so abject, and so impossible to cure, as the fear of who you really are, deep down?

Armadillos

Some say they’re cute. I say they’re evil.

THEY COME IN THE NIGHT, up from their burrows, out of prehistory, little sinister dinosaurs from South America. Across Mexican arroyo and Louisiana swamp they’ve traveled, out of the woods and into our Florida backyard, where they dig divots in the lawn, scuffing, snuffling, poking, as if looking for lost change. Genetic freaks—all born in sets of identical quadruplets, and highly susceptible to leprosy—they look half insect, half humanoid. Body of a pill bug, head of one of those poor kids who age too fast. They give my wife, H.B., the creeps.

For me the repugnance is more personal. Back in my single days as a nightlife reporter in Tallahassee I was “Barmadillo,” my byline appearing under a cartoon rendering of an inebriated armadillo. Now I’m just a totem assassin. A typical armadillo whack goes like this: I’m in my pj’s and rubber boots, down on my hands and knees under our deck. My right arm is thrust to the shoulder into a freshly dug burrow. I have a nine-banded armadillo by the tail.

It chirrups and grunts—”Nyuck nyuck, nyuck nyuck“—ratcheting itself deeper into the earth. In its element, the beast is immensely strong, like a rototiller run amok, headed for China.

“Golf club!” I say to H.B., who’s standing by with varmint tools.

I shove the club blade underneath the ‘dillo, then twist and pull. Out it comes like a bad tooth.

And it is hideous, writhing in the flashlight beam, a wizened Piglet far gone into leather and S&M. It scrabbles at my arm with its claws—the horror!—and I let go.

Breaking cover, it corners the house at a gallop, then cowers under H.B.’s car in the gravel drive. H.B. fetches her keys, starts the car, and begins to back up. Alas for Dasypus novemcinctus, its tendency to leap straight up when startled makes it synonymous with roadkill. There’s a clunk and a crunch, and the stricken ‘dillo makes one last dash, trailing viscera.

Suddenly one of our four dogs swoops in and snatches it up in a great mouthful and lopes off into the woods. Silence, and then the terrible scraping of tooth on nubby bone. In the morning, cranky with lack of sleep, we find the armadillo half buried atop a heaped-up ziggurat of dirt like a Lord of the Flies idol, the dogs arrayed in attitudes of worship. Damn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

IT’S EASY TO BE TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS and dizzying heights and getting lost in a guano-filled cave, but it takes a certain neurotic genius, I submit, to be brought to clammy fear by the genus Phaseolus, that leguminous plant species commonly known as the lima bean.

My lima bean phobia dates back to a family dinner in my very early youth. That greasy little veggie looked to me like some slippery bivalve from under the sea, of an unhealthy gray-green color at that, and was therefore almost certain to be just as strange-tasting.

Still, I might have managed to choke my portion down as I obediently did the fried liver and other disgusting substances that every kid must learn to live with, were it not for the emotional vortex in which I was first forced to deal with the challenge of the lima bean. That dinner was presided over by my father, just home for the weekend from his job a hundred miles away in Toronto. Our attendance was mandatory, in the way of a roll call. But as we kids dutifully assembled in our places at the dining table, my oldest brother, Mike, was missing.

This threw my father, never exactly serene, into a rage. Half an hour later Mike finally straggled in from whatever diversion had warped his sense of time. Dad banished him from the dinner table amid a fusillade of threats and general contumely, followed by the sickening silence that always settles over the scene of a public execution. I stared down, head bowed, at my plate, and sublimated my roiling emotions onto my lima beans.

Mastodons in the root cellar, fire, heartburn 40,000 years before Pepto-Bismol—primitive man had much to be afraid of. But primitive man probably never came face to face with an ominous kidney-shaped legume. If he had, I bet he’d have developed a fluttery stomach and a desire to flee the vicinity, like me. After all these decades, a lima bean has never passed my lips. But I know what they taste like, without ever having tasted one. They taste like fear.

Ticks

They’ve come to suck your blood—and that’s not the worst of it

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I picked an engorged tick up off the floor of my kitchen, thinking it was a stray chocolate chip. It only took a moment for me to see more clearly the minuscule legs and the hideous crease down the underside, but the idea that I had mistaken a tick for something edible freaked me out for days. Because now that I’ve had my midlife mortality crisis and come to terms with just about every fear I used to have (and they were legion), the only one left is ticks.

I have dogs, the best of which is, unfortunately, a golden retriever. A golden retriever is a paradise for ticks—lots of hair to hide in. During tick season here in California, sometimes we see two or three dark-brown ticks crawling around the top of the dog’s head looking for a place to attach. That’s repulsive enough, but it’s the ones who found a spot, ate their fill, and dropped off that I worry about, lying there in the pattern of an oriental rug, waiting to be stepped on.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find anyone who defends ticks. Spiders and houseflies and rattlesnakes and killer bees and even maggots and leeches have their fans, who inform the rest of us about how useful, well adapted, or beautifully designed their preferred creature actually is—but the only thing you ever hear about ticks is that they carry Lyme disease. It is typical of the malevolence of ticks that the carrier is too small to notice until after she has delivered her insidious message.

Ticks seem to exist for themselves alone. They are ugly as nymphs and grossly disgusting as engorged adults. They live only to reproduce, which females do by dropping thousands of larvae and then dying. They don’t take a meal and move on, like mosquitoes; they dangle by their mouths and get intimate. When feeding, they are motionless and passive. The worst thought when you find a tick in your hair is that it’s been there awhile, that it drank your blood without your even realizing it. You have to ask, in the parade of extinctions, why can’t we trade ticks for something we prefer, like black rhinos or snow leopards?

It happens to be summer now in California, too dry for ticks. I have some breathing room. I might even go for a walk one of these days. While I’m out there, I will visualize a world without ticks. It will be just like our world, only better.

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

AFTER YEARS OF TAKING FAST WATER FOR GRANTED, I learned to fear the ironic power of river rapids early last spring. The red inflatable kayak I was paddling caught a sharp rock at the top of a sizable and noisy chute coursing through the middle of an Oregon stretch of the Owyhee River, and began to sink.

In an instant I was sucked under the rock and shot over the waterfall, well beneath the surface. The shock of being pulled so quickly under the water precluded taking a decent breath, so by the time I felt the bottom of the Owyhee beneath my feet, I was already hurting for air. I looked around and realized that I was actually standing on the bottom of the river, surrounded by a surreal volume of luminous and silvery fat bubbles. I looked up to see the surface and the churning whitewater five feet above my head. I was being pummeled by a variety of powerful hits from each side and felt a consistent downward pressure on my helmet. Though I was wearing a life preserver and trying to swim, I realized that I was not rising to the surface.

Everything about the experience was dreamlike. The situation conjured no panic, and even the realization that the air-fat kayak was also being held down beside me, even the strange recall of interviews with people who’d come back from near-drowning episodes to report that the experience was not unlike going to sleep, caused a sensation beyond an abiding wonderment. I just stood there, thinking that here, beneath a river in Oregon most people had never heard of, a hundred miles from anything much more than a few earmarked steers—surrounded by the irony of gigantic white balls full of air—I would die.

I was egested from the hole as powerfully as I’d been swallowed. I bounced off six or seven rocks as I rode the rapids on my back, and I began to hear calls of concern from the others. I eventually found a conical rock I could hug downriver, and I remember thinking that no matter what, I would never let it go.

After I was helped onto the bank, I tried to imagine getting back into the red kayak. The thought sent a reverberating sensation that rattled the backs of my shaking legs. I’d once considered river whitewater no more treacherous than a roller coaster—but that had all changed now: I was afraid.

Bats

They may be worth protecting, but they can still creep you out

MAYBE YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE bat-loving types who lectures people that bats are actually very clean animals and they eat half their weight in insects every sundown and it’s a false slander that they get tangled in women’s hair. Batophilia is not that uncommon these days, as evidenced by all the people heading into the flying mammals’ very lairs: high-tech cavers armed with headlamps, special caving ropes, and the ability to use the word spelunk without laughing.

But back in that stone age when all outdoor equipment was bought at the store, caving was an amateur’s game. I was introduced to it in the late sixties by my friend Donald, whose grandmother had a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. T-ma, as the grand dame was known, was happy to share her equipment, mostly a pile of old dented lanterns that dated, probably, from the Civil War. You filled the lantern’s bottom with carbide and added water, and once it began to make a certain unmistakable sizzle, the resulting gas—as redolent as boiling ore—was flammable.

In most Tennessee caves there are several fairly unavoidable features—the big cathedral space, the mud room, the fat man’s squeeze. On one occasion, Donald’s father, a noted heart surgeon, was struggling through a fat man’s squeeze. Dr. Eddie was also bald, and every time he’d lift his head, he’d howl as a tiny stalactite dart punctured his scalp. He exited looking like a middle-aged messiah who’d just removed a crown of thorns.

I was next in the squeeze, grinding on my elbows across a gravel floor made more comfortable by a freezing stream of cave water trickling through. The spare plastic bag of carbide I kept in my pants pocket had rubbed open from all the wiggling, and my hip began to sizzle, then to warm up, and finally to burn hot as fire. I’d begun to hump pretty damn fast, squirming in a panic, as my mind foresaw a suffocating gas buildup—or, more likely, a Jerry Bruckheimer-like explosion—when a concerned Dr. Eddie bent down to shine his flame into the tunnel. “Hey, Jack, are you having any—” Boom!

Turns out there was a lot more air in the tunnel than I thought, because right then and there, ten cave bats decided to flutter through on their way out. The sudden chaos of fur—when I think about it, there must have been a hundred bats—encouraged me to discover the virgin pleasure of pressing one’s face into frigid gravel water. Fortunately, bats have that radar thing, so all one thousand of them easily found the space above my prostrate body, although it must have been difficult scrambling down my back given the vibrations caused by all the subaqueous screaming.

When I finally got out, everyone was tending to his own suffering. Dr. Eddie was stanching his head with a rag. No one cared about my encounter with ten thousand bats. Donald’s brother accused me of exaggerating. He said he’d seen only a couple of bats. I don’t know. In my mind—then and now—my ordeal resembled that encyclopedia picture of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk when a million bats roar out like demonic nuncios in a funnel of black terror.

And yet, I still cave. Because even though I fear bats, mine is an exquisitely nuanced phobia. It’s not truly activated unless I’m in a cave and I see a bunch of bats, and then my pants catch on fire.

Being Buried Alive

A convincing case that it’s the worst way to go

VIVISEPULTUROPHOBIA—the fear of being buried alive—is more sophisticated, more existentially bleak, than claustrophobia. It nullifies the most basic human egocentrism—that the universe gives a damn about our whereabouts. Rest assured: You will never be found, certainly not in this lifetime.

As a 15-year-old, camping near the Dead Sea, I blithely explored a series of caves, some natural, some clandestine cisterns carved out by Israelite zealots 2,000 years ago. More than two decades later, my throat closes up in panic at the memory of crawling on my stomach through lightless, birth-canal-narrow sandstone tunnels.

A cave is all well and good, but it still gives you room to flail, scream, and claw with bloody fingers on the rock walls. How much worse to be immobilized? Hemmed in by rock or sand—or even ice. Apparently, glaciologists in Norway have come up with a novel way to gather data: They carve tunnels into the core of a glacier using hot water, then climb through this frigid warren—hundreds and hundreds of feet down—amassing information. They have to work fast; in short order, the enormous pressure of the glacial mass overhead reduces each capacious passage to walkway to crawl space to eventually nothing at all.

Pressure is the force that separates the men from the boys, phobiawise. Think about the cumulative weight of that sand, earth, ice, what have you. It only starts with suffocation: the slow, inexorable squeezing of air from your lungs. Take it to the next level by contemplating the uncomfortable constriction of the thorax, the rush of blood out to the extremities, your hands and feet swollen and full to bursting. And what is that sound? Why, it’s the groan of your pelvis buckling under. See it all clearly as your eyes emerge -like from their sockets, the lids pried open like the gaps in a fat man’s shirt. And there you are, marking each torment as it comes. A martyrdom too gruesome even for the most devout saints.

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1972, rural Illinois. A picnic along the banks of the Mississippi. My friend Elizabeth and I, both 17, were forced to attend as a disciplinary measure. We were wearing gauzy peasant shirts and sullen expressions, and were nursing stupendous, temple-clutching hangovers. While the rest of my family bustled around lighting grills and slapping hamburger into patties, Elizabeth and I winced our way barefoot down to the water’s edge to plunk stones into the current and say scathing things about my mother.

“She ought to try drinking a pint of lime vodka,” Elizabeth said darkly, “and see how it feels.” Behind her, at head height, something shifted on the low-hanging branch of a desiccated tree.

One of the worst sounds a person can hear is the heavy thump of a big snake dropping to the ground at her feet. One of the worst sights? Same snake, churning around in a wide circle, opening its mouth to reveal a pale-white interior, vaguely plush, like upholstery.

Our loyalty to each other was such that we engaged in a brief but violent shoving match, cartoon characters trying to get through a doorway. The cottonmouth unfurled itself and wound past us—four feet long and stout as a man’s wrist, but oddly flattened, like something molded out of clay and pressed into the ground. It slithered down the bank and into the river, lickety-split, like a strand of spaghetti pulled into a mouth.

Thirty years later, I experience startle responses not only to snakes but to lengths of rope, suspicious-looking sticks, and garden hoses, especially black ones draped over a fence or log. I am also spooked by snakish areas, including but not limited to grass, warm roads, stone walls, dirt paths, fields, old barns, sidewalks (trust me), tree branches, and, of course, water.

Being vigilant has worked pretty well, although not perfectly. Once I picked up a garden hose, after carefully making sure it actually was a garden hose, and there was a snake underneath. Elizabeth, on the other hand, recovered just fine and even went on to touch some kind of constrictor with a forefinger during a college biology class. Her professor said we couldn’t have seen a cottonmouth that day; too far north.

That’s what my father said, too, when we came racing up to the picnic table, hysterical and shuddering.

“Oh, boy,” he said agreeably. “Water snakes are big buggers. Scare a guy half to death.”

My mother, squinting as she flipped the burgers, cigarette corked in her mouth, turned to consider us, green-gilled and sweaty.

“People who drink too much see snakes,” she said.

Stars

There’s nothing like the universe to make you feel puny and afraid

INSIDE THE CITY, the night sky is more or less a backdrop, benign and one-dimensional. It comes on predictably, like the streetlights, and I pretty much ignore it. There is the moon. Some planets. That spread-eagled hunter who likes to show off his “belt.”

Then I go backpacking. Without warning, the stars go thick as gnats and the blackness has ominous depth. You can see the other side of our galaxy. The sudden hugeness overhead unhinges me. I’ll look up and practically drop my ramen. It’s The Universe. What frightens me, I think, is the abrupt, mind-slamming shift in scale. Like Alice after the “EAT ME” cake, I am instantly, alarmingly diminished—tiny to the point of disappearing. The longer I look up, the smaller and more vulnerable I feel, dwarfed by something huge and unknowable: God, the evil in men’s hearts, infinity. I suppose, on some level, that the fear I feel is a fear of death, of insignificance and nonexistence. Or else I’m just a sissy.

Falling stars in particular unnerve me. Forces are at work out there, and they are not human. If there’s that kind of weirdness in space, God only knows what’s in the woods ten feet away. I spook easily in the wilderness, and I blame the stars.

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EVER SINCE I devoured the first of many 1950s jungle films—you know, those cheesy concoctions based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, The Lost World—with explorers edging along precipitous ledges into the jaws of giant iguanas, I have harbored a secret hope that it wasn’t too late to climb the walls of my own formidable gorge, to search out the marvels of the forest beyond the clouds. And then one day I finally got to do it.

Peak experience: Pico Bonito National Park

Admittedly, this lost world was pretty convenient. Instead of a weeklong trek with grumbling bearers who would throw down their loads at the first sign of a pterodactyl, a courtesy van met me at the La Ceiba airport in northern Honduras for the 20-minute jaunt to The Lodge at Pico Bonito, the area’s brand-new, and first, upscale eco-resort.
Located a few miles west of La Ceiba (the company headquarters of Standard Fruit de Honduras and a rough-and-tumble Caribbean party town), the lodge borders 429-square-mile Pico Bonito National Park, the second-largest in Honduras. In a generous 1987 decree, all land in the country above 6,000 feet was declared park territory, and around La Ceiba that meant the town’s precipitous backyard.

I had seen the park before, through the plexiglass porthole of a puddle jumper bound for the Bay Islands. Gaping at the cloudforested peaks, misting waterfalls, and tumbling rivers, I’d thought: “What a cool place! But how do I get there?”

The lodge answers that question quite comprehensively. Set at the base of a ridge that divides the watersheds of the Corinto and Coloradito Rivers, the structure (built, eco-wisely, from timber downed by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch), resembles a Wyoming millionaire’s summer home, with 8,036-foot Pico Bonito dominating the view like a tropical version of Grand Teton. You could spend an entire vacation by the pool, watching that cone-headed brute break up the weather, if there weren’t so much else to do. I spent five minutes in my room, admiring the craftsmanship of the rugs and furnishings, testing the mattress—superb!—before I was drawn back outside to watch the mountains fade into the night.

Since my camping gear had been erroneously routed to San Pedro Sula, I took advantage of the lodge’s myriad amenities—no sense in rushing off into the sticky wilds when luxury and a jungle primer awaited on the premises. On its excellent hiking trail, a three-hour loop into the park, hundreds of wooden steps ease you up a ridge between the two rivers, through old-growth forests filled with trees as thick as silos. Spur trails along the way lead to three-story observation towers (one with a view of a colony of brilliant black-and-yellow birds, called chestnut-headed oropendolas, squabbling over their stocking-shaped nests); elaborate wooden stairways spill down to waterfalls and pristine swimming holes ideal for sluicing off a light jungle sweat. The trail runs right up to the ramparts of Pico Bonito itself before circling back to within a stone’s throw of the pool and king-size bed of one’s well-appointed casita.

Set aside a couple of hours for the lodge’s butterfly farm, downslope in the orange grove. The farm includes a birthing shed, where you’ll see all stages of metamorphosis in action. Then you can watch the adults flap about, sucking nectar in the screened butterfly house. Next door is the serpentarium, with its collection of boas and vipers, and a resident herpetologist, James Adams, who leads night hikes on the trail, shining his headlamp to look for eyelash vipers in bird-of-paradise bracts. You might see kinkajous, bats, super-size insects, armies of leaf-cutter ants, and even an elusive jaguar—all without leaving the property.

But birders, wildlife lovers, paddlers, and fishermen take note: The really cool stuff lies beyond the lodge, in the untapped wilderness that has become a boon for the region’s burgeoning eco-adventure biz. I signed on for a half-day trip to Cuero y Salado Wildlife Reserve, where canoe trails weave through coastal mangrove forests accessible only by a 2.4-mile jaunt on a narrow-gauge railway car. Our guide, Jorge Salaverri, not only knew where to spot many of the 196 bird species found there, he could whistle many of their calls with perfect pitch.

About 40 minutes east of the lodge, on the far side of La Ceiba, the Cangrejal River carves thousand-foot-deep gorges through the park. Our group paddled two hours on Class III-IV rapids around gigantic granite boulders, and even in the bone-dry early-summer season, the river was frisky enough to unseat me twice from my inflatable kayak. Another good way to get wet is an excursion to the Cayos Cochinos, the least developed of the Bay Islands and close enough to La Ceiba for an overnight or weekend trip. While the reef around the Cayos Cochinos Marine Reserve has suffered from bleaching, it’s slowly making a comeback. But the best reason to visit the Cayos Cochinos is for their isolated ambience. The solitary lodge, the Plantation Beach Resort, has the only phone, and, better yet, the only bar.

I covered a lot of territory in one week, but seaside, barside, or hanging in my hammock, I was lured by Pico Bonito urging me to come on up and have my butt kicked.

So I called Kent Forté, an American expat who’d helped build the lodge and had offered to put together a bushwhacking team for a three-day trek into the backcountry. The team included Salaverri, who was not only an expert bird caller, but also handy with a GPS and a topo map; German Martinez, a young local guide from the lodge; and our head machetero, a campesino named Ramón. As we set out with loaded packs from the banks of the Cangrejal, Ramón warned us about El Sisimite, the Honduran version of Bigfoot. According to him, the hairy beast had been scaring off park intruders lately.

“Sí, para arriba,” Ramón said, cocking his thumb across the Cangrejal and up—straight up—to the top of a cliff where a 264-foot waterfall, El Bejuco, twisted and braided in the breeze from the coast.

What I wondered was how El Sisimite got up there.

It looked impossible but turned out to be the best sort of semi-life-threatening scramble, half hiking and half tree climbing. We stuck to the shaded understory, using saplings for ladder rungs and kicking steps into the soft duff as German and Ramón slashed open a seldom-used trail. At high noon we skidded down into the streambed at the mouth of the waterfall—a little Eden of cool repose. An iridescent blue Morpho cypris butterfly flitted about in the sun-dappled updraft where El Bejuco cannonaded into the abyss, misting us in the shady bower. Combined with my incipient exhaustion, dehydration, and vertigo, the seemingly endless view of the white-capped Caribbean, clear out to the Bay Islands, gave my goosebumps goosebumps.

At the top of the first ridge, a thousand feet above El Bejuco, the trail was a surreal hybrid of lichen, fern, and brush, springy as an old mattress. You could plunge a stick through it, or walk a stout limb out over a gut-sucking drop. Confident as German and Ramón were, they also knew we were following the trail they had been lost on during a previous scouting mission. Only a handful of people, Forté among them, have summited Pico Bonito.

An hour before dark the guides hung a tarp and started a fire to drive off the few mosquitoes, and we settled in for the night. Though we’d seen only feathered wildlife on the ascent, unseen things scuttled in the leaf litter beyond the campfire. Chattering michos de noche—night monkeys—crept close to us in the can-opy above. Every few seconds a click beetle with a pair of bioluminescent antennae, looking just like two little truck headlights, would streak out from the dark tree trunks. With a cool breeze blowing, the fire glowing, it was wonderfully peaceful up there, as luxurious in its own way as life back at the lodge. “El Sisimite, eh, Ramón?” I said. Ramón just winked.

La Ceiba, the jumping-off point for your Honduran adventure, may be a fun town for a pub crawl, with Salva Vida, a tasty local brew, and thumping punta music. But just say no to that next beer. Only a few miles beyond this spicy mestizo, Afro-Caribbean Garifuna, and expat community lies a lush jungle replete with frothy rivers, virgin rainforest, unclimbed peaks, and beachfront sports galore.

At The Lodge: Stay at The Lodge at Pico Bonito ($125-$190 per night; 888-428-0221; ), 20 minutes west of town, and you’re within earshot of the Corinto and Coloradito rivers, which offer Class V steepcreek challenges for expert paddlers. Thirty minutes east of La Ceiba, the Class III-IV Cangrejal tumbles through a 1,000-foot-tall gorge. For half-day rafting trips on the Cangrejal, contact Jorge Salaverri, proprietor of La Ceiba-based La Moskitia Ecoaventuras (504-442-0104; ).
Farther Afield: As his company name declares, Salaverri is the man to see about camping trips into the vast Mosquitia wilderness, a seven-hour drive east of La Ceiba, where he takes clients on a gentle 28-mile float on the Wampœ and Patuca Rivers. Salaverri also leads day hikes into Pico Bonito National Park (), home to jaguars, peccaries, monkeys, more than 250 bird species, and, of course, El Sisimite, the Honduran version of Bigfoot. Before hitting the backcountry, check out “Butterfly Bob” Lehman’s Butterfly and Insect Museum in the suburbs of La Ceiba. Bob is an enthusiastic teacher and his madly colorful collection of 10,000 insects from 38 countries is a knockout ($1 per adult, $.75 per child; 504-442-2874; ).

Birders, beast masters, and fly casters all should save a day for the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge (504-443-0329; ), a 32,741-acre coastal reserve 20 miles west of La Ceiba. Judging from the countless big boils and flashes of silver I saw (and from watching a guy catch tarpon by the dozen on a hand line), this is an untapped fishing paradise—so untapped that there aren’t any sportfishing guides. But Jorge Salaverri can always find a local who will take you out in a canoe.

Cayos Cochinos (Hog Keys), five miles northeast of La Ceiba, are the nearest and least developed of the Bay Islands. The Plantation Beach Resort, a newly remodeled quirky little inn with a great bar, offers deep-sea fishing, diving on the barrier reef, and snorkeling in the Cayos Cochinos Marine Reserve ($599 per person per week, includes food and all diving; 800-794-9767; ). The resort also has sea kayaks, free to guests and perfect for touring this compact island chain, including Cayo Chachauate, a traditional Garifuna fishing outpost.

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From that first stinging cannonball off a riverside bluff to the last day at the beach, our idea of a sweet summer is one by, on, and in the drink. To get things flowing, we’ve charted the waters for you.

Blissful Indolence Made Simple

A Florida Stream, an inner tube, and no ambition in sight.



There are two ways to tube down north-central Florida’s Ichetucknee River: the easy way and the easier. Let’s examine the easier first, assuming it’s a radiant midsummer day, air temperature about 95, humid enough to confuse a frog.
Lie on your back, hindquarters submerged in the 72-degree water, gazing drowsily up through the overarching canopy of Spanish moss. Recall the First Law of tubing physics: The chill of the booty is directly proportional to the circumference of the vulcanized vessel. Fail to think of a Second Law. As the black rubber heats up, regulate body temperature by idly flicking water onto your belly and sighing.


Among Florida’s many artesian springs, famous for their mermaids and manatees, none is more beloved by inner tubers than this perfect conduit for the indolent. Though parts of the Ichetucknee are narrow and serpentine, its banks are buffered by a luxuriance of eelgrass that will gently catch and release your tube with a soft, whispering sound. Do not attempt to steer the tube, except in slow circles to rotate the sky and invite musings on the immensity of the ether, which is frankly miraculous and ultimately exhausting. It’s possible at any moment to be struck by a falling stinkpot, a turtle known to climb high into the canopy and leap into the water when startled. Possible, but unlikely. Disregard the threat, or think to yourself, If the blow must come, let it be fatal. Drifting, drifting, you’ve made your peace.


With the easier path, it’s more likely you’ll fall asleep, only to be wakened by the laughter of other tubers. You’ve gone aground in a shaded eddy, your mouth comically gaping. Sit up, blinking and grinning sheepishly. Now is a good time to tackle the easy way.


This way is more gear-oriented (a mask and snorkel). Flop onto your belly and, chin resting on rubber or head slightly elevated, survey the banks for stalking egrets, sunning Suwanee cooters, or periscope-nosed softshell turtles. You might see otters and beavers, but by and large this is wilderness writ small, though with startling clarity. Because many springs feed the Ichetucknee as it winds through pines, hardwood hammocks, and swampland, visibility is forever. It opens wee mysteries like a microscope slide.


Plunge your mask into the stream. Now you see the spring’s power, pumping an average of 233 million gallons a day. The fish, you see, the bream and bass and little sailfin mollies, are working hard not to drift. The eelgrass is waving as if in a gale. You see breaks in the streambed, phosphate pits and sudden overhanging caverns. Unable to resist, you slither from the tube like a gator and dive deep, and are rewarded by a chance meeting with a siren, a three-foot-long legless salamander. Which is thrilling and, ultimately, quite chilling.


You’ll need to get warm again. Clamber back aboard the tube like a cooter (from kuta, an African word for “turtle”), and take it easier.

Wild, Wild Midwest

This just in: You can say Wisconsin and wilderness in the same breath.

The kayak is often associated with rugged terrain, where rivers rise and fall with the melting of mountain snows. Wisconsin, on the other hand, is canoe country, which is to say it’s mostly flat, pressed smooth by the weight of long winters and the Ice Age, the longest winter of all. Topographic relief appears not on land but in the bouldery staircases and slick-water chutes of the rivers that drain it. Midwesterners feeling hard-put to explain why they even own a kayak need only run the Flambeau, a splash-and-dazzle river that barrels out of the North Woods as if from a glacier.
The Flambeau cuts across north-central Wisconsin in two branches. The North Fork has more quiet water, the South Fork more rapids. Between the forks lies some of the wildest country anywhere: pine forests banded in autumn with sugar maple, yellow birch, and hemlocks; trackless alder marshes like the Million Acre Swamp; and black bears, otters, eagles, ospreys, and at least two packs of timber wolves. Not to mention the isolated tavern, all knotty pine and smoke, with more antlers than bottles above the bar.


“It’s a gem of a river,” David Kelly says of the South Fork. “No dams. No towns to speak of. And it doesn’t get the traffic of better-known rivers like the Brule or Wolf. Already today I’ve seen a bald eagle and a coyote just out my front window.”


Kelly owns the general store in Lugarville—in fact, the only store in Lugarville ten miles northwest of Phillips and overlooking the South Fork. He also runs a shuttle service and canoe rental. Put in at Lugarville and you can cover the 20 miles to Little Falls in a day of hard paddling or two days at a leisurely pace, allowing time to play in the rapids.


The first half of the trip is easy, Class I rock gardens and a couple of Class II rapids. (Water levels fluctuate according to weather; September usually beats out the dog days.) On the second stretch, the rapids are more concentrated and evocatively named: Cornsheller, Big Bull, Prison Camp Rapids. The last is just upriver from the State Prison Forestry Camp, where trustees in green dungarees and white T-shirts, many of them former urbanites, stand around and perfect the long stare.


The best whitewater comes at the finale at Slough Gundy, where the river accelerates as it enters a narrow cleft between a cedar island and a high granite ledge, dropping in three separate pitches over a half-mile. The first pitch is a straight shot down a center chute; the second is complicated by a crosscurrent that sweeps you toward the rock ledge.


On my initial trip, this current caught my paddle and neatly rolled me, so I rode the third set of rapids hanging upside-down, submerged rocks whizzing past my head. I managed to tow the kayak to shore before it went over Little Falls and, after sun-drying on the rocks, lugged it up the footpath to run Slough Gundy again.

A Piece of the Shore

Skinny-dipping under the stars, and other reasons to go cottaging in Ontario

In Ontario, “cottage country” is a precise geographical term, “to cottage” a common verb. The province has a pleasing ratio of 220,000 lakes to 200,000 or so private cottages beside them; about one of every 20 families owns one. And most of the other 19 families manage to cadge an invite or two.


Muskoka, Georgian Bay, the Kawarthas: The topography of the cottage regions changes from one to the next, and the cottages range from million-dollar showplaces to rustic one-rooms (like mine, where running water means hustling from the dock with a bucket). The uninitiated can’t see the appeal of suffering through Friday gridlock out of Toronto, of returning to the same place time after time. “You have to do it to understand it,” says a friend.


For me, the reasons come clear each time I arrive and slide my kayak into Mississagua Lake. I make a circuit to see what’s new, knowing almost nothing is. But always discoveries await: the loon’s nest on the edge of an islet; the heron stalking its supper; evening light striking the long fingers of granite that reach into the water.


Perched on Precambrian rock, our tiny, green-stained cottage is barely visible from the water, hidden among pines. The land around us belongs to the Crown and can’t be built on, so the bay is almost ours alone. When the urge for greater exploration strikes, we pack dry bags into the kayaks and go, because Mississagua Lake spills into the Mississagua River, which alternately meanders and rushes into a lake a dozen or so portages downstream. At its other end, Mississagua connects to a chain of other lakes via a wetland where snakes slither in the shallows, frogs bask on logs, dragonflies mate, and platter-size snapping turtles paddle in deeper stretches.


Any cottager will tell you a cottage is a place stacked with memories of what you can’t wait to do again. Skinny-dipping on a starry night. Devouring the season’s first ear of fresh-picked peaches-and-cream corn slathered in butter. Screaming along on the Laser, hiked out, head almost touching the water, laughing out loud. Sometimes when I’m back home, caught in the city’s hustle and hassle, the clatter seems to retreat and I hear instead the slap of the waves against the dock. I’m up north again, and all’s right with the world.

To the Inland Sea

The best swimming in Mexico: Ocean?

Somebody asked Subcomandante Marcos, the figurehead of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, how he first came to Chiapas. Half-jokingly, he answered that he got drunk and wound up in Ocosingo instead of Acapulco. “There is a lake near there called Miramar,” he said. “I asked which way the sea was, and they told me, ‘That way,’ so I started walking. Pretty soon I realized I was in the mountains, and I never left.” It’s not a bad story, and it’s even plausible once you’ve seen Miramar for yourself.
I’m a lake lover of four decades, and I have never seen anything like it. Laguna Miramar (“sea view”), as it is called in Spanish, lies in a ring of mountains 47 miles southeast of Ocosingo, in the southern state of Chiapas, the heart of the Lacandòn rainforest and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. It is also the Zapatista heartland, one reason Miramar may not be for everybody. Access is through the Maya community of Emiliano Zapata, where you are already “back there,” so to speak. Then it’s a four-and-a-half-mile hike to the lake.


The trail ends at a long, narrow beach. There, beneath chicozapote trees bristling with orchids, bromeliads, and epiphytic cacti, the community has erected two thatched, open-sided palapas, one for tents or hammocks and one with a traditional raised hearth for cooking. Zapata and the other lake communities bar hunting and logging near Miramar, so the only sounds are “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” in Yeats’s words, and the unceasing drone of howler monkeys.


I visited Laguna Miramar with Fernando Ochoa, a bilingual outfitter from San Cristóbal who helped Zapata develop its tourism plan. We paddled the lake’s more than seven square miles for three long days and didn’t see it all, though we did visit pictographs, rock carvings, and a full-scale island ruin left behind by Miramar’s ancient inhabitants, ancestors of the Maya who live there now. A thousand feet deep, Miramar sustains enough aquatic life to entertain a Cousteau, including turtles, crocs, and a cryptozoological creature the Indians say resembles a manatee. In our canoe cruising, however, all we saw were several dozen species of tropical and migratory birds, a bewildering array of plant life, and fish. Mostly we swam.


And the swimming was the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. The few divers who have sampled Miramar’s depths can get downright poetic about it. We paddled from one travertine shoal to the next, diving into water the color and clarity of Aqua Velva and basking in shallow depressions eroded along the shore. Once in a while we saw a single dugout in the distance. The rest was silence.

The Hillbilly Autobahn

West Virginia’s most wicked whitewater, speed limits be damned.

I’m supposed to be listening to my guide, Sib, who barks directions at us in fluent Appalachian. But I can barely hear him over the roar of the water, so I stare at the snarling froth thundering out of Summersville Dam and feel my leg stubble prickle against my rented wetsuit. The first raft to launch is a rowdy all-male squad from Buffalo. They grunt like apes as they try to muscle downriver, but their raft gets swirled around and sucked sideways while the guides on the shoreline whoop with uncivil glee. Our group pushes off next, thwacking paddles and stroking furiously, only to have the Gauley’s unforgiving current push us back to shore. We finally make it through the spin cycle, and Sib yeehaws while grabbing a smoke from his waterproof pack. Fortunately, I’m upwind.


It could drive anyone to tobacco, or worse, taking boatfuls of tourons into world-class West Virginia whitewater. The Gauley has more than a hundred Class IV and V rapids in a 28-mile stretch; even in late summer and beyond, when western rivers whimper down to a trickle, the Gauley rages. Back in 1988, Congress mandated that on 22 days between Labor Day and late October, Summersville Dam must release 2,800 cubic feet of water per second—2,800 basketballs with each tick of the clock—just for rafters and kayakers. Not surprisingly, guides from around the world migrate here before they follow the sun to the Southern Hemisphere.


We approach Insignificant, the first Class V. Sib keeps his instructions light and funny, but since he’s puffing like a furnace while trying to position the raft, I’m not sure I shouldn’t be terrified. The white foaming jaws come into view just before they swallow us. Sib’s yelling, “Paddle, paddle!” but all five of us have been thrown to one side, and we paddle only air. When I dig in for a real stroke the raft suddenly buckles, and I’m waterborne, sucked under like driftwood.


Before I can panic, though, the river’s spit me out and I’m swimming jerkily toward the rocky shoreline, instead of toward the boat as instructed. But, serendipity: The boys from Buffalo are waiting in the eddy, and they yank me up by my life jacket. I lie sputtering in their boat until my own raft comes, then I grin a goofy thanks-for-saving-my-sorry-butt smile and hop back in. Cold, beat-up, and sure I’ve broken my foot, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been baptized by the mighty Gauley. Just 99 more rapids to go.

God’s Own Plunge Pool

A grotto behind the waterfall, a bracing New Hampshire river, and thou.

During a desert-dry lull in an otherwise water-obsessed lifetime—in west Texas—I used to drift off to sleep imagining perfect swimming holes. They always had a waterfall, for aesthetics and to keep the air moist, and cliffs for diving, à la Acapulco. The diving had to be into a deep pool of exceptionally clear water, with underwater formations to explore. The outlet was usually a tumbling riffle over smooth granite. Maybe fruit trees lined the banks, dropping, oh, ripe plums in my lap while I sunbathed.
Years later I discovered just such a place, although the fruit is blueberries and their season ends just before the swimming gets really enjoyable. My nomination for the world’s best swimming hole is the Upper Falls of the Lower Ammonoosuc, near Fabyan, New Hampshire. Pure snowmelt flows from Mount Washington, plunges 12 feet into a succession of three glacial potholes, and exits gracefully over the required smooth rock, spilling into a trout pool to break Izaak Walton’s heart.


The slick granite chute above the waterfall is sized for human buttocks, a natural slide. A small cave behind the waterfall can hide a couple of swimmers at a time. But it’s the potholes themselves that cause swimmers’ hearts to flutter. The first, probably 20 feet around and nearly as deep, is ringed by 20-foot cliffs. The second, connected to the first by an underwater passageway, is larger, and its cliffs offer launch points from perhaps 10 to 40 feet, choose your height. The third pothole is larger yet, with even more diving heights, and sunnier, thus attracting more leisurely attention.


Pardon my obsession with structure: The sheer geology of the place offers all a swimmer could devise for fun in water, except a rope swing. Its only problem: See “snowmelt,” above. The water temperature is bearable for about three weeks in August, past the blueberries’ prime. So bring your own.

Flipper . . . Is That You?

North mixes with tropics in the Channel Islands’ underwater bizarro world.



Suspended 40 feet beneath the surface. Visibility, maybe five body-lengths. Kicking in slow motion through a forest of kelp. Enormous, sinuous stalks, some nearly 200 feet long, rise from the sea floor and grope for light.


To the right, a large, dark shape lingers, barely discernible in the green murk. Consider the possibilities. It’s not a curious sea lion, or it would’ve already stormed your face mask. A great white shark would make great bar-stool fodder, but those are thin odds; people dive southern California for decades without even glimpsing one. Charlie the Tuna? Easy, man; don’t lose your grip here.


Whatever it is, it’s approaching. The other divers seem to have vanished. But then, adrenaline surges and otherworldly ambience are the draw in the Channel Islands, less a Disneyesque reef dive than a bushwhack through the jungle. Warm and cold currents collide here, attracting a through-the-looking-glass collection of species that rarely lurk in the same circles. Other kelp forests grow up north, and some of the same fish, invertebrates, and mammals swim farther south, but only here do they mingle.


At last, the behemoth emerges from the soup: a giant sea bass longer than you, bulkier than you (maybe two or three hundred pounds), and probably tastier, too. Gargantuan up close but a runt among its peers. Its world-record forebear, weighing in at almost 600, succumbed to a hook near Anacapa Island in the sixties. Mouth gaping and eyes bulging, this one circles around and then back for a second pass unusual for a fish—before it slips away into the gloom. The pulse gradually slows.


Nights later come the surreal dreams, of hulking, amorphous creatures seen only out of the corner of the eye. And in the morning, musings about the ones that choose not to be seen at all.

Time Off the Grid

In blissful isolation along the Rogue River, where it’s easier to find a fly rod than a phone.

From its headwaters near Crater Lake, the Rogue River twists and veers for several hundred miles through the lower left-hand corner of Oregon before arriving at its broad estuary on the Pacific at the town of Gold Beach. But the part of the Rogue I love is its 40-mile run through a corridor of Klamath Mountains wilderness—one of those faraway worlds you can still find in pockets all over the Northwest, where the nineteenth century lasted at least halfway through the twentieth. Even today, it’s a long way to a phone.
The surrounding landscape is an absurdly crenellated empire of sharp ridges, steep fir-covered slopes, and deeply notched ravines; a perfect refuge for coots, renegades, and survivalists; and a terrible place for cars. (A wag in Yreka once put up signs that read, “Our roads are not passable, hardly jackassable.”) The sheer cussedness of this terrain has been the Rogue’s best defense against civilization’s embrace.


The Rogue played a supporting role in the Meryl Streep vehicle The River Wild, and it’s a popular summer run for rafters and kayakers. Dams upstream have partly tamed it, but once it enters this coast range the river reverts to a primordial rush of swift and sometimes ferocious Cascadian snowmelt. Still, the pleasures I’ve found along the Rogue have mostly been slow ones. They began with a six-month caretaking job I had at a remote ranch homestead near Horseshoe Bend, a blissful interlude that offered a pretty good argument for the Unabomber lifestyle. I hiked through gorgeous swaths of old growth, saw a pair of cougars lope side by side up a hillside, heard the kind of lore that seems to thrive in the absence of electricity, and had my first taste of fly-fishing for the late-summer run of Rogue steelhead, the signature species of the place.


Steelhead embody the secretive, once-upon-a-time glamour of the Rogue. Like their cousins the salmon, steelhead spawn in rivers and migrate to the sea. But these Homeric fish sojourn in the ocean and return to the river twice before they attain the four- to eight-pound size and quick-strike savagery of the classic Rogue steelhead. Alas, like the Rogue itself, they are threatened, but like the wild Rogue, they triumphantly persist.

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Okay, so you’ve mastered the art of doing absolutely nothing but soaking up the rays, ordered up just one more piña colada, and achieved beached-whale nirvana. Then what? How about one of these seven full-tilt and sublime adventures (plus several more bold diversions) to inject a jolt of adrenaline into your next Caribbean idyll? Because even paradise needs an edge.

Recharge: pulling into a tube at Salsipuedes beach near Isabela, Puerto Rico

BAHAMAS
PUERTO RICO
HONDURAS
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
GRENADINES
DOMINICA
VENEZUELA
ISLAND HOPS

Bahamas

Nothing but Blue Seas Below

Paddling to remote Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park

THERE ARE TWO imperatives for a successful trip to the Exumas, a mostly uninhabited, 120-mile-long archipelago that stretches in a narrow crescent from southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas to the Tropic of Cancer. First, while in George Town, the capital, stop in to see the Shark Lady, aka Gloria Patience, a legendary septuagenarian who earned her nickname—not to mention an audience with Queen Elizabeth II—by hunting down some 1,500 sharks around Great Exuma Island over her lifetime. Second, ignore her on the subject of sea kayaking, because she doesn’t realize she lives in the best damn place in the Caribbean for paddling.

Here in the Exumas, the sea is like Bombay Sapphire in a bottle—a perfect blue lens for a paddler’s up-close perspective, magnifying yellow coral heads, purple sea fans, and tropical fish aplenty. The 88-degree, unpolluted water offers world-class snorkeling, and there are no fewer than 365 cays to explore. “Most classic sea-kayaking trips—Baja, the Honduran Bay Islands—follow a coastline,” says sea-kayak outfitter Bardy Jones of New York–based Ibis Tours. “In Exuma, you’re tiptoeing across a string of islands. You can look to the left and look to the right and see wide-open ocean. It’s kind of intimidating, and it’s seriously remote.”

If you have at least a week and you arrive during the spring, hop a 25-minute charter flight from George Town to Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park near the northern Exuma port town of Staniel Cay, where two outfitters have been guiding weeklong, 50-mile trips in the park by sea kayak for more than a decade. Established in 1958, the 176-square-mile park is a no-take (i.e. no-fishing) zone that serves as a nursery for grouper, conch, and lobster. Miniscule cays spring up everywhere, home to the white-tailed tropicbird—a smallish bird endowed with a spectacular, three-foot-long white streamer—and the faded ruins of British loyalist plantations.

If you have less than a week, sign up as I did with Starfish, the only Exuma-based outfitter, in George Town. For two days I explored the red mangrove colonies and bonefish flats of the nearly deserted south side of Great Exuma with a taciturn Dutch guide, Valentijn Hoff, and his younger Bahamian sidekick, Philip Smith, who entertained us with his granny’s bush-medicine wisdom: The “juice” from a ghost crab kills an earache, tea from the “strongback” plant increases male virility, and sniffing crushed orange peel dispels seasickness. After a short hike around 18th-century limestone ruins on rocky Crab Cay, we camped on the sand of an unnamed barrier island, uninhabited but for a ravenous air force of mosquitoes and no-see-ums.

But the trip’s standout hour came the next morning. As we coasted back toward George Town, the hot sun splintered through the turquoise sea, casting a brilliant net that scrolled across the white-sand floor—picture an enormous David Hockney pool. Then, from just beyond my right paddle, came a sudden, loud outbreath. Three dolphins leaped among our bright plastic hulls for a moment and then vanished.

Access + Resources

Whether you arrive in Exuma during the dry season, from December to May, or the wet from June to October, which averages six to nine inches rainfall per month, it’s easy to locate an ocean-worthy kayak and all the gear you need to set out to sea.

GETTING OUTFITTED: Starfish (877-398-6222; ) runs trips around the coast and barrier islands of Great Exuma and Little Exuma for $45 (half-day) to $75 (full day) per person year-round; overnight trips, like the 12-mile route I did, cost $150 per person per day for the first two days, and $100 per night for every night after that. If you want to go it on your own, Starfish rents touring kayaks ($30 per day for singles, $40 for doubles) as well as Hobie Wave sailboats ($50 for a half-day), tents, and other camping gear. March through May, Ibis Tours (800-525-9411; ) runs eight-day trips in Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park () in the northern half of the archipelago for $1,595 per person, including charter airfare from Nassau.

GETTING THERE: American Airlines (800-433-7300) flies from New York to Nassau for about $420 round-trip, $360 from Atlanta. Charter airfare from Nassau is included in outfitters’ package prices; or, if you’re traveling on your own, ask at your hotel or the local marina for information on the many private planes that can fly you to Staniel Cay for about $250 one-way.

LODGING: George Town’s Peace & Plenty (800-525-2210; ) is the small town’s clubby social hub. Doubles start at $175.

Puerto Rico

Riders on the Perfect Storm

Tough commute: heading out to a break on Puerto Rico’s west coast

IF YOU HAPPEN to reach for your sheet one night in your cabina in Rincón, Puerto Rico, you’ll know the cold front has arrived. No worries: By the time the big lows that rumble out of the Arctic and fling nor’easters at the whole eastern seaboard hit Puerto Rico, they’re feeble, welcome whiffs of free AC. But before you snuggle under your sheet and drift back to sleep, listen close—feel—for the detonations, because cold fronts bring good tidings. Far out in the dark, thundering like a thousand derailing boxcars, is just what you came for, and at dawn, you’ll have your proof: Pools Beach submerged, seawater raging up into the dry streambed, and the surf…humongous.

If it’s early in your trip, congratulations—you’ve won the raffle! The swell will last three or four days at least. And now you’ve got a ton of good options. (As for your surf-swell lotto odds, they’re excellent in February, good for March, but dicey after April Fools’ Day.) There’s surf on the whole north coast of Puerto Rico, from San Juan to the Punta Borinquén corner, and more along the west coast south to Rincón. In fact, the northwest corner of the island is Oahu’s North Shore writ small—OK, miniature—but also minus the ego wars and the raging King Kamehameha Highway.

Start by heading to Tres Palmas, less than five minutes by car from Rincón, and the island’s biggest wave. A deep-water reef and a thousand-mile stare across the Puerto Rico Trench mean you see the real fist-prints of the storm from here. To the south it’s all channel, and an easy, if tense and longish, paddle out to the breakers. But unless you’re a badass—and even if you are—beware of Tres Palmas: The sneaker sets are sneakier than you are, and even on a ten-foot day (the minimum for Tres), there’ll likely be a 15-foot set with your name on it.

For a base of operations, it’s hard to top that cabina in Rincón, the Capital de Surf on the island’s west end, which has all the amenities of a small resort town tweaked for its surfista clientele. It’s Gringolandia, fer sure, but you can rent anything from a Ted Kaczynski cabin under a palm tree to a villa in the lush hills and be within walking distance of dozens of breaks. Rincón is the most bike- and pedestrian-friendly surf destination I know, and the unofficial capital of the Capital, Calypso Bar and Grill, sits within binocular range of Tres Palmas and boasts a commanding view of The Point, arguably PR’s best point break. Restless? Take a quick 300-yard hike from Rincón along the tawny, tide-pool-bejeweled beach up to El Faro, a lighthouse atop a grassy bluff where the whale-watchers gather. From there, it’s a quarter-mile or so up a rutted dirt road to Domes, site of a defunct nuclear apparatus and a sliver of beach whose first-rate right point has an inside-bowl section perfect for launching aerials. And don’t neglect Spanish Wall, a few steps farther north, or Sandy Beach, just around another small point and anchored by its own pub, the Tamboo Tavern.

Meanwhile, a case for day trips can easily be made. Get up early to beat the gridlock in Aguadilla and drive 30 miles north of Rincón to Wilderness, a series of spacious reef breaks at the foot of the old Ramey military base golf course. With its rugged coast of tall causarina pines, Wildo is lovely. Or venture farther north to the less populous dunes around Jobos, or even remoter spots such as Shacks or Middles. Middles is said to be the best all-around wave on the island, an A-frame barrel on its signature days.
Still can’t quite picture it? Allow me: It’s the third day of a weeklong swell, and you’re at the end of an afternoon session. You’ve been working your way north as the crowd thinned, moving from the overhead right and left peaks of Dogman’s, over the shallow reef at Maria’s for some tuck-in tubes, and now at twilight you’re shading toward The Point itself with just a handful of surfers still out. The sun is slipping down behind Desecheo, the silhouette of the island looking like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. On shore, the lights of the Calypso are twinkling, music wafting out over the water. You take off on a wave that’s tall, razor-thin, backlit, and burnished by the setting sun, thinking it might be your last wave of the day. But then it lines up so sweetly, section after section, that when you kick, spray slightly chilling you with that faintest hint of winter, you think, well, maybe one more. And here comes a guy paddling out, wall-to-wall grin, who says he just arrived from Maine. “Took off in a snowstorm,” he says. “Man, am I glad to be here.”

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GETTING OUTFITTED: TWA (800-221-2000) flies from New York’s JFK to Aguadilla (30 minutes by car from Rincón) for $288; or try TWA from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan (two hours’ drive from the west end) for $285. American Airlines offers Miami–San Juan flights for $350. The major U.S. rental-car agencies have outlets at both Puerto Rico airports.

OUTFITTERS: Best to bring your own board, but there are several surf shops in Rincón where you can rent or buy used boards in an emergency. Also, if you stay at the Rincón Surf and Board, they’ll rent you one.

WHERE TO STAY: I recommend either Rincón Surf and Board (787-823-0610; ), with suites for $85 per night and dorm-style accommodations for $20 per person, or the Lazy Parrot Inn and Restaurant (787-823-5654). Rates at the Lazy Parrot run $85 for a single, $95 for a double, including a pool. For extended stays or more posh spreads, try Island West Properties (787-823-2323), which lists peak-season rentals (lots are oceanfront) from $553 to $3,675 weekly.

Honduras

Tropical Thrilla in Utila

Give me five: reef life in the Bay Islands

TIME WAS THAT on Tuesday nights, everyone went a bit mad on the island of Utila. It was the day when the supply ship made the 20-mile trip from mainland Honduras, bringing oil for the island generators. As a result, the lights stayed on late and the island became one big electric fiesta. The bars—including my favorite, the Bucket of Blood—set up their good sound systems and the dancing and partying (aka “liming”) ripped full tilt. The supply ship comes to the island’s only town, East Harbor, every day now, which doesn’t mean Utilans don’t still know how to throw a good lime. But even during the high season, which sees less than a couple hundred tourists at any given time, the action tends to wind down before midnight. Negril it ain’t. The reason? Everyone gets up early to dive.

The water averages a mellow 80 degrees Fahrenheit and is as clear as any in the Caribbean when the seas are calm—practically all year, from November to September. On the north shore of Utila are walls where the shallows suddenly drop from five feet to 1,500. On the southeast side, near the airport, are magnificent reefs of soft coral and sea fans. The Bay Islands host a wide variety of aquatic life—from sea horses to sea turtles, and corals such as pillar, elkhorn, lettuce, star, and brain—but they’re also a veritable graveyard of ships. The mainland port of Trujillo was once the main shipping point for the Spanish, and Utila and Roatán were the hideouts for 17th-century buccaneers like Captain Henry Morgan. There are regularly scheduled dives to such famous 20th-century wrecks as the Prince Albert off Roatán or the Jado Trader off Guanaja, and I heard it said a dozen times that for the right price to the right pocket, dives can be arranged to some of the old colonial wreck sites.

During the three weeks I spent on Utila, evenings at the Bucket of Blood, followed by early-morning dives, defined my routine. Later each morning, I’d hang out, read, and swim until I washed up like waterlogged detritus on the beach. After a cheap fresh-fish lunch it was time for a hammock nap, and then in late afternoon I’d climb the hill up to the Bucket of Blood for dominoes with Mr. Cliford Woods, the owner, who has since passed away. He’d mutter angrily whenever he saw me in the doorway, so I think he looked forward to it. Still, every afternoon after he’d given me a good whuppin’ at the table, he’d say, “So tomorrow you’ll be going home, eh?”

Islanders’ attitudes—along with a low beach-to-marshland ratio—have so far saved the island from massive tourism development. Twenty-five-square-mile Utila, the islands of Roatán and Guanaja, and some smaller uninhabited and sparsely inhabited cays comprise Honduras’s Bay Islands. (In 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Guanaja, doing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, but left Utila virtually unscathed.) Most of Utila’s 5,000 inhabitants live along Main Street, a narrow road that runs along the crescent-shaped bay of the east side. It’s a bike-and-hike island when it’s not too hot to move around.
But most of all, it’s a dive island. Some of the world’s least expensive scuba certification programs operate out of the dozen or so different dive shops along Main Street.

On one of my leisurely dives just a hundred feet from the tiny airport’s runway, I fell into a trance among the delicate sea fans, letting the schools of parrot fish, indigo hamlets, rock hinds, and the occasional sea turtle circle but otherwise ignore me as they went about their business. Suddenly, a huge dark shadow came toward me and then, in a flash, passed overhead. My first panicked thought, of course, was that it was the Mother of All Great White Sharks. I swam hard and broke the surface a few yards from land. That’s when I saw that the large, looming shadow was in fact a small plane landing at the airstrip.
Afterwards, when I dropped in on Mr. Cliford, I downed a Port Royal and told him of my high adventure. He looked at me as he might a failed vaudeville act. “You know, there’s not a day go by I don’t wish you tourists would stay home,” he said with a long sigh, pausing to move a domino. “Or at least go to Roatán.”

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GETTING THERE: The best way to reach Utila’s waterfront airstrip is by flying on one of the major carriers into San Pedro Sula, Honduras (American Airlines, 800-433-7300, $840 from New York, $420 from Miami), and then connecting to either SOSA (011-504-425-3161) or Atlantic (011-504-425-3241) for the short $110 round-trip to Utila.

DIVING: According to Troy Bodden, owner of Utila Water Sports (011-504-425-3239), the owners of most of the dive shops on the island, such as Cross Creek (011-504-425-3134), Bay Islands College of Diving (011-504-425-3143), and EcoMarine Gunter’s (011-504-425-3350), have cooperatively priced the basic PADI beginner open-water certification—including four to five days of instruction, equipment, and two tanks—at $159 per person.

WHERE TO STAY: There are several clean, basic hotels in East Harbor for under $20 a night, with ceiling fans and occasional hot water. I stayed at the Bayview Hotel (011-504-425-3114) for $14 (ask for the first-floor room facing the bay); I also recommend Hotel Trudy Laguna del Mar ($15, 011-504-425-3103) and Utila Lodge ($75, 011-504-425-3143), which has amenities like air-conditioning and a recompression chamber.

Dominican Republic

The Bigger Island, the Better Ride

Hot Wheels: the Rocky MF trail in the El Choco National Park, Dominican Republic

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has it that the tiniest Caribbean islands are the most precious and desirable. Think eight-square-mile St. Bart’s, or the newly chic crop of “single-resort islands.” This logic is fine if your idea of dry-land adventure starts and ends with daily barefoot beach strolls. But if you’re a mountain biker seeking enough varied terrain to explore for more than an hour or two, you probably subscribe to that all-American axiom “Bigger is better.” Hence the allure of the 19,000-square-mile Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern two-thirds of the Caribbean’s second-largest island, Hispaniola. (Haiti lies to the west.) And it’s not just size that appeals: The range and diversity of riding here beat any you’ll find elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Flying into Puerto Plata on the north coast, you immediately see that the country has more to offer than beaches. With tropical bush–covered peaks rising steeply from the cultivated coastline, the Dominican Republic looks like a rugged, misplaced chunk of Central America. Forget the value-priced, all-inclusive resort compounds for which the DR is dubiously famous. Instead, take a 20-minute taxi ride east from the airport to Cabarete, and make it your home base for two-wheel adventure.

A tiny fishing village when wave-craving Canadian and Swiss windsurfers started showing up more than a dozen years ago, Cabarete has quickly matriculated from backpacker’s crash pad to a thriving, polyglot adrenaline-sports colony. A few Cabarete outfitters have turned their backs on the ocean to focus on the region’s river-threaded valleys, limestone caves, misting waterfalls, and twin cordilleras (10,414-foot Pico Duarte, 100 miles southwest of Cabarete, is the highest peak in the Caribbean). Upstate New York native Tricia Suriel is foremost among these inland guides. With her seven-year-old company, Iguana Mama, she’s scouted hundreds of miles of bike routes, on everything from paved roads to goat paths to highly technical singletrack across waist-deep rivers. If you bring your own bike—or rent one of Iguana Mama’s new XT-equipped Specialized RockHoppers and ride guideless—it’s still smart to sign on for a ride or two to get oriented.

One standout trail, the cryptic-sounding Rocky MF, is a remote, seven-mile experts-only ride that climbs up and then careens down jagged, rock-mined singletrack, all beneath the dense shade of mango and avocado trees in El Choco National Park, one of the country’s newest, just outside Cabarete. But most day rides from Cabarete are less technical, rambling forays into the Cordillera Septentrional. As you pedal, the ubiquitous concrete-block shops selling Coke and lottery tickets thin out. Soon you’re passing pink-and-green-painted wooden shacks and hibiscus bushes draped with wet laundry. Uniformed schoolkids rush out to try for rolling high fives; farther outside town, they just stare shyly. Trading dirt road for rutted cow path, you navigate between leafy “living fences”—piñon stakes revivified in the fertile soil. Above shoulder-deep pasture grass, egrets flash white, tending humpbacked Brahman bulls.

Slowly absorbing the way life is lived here is what can make riding in the DR so eye-opening. Curious locals seem willing to entertain the rustiest of Spanish-language overtures. Up for some real immersion? Join one of Iguana Mama’s multiday trips (they’ll design custom itineraries, or you can book ahead for one of their five-day expeditions). During an overnight to Armando Bermudez National Park, near the base of Pico Duarte, my small group enjoyed a vegetarian coconut-milk stew with the park ranger’s family, and then sneaked our sleeping bags inside park headquarters to escape a nocturnal downpour.
All this is not to say you should sacrifice the island’s more traditional Caribbean seductions for mountain biking: They are best enjoyed hand-in-hand, as exemplified by a triumphant return to the beach at Cabarete after a good hard ride. Late afternoons, you can try out everything from Hobie Cats to sea kayaks to kiteboards. Or my personal favorite, a nice long bodysurfing session and a face-in-the-sand nap.

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GETTING THERE: American Airlines (800-433-7300) flies round-trip to Puerto Plata for about $460 from New York, $360 from Miami. An $18 taxi ride gets you from the airport to Cabarete.

OUTFITTERS: Mountain-bike day trips with Iguana Mama (800-849-4720; ) run $40 to $85 per person. The five-day Dominican Alps inn-to-inn trip costs $950 per person, including guides, equipment, hotel lodging, and meals; customized biking and camping trips are also available. Bikes rent for $30 per day.

WHERE TO STAY: The newly renovated Cabarete Palm Beach Condos (809-571-0758) are spacious and homey, with great beachfront balconies. Two-bedroom condos cost $60 to $160 a night, depending on season and occupancy; studios go for $40 to $70. The 60-unit Windsurf Resort (809-571-0718) charges $74 for a one-bedroom poolside apartment.

Grenadines

The Pleasure of a Steady Nine Knots

Rum Runners: sailing near Palm Island

FOR SEASICKNESS, try beer and peanut butter. I hit on this desperation diet my second morning aboard the Boom Shak-A-Lak, a 45-foot Beneteau sloop that three friends and I had chartered for a two-week, early-winter cruise through the Grenadines. As a novice mariner, I’d had visions of a leisurely sail through bathtub-still waters, the moist tranquility of the tropics permeating my vacation-deprived soul. That nonsense was immediately debunked once we left our mooring in Bequia’s Port Elizabeth. After passing the lee of the island, we were borne by a stiff wind to port as we sliced through the steely water—nearly perpendicular to it—at a steady nine knots. Then for two nights we were pounded by unseasonal rain and high winds that left us cranky and queasy; surprisingly, a breakfast of Corona and Skippy calmed my churning stomach, and what had started out looking like a two-week ordeal instead became a promising adventure.

Known for their unblemished white-sand beaches, spectacular reefs, and northeasterly trade winds, the Grenadines, a minimally developed archipelago in the eastern Caribbean, are an ideal place to drop off the map for a while, guided by the whims of the wind and the waves. Our loose plan was to sail from north to south, stopping at Mustique, the Tobago Cays, Canouan, and Union before ending the trip in Grenada.

After the initial excitement aboard the Boom Shak-A-Lak, I expected our focus to be the islands, with the sailing merely the means of getting from one to the next. In fact, for all their splendor, the islands—celebrity-clogged Mustique, low-key Canouan, the uninhabited Tobago Cays—began to blur together in my mind, while the time spent under full sail, surfing the swells as the wind howled around us, made me feel most alive. In contrast to the relative sameness of the closely spaced landmasses, the sea was infinitely variable, hypnotizing me with its shifts of color and light.

Quickly, we settled into an unhurried routine of rising late, breakfasting on board, and then sailing from one island to the next, stopping along the way to dive the region’s many reefs. Evenings, we went ashore to dine and drink and compare notes with other sailors, most of them French or German. After ten days or so, the land had all but ceased to exist—I didn’t care if we ever docked the boat. By the time we anchored in Tyrrell Bay on Carriacou (politically part of Grenada, but geographically a continuation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), we were so attuned to the rhythms of the sea that we now felt queasy only when we ventured onto dry land.

A party at Carriacou’s yacht club, the best that we’d found, soon took care of that. In addition to surprisingly good food, something of a rarity in these parts, we were served the most potent rum punch of the trip, heavily laced with Iron Jack, a spirit so strong (190 proof) that its manufacture is banned in most of the Caribbean. Smuggled in from Trinidad, where it’s legal, or brewed in clandestine backyard stills, Iron Jack has a reputation for bringing even the most experienced rum-swiller to her knees. Sure enough, halfway through our dinner of roti and french fries we were barely able to remain upright, the conversation degenerating into uproarious laughter over nothing in particular. And that was after only one drink.

Back on board the next morning, we discovered that our dinghy had disappeared, and no one could quite remember who had been designated to tie it up. In fact, we couldn’t remember returning to the boat at all. As we prepared, somewhat fuzzily, to sail for Grenada, our final stop, we were a somber bunch. Fortunately, beer and peanut butter works for hangovers, too.

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GETTING THERE: There’s no easy way to get to the Grenadines. The most direct route is to fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where you can connect to a nonstop flight to St. Vincent on American Eagle ($330). Most of the yacht-charter operations are on St. Vincent or Grenada; Bequia is a nine-mile ferry ride from St. Vincent.

YACHT CHARTERS: We got our boat through Trade Wind Yachts (800-825-7245; ), which also handled our airline tickets and hotel reservations in San Juan. A Beneteau 445 like ours, with three cabins and three heads with showers, rents for $2,065 to $3,458 per week, depending on the season.

Dominica

Moonscapes and Mountain Chickens

Hell of a time: Dominica’s Boiling Lake Trail

DOMINICA ISN’T YOUR typical Caribbean paradise: There are few beaches to speak of, and the snorkeling’s only so-so. But if you’re the kind to go stir crazy after a couple of languorous hours surfside, you’ll agree—this place is heaven. The largest but least populated isle in the eastern Caribbean’s Windward chain, Dominica has 289 square miles of rugged, 4,000-foot mountains, active volcanoes, old-growth tropical rainforest, and more than 300 miles of hikable trails. On my last visit, hoping to spot an exotic bird (Dominica boasts 172 avian species) or a ten-inch crapaud (locals call these big, tasty frogs “mountain chickens”), I followed Glen, my dreadlocked local guide, up the Syndicate Nature Trail, a rocky ten-mile path through stands of gnarled, hundred-foot chataignier trees, to the summit of 4,747-foot Morne Diablotin, the highest point on the island. Not two hours in, a blue-green Sisserou, the largest, rarest Amazon parrot, glided across the clearing on three-foot wings to land just a few feet ahead of us.

The surreal landscape on the eight-mile, eight-hour out-and-back hike to Boiling Lake, a 200-foot cauldron of bubbling, gray-blue water that simmers at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit and recalls Milton’s Paradise Lost, was equally spectacular. The trail winds through Morne Trois Piton National Park, a 17,000-acre preserve just west of Roseau, climbing the 45-degree slopes of 2,700-foot Morne Nichols before dropping into the Valley of Desolation, a half-mile-wide moonscape of sharp volcanic rocks, hissing steam vents, and hot springs, some of the cooler ones ideal for soaking.

World-class hiking in the Caribbean? Jah, mon.

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GETTING THERE: Dominica is a two-hour flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico ($290, American Eagle, 800-433-7300), or 30 minutes from Guadeloupe ($150, LIAT, 268-480-5601).

OUTFITTERS: You will need a guide—the island’s 300-plus inches of annual rainfall means trails are often washed out and difficult to follow. Hire one ($40 a day) through your hotel. Ken’s Hinterland ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Tours (767-448-4850; ) can arrange group hikes or kayaking trips.

WHERE TO STAY: Papillote Wilderness Retreat (767-448-2287;), a cozy inn five miles from Roseau, offers double rooms for $90 a night. Simple, fan-cooled doubles at the colonial-style Springfield Plantation Guest House (767-449-1401), 15 miles northwest of Roseau, also go for $90.

Venezuela

Love on Los Roques

Lean machine: caught speeding near Los Roques National Park

MY PALMS WERE beginning to burn—a sign of the blisters to come—but I couldn’t resist; I pulled hard on the boom and trimmed the sail against another gust. The entire length of the board lifted off the water and shuddered, then settled back on a few inches of fin. I barreled across the channel toward the tiny island of Esparqui, its thick tangle of mangrove trees growing larger by the second, and waited as long as I could before throwing the rig forward and turning sharply through the wind, away from the sandy shore. A huge sea turtle slid beneath me as I headed back to my launch, an empty, salt-white stretch of beach now a good mile away. Except for the masts of a few sailboats shimmering in a distant anchorage downwind, I was the only thing on the water.

Perfect wind, every conceivable sailing option, warm, clear seas, and utter isolation. In 15 years of windsurfing all over the world, I’d never seen anything like this. Just 11 degrees above the equator and 85 miles north of Caracas, Venezuela’s Los Roques National Park is a pristine archipelago of some 350 small islands, cays, and reefs scattered across 15 miles of iridescent turquoise water. First charted by Spanish explorers 470 years ago, it has remained a refuge from time and civilization, with 1,200 or so residents and few visitors save a handful of hard-core yachtsmen and bonefishing addicts, and the 200 or so windsurfers who ride its steady stream of east-northeasterly trades each year. A primitive airstrip near Gran Roques, the collection of empty sand streets and sun-bleached pastel facades that is Los Roques’ only town, is the one link to reality.

Arriving on Francisqui, an hourglass-shaped island less than a mile long, via a fisherman’s small, open peñero several hours earlier, I had trouble taking it all in. To my left was the flat water of the channel, perfect for easy cruising or speed runs to other islands; on my right lay two reef breaks—a left and a right—for shredding chest-high waves and jumping. Beyond them, rolling swells of open ocean. And every possibilityblessed with 13 to 22 knots of the kind of breeze windsurfers dream about. There was only one thing missing.

“What,” I jokingly asked my guide, Elias Pernales, “no point break?”

He gestured over my shoulder toward the tip of the island. “Ten, maybe twelve tacks upwind and around the anchorage. But it’s tricky getting through the reef, so I don’t bring too many people there.”

Pernales, a relaxed, 36-year-old Venezuelan with a body straight off the cover of a fitness rag, manages Vela Los Roques, the only windsurfing operation on the islands. Working alone out of an open, metal-roofed hut stocked with 30 new sailboards and a huge quiver of pre-rigged sails, he spends his days guiding intermediate and expert sailors—rarely more than three or four in a day even during the high season, thanks to Los Roques’ remoteness—as they weave between islands or along the serpentine barrier reefs. We spent the morning gliding between jagged cays and exploring hidden lagoons, and then retreated to the welcome shade of his “office” for a lunch of fresh tuna steaks, cold pineapple slices, and frosty Polars—the light pilsner that’s considered the national beer of Venezuela. Just as I was eyeballing the hammock, Pernales dragged out a two-man kayak. “Time for some snorkeling, eh?”

We did, among waving sea fans and yellowtailed angelfish near yet another deserted cay. By the time we paddled back to Francisqui, the tide had shifted and the swell was up, so it was out to the reef for some five-foot waves. I tacked upwind a few hundred yards and began slicing down the smooth, right-breaking faces, trying to stay focused on the sharp coral just below the surface. As the tropical sky began to grow pink, I spotted the peñero buzzing slowly across the bay to retrieve us, but I couldn’t bring myself to head in. Instead, I turned the board toward the horizon and raked the sail back for speed.

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GETTING THERE: American (800-433-7300) or Continental (800-231-0856) Airlines can fly you nonstop from New York or Miami to Caracas, Venezuela, and book your 50-minute connecting flight to Margarita Island ($800 total from New York, $687 from Miami). Vela Windsurf Resorts will provide air transportation from Margarita to Los Roques (see Outfitters, below).

OUTFITTERS: U.S.–based Vela Windsurf Resorts (800-223-5443; ) runs the only windsurfing operation in Los Roques and takes clients on single- or multiday excursions to the archipelago from its Margarita Island resort, 180 miles west of Los Roques. Trips leave Margarita Island daily and include round-trip airfare (it’s a 60-minute flight) on Venezuela’s Aerotuy Airlines, boat transfers, accommodations at one of several small guest houses in Gran Roques, meals, equipment, and guide service (one day/one night, $185 per person; three days/two nights, $525). The $16 national-park entry fee is not included.

Island Hops

Even more splendid ways to escape from the chaise longue

Guadeloupe: Pedal Like the Pros
Professional cyclists from around the world meet on this butterfly-shaped isle for the annual Tour de Guadeloupe, a 797-mile, ten-stage road race. The race comes to the island in August, but you can ride the circuit any time (call Dom Location, 011-590-88-84-81, for a map and bike rental, $10/day). Or ditch the bike and explore the island’s offroad attractions: black-sand beaches, jungle waterfalls, and the short hike through clouds of sulfur to the top of La Soufrière volcano.

St. Barthélemy: Buff Enough to Surf
The curl at the out-of-the-way (and, unofficially, clothing-optional) Anse de Grande Saline beach is the island’s best for bodysurfing. The half-mile-long stretch of white sand on the south shore is a 15-minute walk and worlds away from the Hollywood types at St. Danjean Beach. Call the St. Bart’s Tourist Office, 011-590-27-87-27.

Cuba: Total Immersion
Wheel through Havana with the local biking club. Hone your underused salsa moves. Debate hot political issues using your newly mastered verbs (like derrocar—to overthrow). All this and more on a two- to four-week crash course in Spanish language, Cuban culture, and island adventure. Call Cuban Outreach Tours, 415-648-2239; .

St. Lucia: Climb the Big Piton
St. Lucia’s lush, volcanic twin peaks tower over sunbathers on the beach below—but why sit around in the shadows? Though local foresters have tagged precipitous and overgrown 2,461-foot Petit Piton off-limits due to falling rock, the summit of 2,619-foot Gros Piton begs to be topped, and the 2.5-mile trek can be done in four hours. Call the St. Lucia Forestry Department, 758-450-2078, for maps and information.

Trinidad: Walk with the Animals
Hike past the Lagon Bouffe Mud Volcano and two miles up a forest path, where howler monkeys, peccaries, and orange-winged parrots await you in the Trinity Hills Wildlife Sanctuary—a private preserve owned, interestingly enough, by a local oil company. To visit, call the Incoming Tour Operators’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago, 868-633-4733.

Jamaica: Raft the (Other) Rio Grande
Play Huck Finn for a day on a guided, seven-mile run down the Class I water of the lower Rio Grande in the jungly Blue Mountains. Your craft: a 30-by-6-foot, hand-hewn bamboo raft. The highlight: chatting with rural Jamaicans—and Red Stripe vendors—along the riverbank. Call Valley Hikes, 876-993-3881.

Martinique: Absalon, Absalon!
Bushwhack through the rainforest, rappel down a 40-foot cliff, navigate a boulder field, and then slip into the 90-degree, orange (from the iron in the rocks below) waters of the Absalon Thermal Spring. Call Aventures Tropicales, 011-596-75-24-24; .

Jost Van Dyke: La Vida Coco
Watch the sun set over White Bay and grab a painkiller (Pusser’s rum, Coco Lopez, multiple juices, and the obligatory nutmeg) at the self-serve Stress-Free Bar (284-495-9358) on Jost Van Dyke, a three-square-mile dot in the British Virgin Islands. Then pick up a guitar, bongos, or an empty coffee can and jam into the night with the eclectic house band. (Bonus: There’s a campground out back.)

The post Life is Way, Way More than a Beach appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

First, Let Yourself Go It's the adventure of a lifetime! You just have to share it with eight strangers. (Sigh.)

“Marsopa! Marsopa!” the deckhand cried, and we scrambled for our wetsuits and gear. We were three days into a ten-day live-aboard cruise south of the equator and still edgy and terminally polite with each other. Excusez-moi. Pardon. Eight guests from five different countries fumbling into scuba gear so that we could swim with the marsopas. What we saw when we hit the water was astonishing: about 30 bottle-nosed dolphins, some 500-pounders, some like sleek gray piglets, and all grinning and nodding enthusiastically in our face masks as if to say, “Yes! Yes! Weird, bubble-making, rubber-suited beings, come play with us! You we like!” Unlike when I'd met my fellow passengers, I took one look at the dolphins and thought, This is the fun-loving peer group I've been looking for ever since my high-school friends got lives.
I couldn't tear myself from the ceaselessly circling celebration until, after about 45 minutes, the dolphins lost interest and swam off. Suddenly alone, I kicked to the surface and saw the tiny, very distant dive boat motoring away. Yep, I thought, once again I'm screwed.

When it comes to group travel, it can seem at times that we're all screwed. You think about how you spent all this money and traveled all this way to get stuck with a bunch of tight-assed ophthalmologists' wives. And then you end up having sex with them. (Or don't, but wish you had.) Personally, I start out on a trip among strangers with my defenses up, prejudices blazing. But the more I travel, the more I hold out hope. And what I hope for is a little disaster, the one that breaks the ice—if it doesn't kill me first.

Sometimes it doesn't even have to be about me being the idiot. I wasn't the one who started the riot in the karaoke bar in Koror, nor did I cause the whole team to slide 500 feet down Mount Hood on their butts, practicing self-arrest techniques. I didn't call the Mayan shaman's grandmother “Fat Lady,” and it wasn't my navel ring the sea lion wanted to play with in that cavern in Baja. In each of these cases, somebody else stepped up and ate the humble pâé, but each time, everyone in our group rallied around the misfortune. The important thing isn't who does it, or what they do, but that everybody is actually doing something, anything, out at the edge of their comfort zone. Then the moment of terror, beauty, or humor (or all three at once) makes friends of fellow travelers.

For example, my rescue from an uninhabited rock mere hours after running away to join the dolphin circus gave us all something to talk and joke about. And from that point on we eight became a team. No one got left behind as we surged onward, a small community stoking each other with laughter and wonderment—a fine peer group, after all, though I agree with the marsopa: We do look ridiculous in our rubber suits.

Best Trips of 2001: Island Escapes

Island Escapes

Mighty island: one of the El Nido chain north of Palawan Island, Philippines

You could limit yourself to standard island fare: beaches great for digging your feet into the sand, tiki torches, moonlight dips in aquamarine lagoons. Or you could seek out the delights found only on the choicest isles: whitewater rapids galore, verdant hiking trails winding through wolf territory, and mindblowing views of the northern lights.

The Philippines: Coral, Butterflies, and Sweat
Start with a seven-day whitewater-rafting descent of the boulder-choked Cagayan River, which churns down Luzon's Sierra Madre and through the island's last remaining rainforest. You may not be able to identify every one of the butterflies along the way (the Philippines have 895 species) because you'll be too busy paddling; this is, after all, only the second commercial trip down the steep and technical Class IV upper section of the Cagayan. Next, ditch the raft and embark on a four-day trek to the 2,000-foot-high, 2,000-year-old Banaue rice terraces before hopping into a sea kayak for four more days of paddling and snorkeling around the lush El Nido islands to see as many of the Philippines's 500 different corals as you can. Outfitter: Mukuni Wilderness Whitewater Expeditions When to Go: ¶Ù±ð³¦±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–J²¹²Ô³Ü²¹°ù²â Price: $2,950 Difficulty: Moderate —Jason Daley

Get Marooned
Michigan: Backpacking Isle Royale National Park
The dense boreal forests of roadless Isle Royale, located 22 miles off Minnesota's easternmost tip in Lake Superior, put you in prime moose-viewing territory. Depending on your fitness level, guides choose between two seven-day, 45-mile island traverses: the mountainous Greenstone Ridge, which follows the island's backbone, or the precipitous Minong Trail on its north shore. At night, you'll watch the northern lights from camp and listen for the howls of the island's 29 wolves.Outfitter: The Northwest Passage When to Go: September Price: $925 Difficulty: Strenuous
Ireland: Mountain Biking the West Coast
There's only one proper way to experience rural southwestern Ireland's druidic past—biking your way 30 to 65 miles a day for 14 days down coastal roadways and rough lanes on the Dingle Peninsula. You'll take detours over narrow sheep-clogged farm pathsin County Clare and cycle through the Irish mist to 2,200-year-old caves, ring forts, and mysterious stone dolmens—thought to be druid altars or gravestones—and sleep in village hotels. It could well rain, but in Ireland, you have to take dark skies with a grain of salt. (A pint helps, too.) Outfitter: Classic ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $2,990 Difficulty: Moderate

Scandinavia: Road Cycling the Southern Islands
You'll start each of this trip's 15 days with platters of Danish pastries, mounds of Swedish pancakes, and no fewer than 12 varieties of yogurt. After breakfast, the cycling will wake you from a carbohydrate stupor as you explore the islands and mainland coasts of eastern Denmark and southern Sweden, powering 25 to 30 miles a daypast the grassy dunes and sandy beaches of Denmark's Baltic coast to the harbor towns of Aerø Island and the cool pine forests of Sweden's Lake District. And the best thing about a hard day's ride? Evenings spent lounging in the Swedish sauna. Outfitter: Euro-Bike and Walking Tours When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–J³Ü±ô²â Price: $3,900 Difficulty: Moderate
Indonesia: Tall-Ship Sailing the Bali and Flores Seas
It looks like a prop from The Princess Bride, but the century-old tall ship Adelaar is a prime sailing machine. It cruises east from Balifor 11 days and through the remote tropical archipelago Nusa Tenggara, detouring to let you snorkel the coral surrounding Rinca Island and deserted Banta Island in search of butterfly fish and Spanish dancers. On Komodo Island, you'll prowl the Komodo National Park with a guide to look for the nine-foot-long man-eating Komodo dragon. Outfitter: Wilderness Travel When to Go: ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù, December Price: $3,200 Difficulty: Easy
Irian Jaya: Visiting Papua New Guinea's Stone Age Peoples
Irian Jaya, an Indonesian province comprising the Western half of the island of Papua New Guinea, is inhabited by hundreds of tribes who practice a way of life that dates back to the Stone Age. On this 14-day trip, you'll visit with the Dani people of the Baliem Valley and the Asmat of the southern coast and witness traditional ceremonies (such as the Bisj pole ceremony which commemorates dead warriors). You'll hike through lush mangrove forests and down sandy beaches as your native Irian guides point out the best parts of their homeland. Outfitter: Geographic Expeditions When to go: June, September Price: $5000 Difficulty: Strenuous
Prince Edward Island: Cycling Historic Canada
You'll start your 7-day cycling tour in the P.E.I. capital Charlottetown before moving down the road to Canada's Brackley Beach National Park. Then you'll pedal through rolling farmland on to the fishing village of Victoria, known for its light houses and blue heron colony. Besides magnificent seascapes, choice seafood, and a dose of island life, you'll learn much mire than you ever thought possible about the influences behind Anne of Green Gables, P.E.I.'s literary claim to fame. Outfitter: Classic ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to go: July Price: $1295 Difficulty: Moderate
Madagascar: Wildlife Safari
For millennia, Madagascar has been separated from mainland Africa, allowing an amazing array of unusual and interesting creatures to develop. On this 19-day trip, Allen Bechky, a world-renowned authority on safari and bush travel, will lead you into the rain forests of Perinet, the Coral Gardens of Isalo, the Spiny Forest of Ifaty, and the badland canyons of Isalo. You'll see some of the island's wildlife–indri, aye-aye, and sifaka to name a few–and gain a deep understanding of their place in one of the world's most unique ecosystems. Outfitter: Mountain Travel Sobek When to Go: April, May, June Price: $4750 Difficulty: Easy
Washington: Sea Kayaking the San Juan Islands
You'll start your six-day adventure on San Juan Island, one of more than 200 island in the San Juan archipelago. Paddling through forested islets, you'll be in the prime location to spot some of the more than 80 orca whales who call the San Juans home. The evenings are spent in beach camps, where classic Northwest cuisine (roast salmon!) is served as you watch the sun set over the Pacific Outfitter: REI ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: June, July, August, September Price: $895 Difficulty: Moderate

Greece: Cycling Crete
The double steeps: Crete is steeped in history–you'll pass by the ruins of Knossos, Gortyn, and Festos on your week-long journey–and Crete's roads are steep. On this cycling trip you'll power up the islands rugged mountains and coastline as you cycle from inn to inn and taverna to taverna experiencing the best hospitality the Cretans have to offer. Flower-festooned houses greet you as you come out of the mountains and into inland villages. And although it's ancient, Crete loves new visitors. Outfitter: The Northwest Passage When to Go: May, October Price: $1890 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: High Altitude ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs

High Altitude ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs

An uncommon view: the North Face of K2 seen from Xinjian Uygur, China

From the highest hill in Indochina (cool) to the highest summit in New Zealand (cold) to the base of the second-highest peak in the world (colder). We've done the research. The rest is up to your legs and lungs.

China: The Back Door to K2

This is K2 with a twist. Mountaineer Jim Williams, a 30-year Himalayas veteran, leads a 32-day trek to the base of this 28,250-foot peak, the world's second-highest, from Xinjiang Uygur, a predominately Muslim, Turkish-dialect-speaking, autonomous region of China. One advantage to this approach (versus the usual route from the increasingly crowded Pakistani side) is the sheepherding and farming Uighur cultures encountered in the town of Kashgar before the trip's most rigorous slog: a six-hour-per-day, 14-day trek to the K2 glacier and a 12,631-foot base camp. Afterward, there's the 15,524-foot Khunjerab Pass, where five of the world's most impressive mountain ranges—the Hindu Kush, Kunlun, Tian Shan, Karakoram, and Himalaya—converge. Outfitter: Geographic Expeditions When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $7,490 Difficulty: Strenuous —Sam Moulton

Breathe Deep Peru: Climbing and Trekking in the Cordillera Vilcanota
Acclimatize on the classic three-day Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu. Then veer off the gringo route and through the rarely visited Cordillera Vilcanota, a range of 12,000- to 15,000-foot peaks, to climb 20,945-foot Nevado Ausangate. You'll stage a one-day summit bid from a 17,000-foot camp on the backside of the peak. “The crux of the climb,” says Vince Anderson, owner of Skyward Mountaineering, “is a 50-degree glacial headwall early on.” The rest is, uh, cake: scrambling around crevasses to the top and then returning to Cuzco on foot 21 days after you set out. Outfitter: Skyward Mountaineering $3,500 When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Difficulty: Moderate

Canada: Backcountry Snowboarding Rogers Pass, British Columbia
On day one of this five-day, 30,000-foot-total vertical trip, intermediate boarders learn backcountry travel basics, route selection, and avalanche-transceiver techniques. Then they ascend the powder keg that is British Columbia's 8,000- to 11,000-foot Selkirk Range on snowshoes or split boards and carve down epic, 4,000-foot alpine runs. “We set you up for success with steep chutes, wide-open bowls, and treed glades,” says Yamnuska owner David Begg. Nights are spent in local hotels (on your dime), and each of the last four days involves tough decisions—Dome Glacier? Hermit Basin? Young's Peak? Don't worry, you can't go wrong.Outfitter: Yamnuska, Inc. When to Go: ¹ó±ð²ú°ù³Ü²¹°ù²â–A±è°ù¾±±ô Price: $520 Difficulty: Strenuous

Vietnam: Fan-si-pan Summit
Trek through lush fields of orchids and wild medicinal herbs to mingle with Hoang Lien Mountains hill tribes before reaching a surreal high-alpine environment of bamboo thickets, pine trees, and rhododendron. You'll slog through wet, steep jungle foothills, camping en route to the highest peak in Indochina, 10,312-foot Fan-si-pan—a far cry from the Himalayas and Andes, not to mention home—with glimpses of southern China. Outfitter: Snow Lion ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: November Price: $2,000 Difficulty: Easy
New Zealand: Climbing Mount Cook
The ascent of 12,346-foot Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest, is “much more technical than Denali,” says Bryan Carter, managing director of outfitter Alpine Guides. The obstacles are numerous: heavy glaciation, big vertical scale (5,300 feet), and unpredictable weather. Consequently, you (a fit and skilled mountaineer) are allotted seven days for what could well take four. The payoff is a panorama of the Mackenzie Basin grasslands, the Tasman Glacier, and the Tasman Sea from a crowd-free mountaintop; only about 250 people summit each year.Outfitter: Alpine Guides When to Go: ±·´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–M²¹°ù³¦³ó Price: $1,400 Difficulty: Strenuous

Peru: Trekking in the Cordillera Vilcabamba
From coffee and tea plantations to sub-tropical forests and 6000 meter peaks, this 21-day adventure takes in all of Peru's Cordillera Vilcabamba, an area that has had few visitors in the past several centuries. Highlanders still wear their traditional dress and Incan roads still criss-cross the area. On your journey you'll trek four or five hours per day with ample lunch breaks and time to explore local villages and investigate the wildlife. You'll also cross five high-mountain passes, including the 16,000 foot Incachiriasca Pass before winding down your adventure with a visit to Machu Picchu. Outfitter: KE ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Travel When to Go: July-August Price: $2795 Difficulty: Strenuous
Alaska: Ski Mountaineering and Rafting in Glacier Bay NP Space.
That's what you'll notice when descending in your seaplane toward Glacier Bay on the first day of your arctic adventure. For twelve days, you'll be out there in Alaska's wide expanse, traversing the jagged blue ice of the Riggs glacier, climbing and skiing peaks that have never been skied, camping on ice, and descending the massive LeBlondou Glacier to the Tsirku River for 2-days of rafting. Outfitter: Alaska Mountain Guides & Climbing School, Inc. When to Go: June Price: $2400 Difficulty: Strenuous

France: Cycling the French Alps
If you take this trip, you'll be just like Lance Armstrong. Minus the cycling titles. Minus the against-all-odds story. Minus coverboy status. (Okay, so you both breathe oxygen.) This ten-day bike trip takes you onto the Route Des Grande Alpes and stages 14, 15, and 16 of the 2000 Tour de France. You'll pedal 70-100 kilometers a day, passing the Gorge de Cians on your way to the high passes of Col d'Iozard, Croix de Fer , and the 21 switchbacks of the l'Alpe d'Heuz. And, pardon my French, you'll rest your tired keister at night in some of the Alps most inviting resorts and inns. Outfitter: Cyclevents When to Go: July, August Price: $1850 ($950 if you camp) Difficulty: Strenuous
Tanzania: Climbing Kilimanjaro
Steep climbs and high altitude mark the Machame Route, a little traveled but highly scenic trail to the top of Kilimanjaro. This non-technical ascent will take you through cloud-forests and groves of giant heather before you reach the roof of Africa. But as a warm-up, you'll spend the first half of your two-week trip viewing wildlife in Ngorongoro Crater, Tarangire, and Manyara National Parks. Outfitter: Mountain Travel Sobek When to Go: January, February, June, July, August, September, December Price: $3990 Difficulty: Strenuous
Italy: Hiking the Dolomites
Imagine the Von Trapp's slurping spaghetti or Pavarotti singing Edelweiss, and you've captured the Dolomites, the northern border of Italy where Austrian and Italian cultures mingle in villages set among alpenrose blanketed valleys and jagged chamois-haunted peaks. This eight-day trek takes you to the picturesque Alto Adige region, Puez Odle Park, and Lake Crespeina. You'll lunch in some of the regions rifugi (mountain huts) and experience the wild and scenic land mountain people have made their home for centuries. Outfitter: Backroads When to Go: June, July, September Price: $3298 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: Biohazards

Biohazards

In certain corners of the globe, you don't go without bug protection, you don't swim in the rivers, and for God's sake, you don't drink the water. Here are the top ten cooties to avoid.

1. Schistosomiasis Snails in lakes and rivers in Brazil, northern Africa, and Southeast Asia carry microscopic fluke larvae that cause fever, diarrhea, and possibly deadly seizures from brain lesions.

2. Leptospirosis Animal-urine-tainted water, common in Southeast Asia and India, breeds biting parasites that bring on fever, chills, kidney failure, and internal hemorrhaging.

3. Leishmaniasis Sand-fly bites in the tropics and subtropics can cause oozing sores, anemia, and a swollen spleen and liver.

4. River Blindness On river shores in Central Africa, Yemen, and Central America, bites from female blackflies infected with a worm parasitecause cysts and sometimes blindness.

5. African Sleeping Sickness Fever, skin lesions, rash, and possible brain swelling are the woes that tsetse flies bestow in the tropical African savanna.

6. Dengue Fever It's a tropical/subtropical mosquito-borne virus featuring headache, chills, fever—and nasty complications like internal hemorrhaging and deadly pneumonia.

7. Japanese Encephalitis Get vaccinated against this virus before heading to the Far East or eastern Russia to avoid mosquito-bite-induced paralysis, seizures, and, in advanced cases, coma or death.

8. Lymphatic Filariasis Tropical mosquitoes squirt parasitic worms into your blood, causing your lymph nodes—and, at worst, testicles—to swell to the size of coconuts.

9. The Plague This devastating 14th-century bacterial disease, transmitted by fleas, is still imparting open sores and swollen lymph nodes (which can hemorrhage and cause gangrene) anywhere wild rodents thrive.

10. Rift Valley Fever Use extreme caution when traveling to African regions—including the Senegal River Basin and the Nile Delta—during outbreaks of this rare flea-, spider-, and mosquito-borne killer. —Tim Neville

Best Trips of 2001: Africa

Africa

The timeless life: A villager transports the harvest in Mozambique.

You've Land Rovered the Okavango Delta in search of the Big Five with your zoom lens extended, watched a lion kill an antelope from 100 yards. You're not done yet. Now it's time to navigate Africa's raging whitewater, cycle Senegal, dive with sea turtles in the Indian Ocean—in other words, explore the lesser-known jewels of the greatest continent.

Mozambique: The Total Eclipse Package
Think of this as a 15-day astronomical quest. Your destination? The grassy hills in northwest Mozambique, near Changara—one of the few places on Earth where the first total solar eclipse of the new millennium will be completely visible. From Johannesburg, you'll head north, camping on the sandy white beaches of Mozambique before heading west, deeper into the country than any commercial expedition has gone before. You'll spot lions, cheetahs, and elephants from the rooftop deck of your converted Mercedes-Benz jeep (plush!) as you traverse the savanna, stopping to watch the sun completely disappear on June 21. After the eclipse, you'll loop down through Zambia and Botswana, with a stop in the Makgadikgadi Pans Game Reserve—where hyenas, zebras, and antelope roam—on your way back to South Africa.Outfitter: Journeys International When to Go: June Price: $2,195 Difficulty: Easy —David Friedland
Do it Differently Ethiopia: Blue Nile Trekking and Rafting
The Blue Nile Gorge's spectacular mile-high basalt walls (it's been dubbed the Grand Canyon of Africa) are the highlight of this 22-day trip. Start out by learning the country's history and exploring the 400-year-old stone architecture of the Ethiopian highlands en route to Lake Tana, the headwaters of the Blue Nile. There, you'll begin a seven-day, 60-mile trek downstream, camping on the river's rocky eastern banks amidst hippos and colobus monkeys. At the Blue Nile Gorge, put in for a seven-day, 120-mile, Class II-III raft, stopping to meet the Borano, Welo, and Shewa people, many of whom have had little contact with foreigners. Outfitter: Mountain Travel–Sobek When to Go: September Price: $3,990Difficulty: Moderate

Tanzania: Walking Safari in the Selous and the Serengeti
Slip into some gaiters and hiking boots, and spend nine days camping and bushwhacking along thorny paths trampled by giraffes, zebras, and large-tusked elephants in one of the world's largest animal parks, the little-visited, 22,000-square-mile Selous Game Reserve. After the trek, take a side trip to the 100-square-mile Ngorongoro Crater, a three-million-year-old caldera with a high concentration of East African animal species—including lions, wildebeests, pink flamingos, and rare black rhinos—living beneath its 2,000-foot walls. Outfitter: Geographic Expeditions When to Go: ¹ó±ð²ú°ù³Ü²¹°ù²â–M²¹°ù³¦³ó, ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù, October Price: $4,395Difficulty: Moderate
Aldabra: Snorkeling, Diving, and Wildlife Watching
The Aldabra Atoll, a speck in the Indian Ocean 260 miles north of Madagascar, has ten times more nesting green turtles (2,000) than annual visitors (200). With its narrow channels and lagoons, the 19-by-8-mile raised coral atoll is also one of Africa's—and the world's—best drift-diving sites. You'll spend nine sunbaked days on the Indian Explorer, a 14-passenger live-aboard, diving and snorkeling among the parrotfish, grouper, and yes, turtles, of Aldabra and the nearby Cosmoledo and Assumption Islands.The Outfitter: Explore, Inc. When to Go: March–April, November Price: $4,495Difficulty: Easy
Senegal: Cycling the Saloum River Valley
This 13-day, 350-mile loop on mostly flat, paved roads and jeep trails is as authentic-western-Africa as it gets. You'll carry your own gear as you pedal a hybrid bicycle through the mango orchards, cashew groves, and savannas of the Saloum River valley, bunking in small hotels and local villagers' homes along the way. Refuel with yassa, a mixture of meat, onions, and spices, and mafe, a peanut sauce served over rice, prepared by local Wolof, Serra, Dioula, and Peul ethnic groups. Outfitter: Bicycle Africa Price: $1,190 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: Most Remote

Most Remote

Tall, silent types: saguaros in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona

A jet and helicopter can get you just about anywhere quickly; remoteness isn't about mere distance. It's about removal. A truly wild locale swallows you whole. It's a place where you are least likely to run into some clod yakking on a cell phone. It's a place where the locals have no idea what a cell phone is. Maybe it's a place where there are no locals at all.

The Sonoran Desert: Plenty of Nothing

The phrase “lush desert” may reek of oxymoron, but in springtime the Sonoran—with its massive saguaros and organ-pipe cacti, as well as Mexican gold poppies, magenta owl clover, and indigo desert lupine—is just that. Motor down dusty, rarely visited roads into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, just north of the Mexico border in Arizona, and then backpack three miles farther. Take day hikes from base camp into the Ajo and Bates Mountains, checking water holes for desert bighorn, Sonoran pronghorn, and javelina. Then head to the even more desolate, sparsely vegetated Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to finish off your Abbey-esque week. “The silence and purity of this place is what people are looking for,” says guide Howie Wolke. Fortunately for you, few people look for them so hard that they end up this deep in the desert. Outfitter: Big Wild ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: March Price: $1,200 Difficulty: Easy —Nate Hoogeveen

Lose Yourself Bhutan: Trekking Lunana in Northern Bhutan
Nostalgic for pre-1950 Tibet? Lunana—a region of northern Bhutan that sees fewer than 75 Westerners per year—is your place. Hike five to 15 miles a day for 28 days, passing through lowland jungles en route to Laya, a mountain village close to the Tibetan border, and encounter nomadic shepherds and villagers dwelling in stone huts. Then leave humankind in the dust to travel eastward, crossing 15,000- to 17,000-foot passes beneath craggy peaks, including the world's tallest unclimbed mountain, 24,900-foot Gangkhar Puensum. Outfitters: Geographic Expeditions, High Asia Exploratory Mountain Travel Co., Karakoram Experience, Snow Lion Expeditions When to Go: ³§±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–O³¦³Ù´Ç²ú±ð°ù Price: $5,000–$6,535Difficulty: Strenuous
Alaska: Rafting the Kennicott, Chitina, and Copper Rivers
Blast down the frothy Kennicott River and then float 150 miles in 12 days of the ever-widening Chitina and Copper Rivers along the western border of the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, home to eagles, elk, grizzlies, and the 16,000-foot peaks of the Wrangell and St. Elias ranges. For a finale, watch skyscraper-size ice chunks calving from Child Glacier from a safe distance across the river about five miles from the Pacific; then dodge floating bergs all the way to the sea. Outfitter: Too-loo'-uk River Guides When to Go: July Price: $2,200 Difficulty: Moderate
Mongolia: Fly-Fishing Northern Mongolia
During the course of 13 days, you'll cast into four wide rivers—the Chuluut, Soumin, Shishgid, and Tengis—for lenok (similar to North American browns), taimen (imagine a salmon-anaconda hybrid), and Arctic grayling. At night, sleep in heated domedgers on plains that evoke western Montana—sans ranchettes, ski trams, and fences. If you're lucky, nomads will visit to share their blowtorch-roasted, tuber-filled marmot.Outfitter: Boojum Expeditions When to Go: ´¡³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $4,600 Difficulty: Easy
Argentina: Backpacking the Patagonian Ice Cap
Spend 12 days backpacking over windy passes to get to and from the rolling glacial ridges of southern Argentina's Patagonian Ice Cap. Once there, you'll spend two days covering 20 miles of the 350-mile-long glacier, the world's largest nonpolar ice cap, where the weather is notoriously inclement (even though the altitude tops out at a mere 4,000 feet), with high winds and, as a result, horizontal snow. When the sky clears, you'll discover 11,000-foot peaks surrounding the glacier and backside views of the massive granite monoliths Mount Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre. Outfitters: Exum Mountain Guides When to Go: ¶Ù±ð³¦±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–F±ð²ú°ù³Ü²¹°ù²â Price: $4,190–$4,590 Difficulty: Strenuous

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Best Trips of 2001: Open-Air Classroom

Open-Air Classroom

Steep learning curve: instructor Doug Coombs on La Meije Coulouir, La Grave, France

A wise man once said, “experience breeds knowledge.” He was right, of course, but we say it never hurts to have an expert show you the ropes when you're taking up a new pursuit. It also never hurts to seek out the best possible classroom. Steep skiing? La Grave. Expedition canoeing? The Boundary Waters. Mountaineering? Bolivia's Cordillera Real. Any questions?

France: Trés Glacial

Ski for a week in the shadows of 19th-century mountaineering pioneers in myriad bowls and chutes of virgin powder from your lodge-base in the 12th-century agricultural village of La Grave with one of the most talented instructors in the world. Bragging rights for you and your classmates include classics like the 3,300-foot, 45-degree Freaux Couloir and the 7,500-foot Girose, which starts with a glacial face plunge, continues with a 40-foot rappel over a frozen waterfall, and then ends with a couloir and a river crossing for good measure. The vertical is served by one main lift, but that's the mountain's only concession to convenience: There is no grooming, ski patrol, or avalanche control. Which is precisely why steep-skiing guru and outfitter Doug Coombs—pioneer of over 100 first descents in Alaska and two in Antarctica—and his guides make avalanche awareness, rescue, and terrain evaluation part of the daily agenda. Outfitter: Steep Skiing Camps Worldwide When to Go: January-February Price: $1,995 Difficulty: Strenuous —Ben Hewitt

Take Note Minnesota: Expedition-Canoeing School in the Boundary Waters
Think canoeing rates up there with river tubing for difficulty? Then you've never navigated the endless maze of deep, placid waterways of the 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. To go on your own, crack orienteering skills would be a must, and only proficiency in pry- and J-strokes would ensure you made it to camp each day before midnight. On this eight-day learning expedition, you'll master these techniques as well as how to portage, balance out 50 pounds in your craft, and identify the dull, thumping you'll hear at night as the mating call of the local ruffed grouse.Outfitter: Voyageur Outward Bound School When to Go: ²Ñ²¹²â–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $1,095 Difficulty: Moderate
Florida: Live-Aboard Sailing Instruction in the Keys
For seven days a 46-foot Hunter sloop will be your classroom, and Hawks Channel, the four- to six-mile-wide strip of calm azure water that separates the Keys from the coral reef that runs their length, your campus. You'll learn navigation, engine mechanics, docking, and how to tack between Key West, where you'll stock up on merlot, and the reef, where you'll scout for dolphins. Pass the final written test, and you'll earn certification in basic and bareboat cruising. But by the fifth day, anchored off of Boot Key with the sun slinking over the horizon, you'll have long forgotten you're in school.Outfitter: Offshore Sailing School When to Go: Year-round Price: $1,995 Difficulty: Moderate
Bolivia: Learning Mountaineering in the Andes
After two days' training in crampon technique, crevasse rescue, and self-arrest on a glacier at 16,000 feet at the start of this two-week course, you'll pack your tent and leave your cozy lakeside hut for 17,000-foot-high base camp on Huayna Potosi. Front-pointing your way up the mountain's 55-degree ice sheet to its 19,870-foot summit is your midterm, and it's a lesson in extremes—the turquoise sprawl of Lake Titicaca lies below you to the northwest and 21,201-foot Mount Illimani is above you to the south. Take a good look: Illimani's sustained 45-degree slopes await the bite of your ice axe in week two.Outfitter: Colorado Mountain School When To Go: July Price: $2,400 Difficulty: Moderate
Oregon: Whitewater Kayaking Classon the Rogue River
After five days of learning basic paddle strokes, rolling, and rapid scouting within sprinting distance of a hot tub and fireplace, you'll embark on a four-day, 33-mile, raft-supported journey down the Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue River. You'll navigate progressively more difficult Class I-III rapids, watching for bear, cougar, and great blue heron at water's edge. Evenings will find you pitching camp on wide, sandy beaches beneath granite canyon walls.Outfitter: Sundance River Center When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $1,850 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: Grand Openings

Grand Openings — The world's destinations

It's just a step to the left: climbing “The Crawl,” Grand Teton Wyoming; Red-eyed tree frog, Costa Rica; moray eel, Great Barrier Reef, Australia; Rangiroa Atoll, Tahiti

Tuva, Russia
Visa-securing hassles have been steadily decreasing since the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991—opening the door for a trickle of visitors to horseback ride into the Sayan Mountains' alpine lakes (there are no rentals; buy a steed for $500 in Kyzyl), and paddle the republic's Kyzyl-Khem River, a Class IV run recently discovered by outfitters. Contact: Russian Embassy

Southeastern Myammar
In 1991, this nation's oppressive military regime signed peace pacts with the Pa-O, a sovereignty-seeking hill tribe that lives primarily in southeastern Myanmar. But it wasn't until a few years ago that hostilities were sufficiently quelled for adventurers to begin trekking through the rolling tea fields of the Shan Hills near Thailand without fear of being caught in the crossfire. Go with an outfitter (such as Asia Transpacific) and you'll avoid paying a mandatory fee of $200 to the government.
Saudi Arabia
It used to be that a holy pilgrimage to Mecca or a work visa were the only viable excuses for setting foot on a plane bound for this Arab kingdom. But in 1999, the government began warming up to tourism, allowing Saudi Arabian Airlines to dispense visas to outfitters like Geographic Expeditions and Mountain Travel-Sobek, who both lead jeep trips to the Red Sea, the 6,000-foot Asir Mountains, and the Arabian Desert. Contact: Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia
Southern Namibia
The 1,000-foot-tall red sand dunes of Sossusvlei and the seals and desert elephants of the Skeleton Coast are the draws, as is the reprieve from the tourist crowds in the neighboring adventure-travel meccas of South Africa and Botswana. What's kept the throngs away? For two weeks in August of 1999, secessionist violence in the tiny northeastern region of Caprivi threw the country into a state of emergency, which has since been lifted. But the rest of the country is ripe for travel, as long as you avoid Caprivi and its neighboring Kavango region, where the civil war in Angola spills over the border. Contact: Namibian Embassy —Tim Neville

Best Trips of 2001: Multisport ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs

Multisport ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs

Trans-Isthmus Highway: Avoiding the washboard halfway across Costa Rica

Sure, you'd love to sea kayak around Africa, cycle across Canada, and hike the Pacific Crest Trail this year, but limited vacation time kind of negates those plans. The following trips may not land you a featured spot on the Discovery Channel, but any one will take you on a whirlwind sports extravaganza—and get you out of the office long enough for you to consider never going back.

Costa Rica: Costa to Costa

It's a masochist's dream—crossing an entire nation by muscle power in less than 15 days. (OK, it's slim-jim Costa Rica, but it still counts.) The 145-mile west-to-east adventure mixes five glute-burning days threading a mountain bike through the dense cloudforests fo the Tapanti National Wildlife Refuge, with four days hoofing it up the steep, winding passes of the central Cordillera de Talamanca and over the 7,600-foot Continental Divide, and winds up with four days' careening down to the Caribbean finish in a raft on the Class III-IV Pacuare River. But it's not all uphill drudgery—there's a leisurely stopover at a coffee plantation for some rich local java, time to soak in a steaming hot spring, and a splashing champagne celebration in the surf at journey's end. Outfitter: BikeHike ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: Year-round Price: $2000 Difficulty: Strenuous —Jason Daley

Do It All Tahiti: Hiking, Sailing, Kayaking, and Snorkeling
At the start of this 11-day outing, you'll hike to see the triple waterfalls of Fa`arumai and the black-basalt sand beach of Matavai. Then it's time to cast off for four days aboard a 57-foot catamaran, from which you'll take kayak expeditions around Tiputa Pass's most remote lagoons, snorkel in the translucent waters of Rangiroa, the world's second-largest atoll, and gawk at towering tropical volcanoes and Day-Glo coral outcroppings throughout the island chain. Outfitter: Wilderness Travel When to Go: May–June, October Price: $3,500 Difficulty: Easy

Australia: Mountain Biking, Bushwalking, and Rafting Northern Queensland
The faint of heart might be tempted to pass this trip over—the 15-day itinerary includes trekking around croc-infested swamps. Don't let the reptiles scare you away. As a multisport nirvana, Australia's sporting opportunities outweigh the risks ten times over. You'll sleep in a hammock near a 100-foot waterfall, mountain bike over gritty gravel roads in Danbulla State Forest, bushwalk two days through the lush rainforests of the Mulgrave Valley, raft the pumping Class III-IV Russel River, sail and scuba dive among Great Barrier Reef sea turtles and dolphins, and sea kayak between the uninhabited Barnard Islands. Outfitter: REI ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: ²Ñ²¹²â–N´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $2,295 Difficulty: Moderate

Wyoming: Canoeing, Climbing, Mountain Biking, Horseback Riding, and Rafting through the Tetons
This trip is lodge-based, so your only after-dark exertions will be nursing blisters and chowing down on buffalo steak. The days are a different story: First you'll hike the Hermitage Point Trail beneath the shadow of eight of the grandest Tetons. On day two, you'll either canoe mirrorlike Jackson Lake or take a rock-climbing courseat Cascade Canyon on Jenny Lake. Day three, thread the smooth singletrack up Cache Creek Trail and then down rugged Game Creek Trail. Dessert? A half-day horseback ride through the Gros Ventre Wilderness and an overnight whitewater-raftingtrip on the Class III Snake River. Outfitter: Tahoe Trips and Trails When to Go: July Price: $1,510 Difficulty: Moderate

Iceland: Hiking, Biking, Rafting, and Horseback Riding in the South
Iceland's combination of volcanic activity and Arctic climate makes for unparalleled multifaceted terrain—glaciers calve and re-form with alarming frequency, earthquakeshave opened cracks in the earth as recently as 1998, lava nearly always flows, and there are hundreds of bubbling hot springs. For six days, you'll visit geothermal vents, raft Class II rapids on the icy Hvíe;táe; River, and ride Icelandic steeds over a surreal, lava-encrusted moonscape. To shock your senses after that monochromatic landscape, you'll chase the horseback ride with a hike and mountain-bike ride through the Heidmörk Recreational Area, carpeted with thousands of poppies. Outfitter: Borton Overseas When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $1,690 (includes international airfare)Difficulty: Easy

Best Trips of 2001: Paddling

Paddling

Torrents of spring: finishing off the third and final section of Idaho's Salmon

There are almost as many water conditions (frothy, glassy, curling) as there are places to paddle. Almost. Here are five of the best spots (rivers, surf breaks, island channels) and ways (sea kayaking, whitewater kayaking, heli-rafting) to get wet this year.

The Salmon River: Either/Oar
Bounce down all three branches of the Salmon—Middle, Main, and Lower—the longest stretch of undammed river in the Lower 48, by paddle raft. The Salmon drops more than 5,000 feet in 256 miles through the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness Area, and is as diverse as it is epic: cold and creeklike in the ponderosa pines at Boundary Creek, the alpine put-in; warm and wide among the more arid, beachy lower section. The thumping Class II-V rapids (there are over 100 rapids on the 100-mile stretch of the Middle alone), hot-spring interludes, side-hikes to old mining settlements and Shoshone Indian sites, and excellent fly-fishing for smallmouth bass, sturgeon, and cutthroat trout, will keep you more than busy for 17 days.Outfitter: O.A.R.S. When to Go: ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $3,280 Difficulty: Moderate—Sam Moulton
Make Waves Equador: Surf Kayaking the Pacific
Surf-bum for a week on the coast of Ecuador, north of the town of Montanito. Sessions of riding the five- to nine-foot green faces of a secret point break in a surf kayak—a tricky task—are punctuated by naps and meals of fresh corvina (a local fish).Accommodations at the hotel (the nicest in town)are only slightly more upscale than a surf camp, says Small World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs owner Larry Vermeeren: “The windows are cracked and the water's not hot.” A surf bum wouldn't have it any other way. Outfitter: Small World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: ±·´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–M²¹°ù³¦³ó Price: $995 Difficulty: Strenuous

Canada: Heli-Rafting British Columbia's Klinaklini River
For the eighth time, Butterfield and Robinson, the only outfitter with a Klinaklini River license, will fly clients into the Coast Mountains of northwestern British Columbia for a seven-day, 90-mile descent of the icy river, from heavily forested lake country to Knight Inlet, off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. You'll splash down long wave trains, around logjams, and through glacier-fed Class II–V rapids. “If the water weren't moving,” says expedition planner Andrew Murray, “it'd be frozen.” Outfitter: Butterfield and Robinson When to Go: ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $5,250 Difficulty: Moderate

Mexico: Whitewater Kayaking the Zimatan and Copalita Rivers
Navigating the tight lines within the steep white granite gorges on the upper and lower branches of the Zimatan and Copalita Rivers, you'll encounter play spots, holes, and waves for flatspinning, low-angle cartwheeling, and plenty of must-make moves(as in “Ya gotta stay right, or…well…just stay right!”). After six days paddling the clear, 70-degree Class III-IV waters, tumbling through the lush, high-canopied thorn forests of the southern state of Oaxaca, you'll be dumped into the Pacific near the town of La Cruzecita. Outfitter: Agua Azul When to Go: °¿³¦³Ù´Ç²ú±ð°ù–N´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $1,450 Difficulty: Strenuous

Tonga: Sea Kayaking the Vava'u Islands
Paddle for 12 days through the Vava'us, a labyrinth of 55 South Pacific islands located about 140 miles north of the main island of Tonga. Mornings are spent kayaking (you'll log two hours a day of mellow paddling in marine caves and alongside limestone cliffs that resemble tilted wedding cakes), afternoons are for snorkeling the hard coral reefs and taking the occasional nip of kava (muddy-dishwater-tasting, mellow-buzz-providing local brew) with island villagers, and nights are all about beach-camping.Outfitter: Mountain Travel–Sobek When to Go: ³§±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–O³¦³Ù´Ç²ú±ð°ù Price: $2,290 Difficulty level: Easy

Best Trips of 2001: Global Warning

Global Warning

In these fragile, frigid ecosystems, the phrase tread lightly takes on a whole new meaning.

Lured by icefloe wildlife and the world's last remaining true wilderness, increasing numbers of would-be Shackletons are venturing beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles—the chilly climes 66.5 degrees north and 66.5 south of the equator. Nearly 10,000 people visited Antarctica in Y2K (up from fewer than 1,000 just 25 years ago). But are the plants and animals ready for a wave of human visitors? Hardly. These extremely fragile ecosystems require extremely low-impact travel.

Most Polar Animals, be they musk oxen in Greenland or Antarctic chinstrap penguins, have never seen or heard a human, much less a neon anorak or a crackling two-way radio. Your presence will be stressful. To minimize your impact, stay at least 100 feet away from animals at all times—and don't even think about feeding them.

Fire is a constant danger at the poles, which are the driest regions on the planet (parts of Antarctica get less than two inches of precipitation per year). Open fires, which pose a huge threat to man-made structures, are prohibited.

The fewest plants that can survive the harsh polar climate, including lichens and snow algaes, are protected species that don't fare well under boot soles. A footprint in polar moss, of which there are some 350 Antarctic varieties, lasts ten years.

Human waste is preserved for decades due to the aridity. Pack it out. —Christian DeBenedetti

Polar Protection: In addition to high winds and frigid temps, polar travelers should prepare for blistering dry air (bring the thickest lotion you can find, such as Bag Balm), the world's most intense ozone-hole UV rays (and 40 SPF zinc-oxide), and blinding sunlight (and ultra-dark sunglasses that provide 99–100 percent UV protection). —C.¶Ù.

Best Trips of 2001: Arctic and Antarctic

Arctic and Antarctic

It can be balmy above the Circle: cruising the Salten Coast in Arctic Norway

Daylight and big-sky vistas are the rule in these geological playgrounds—places where ice and ocean and rock collide—while obnoxious tourists are as rare as bikinis. You can scale a peak, paddle along white sand beaches, and be the first to descend a glacier-fed river. You might even do all three in one day.

Norway: It's Like Jamaica, but Colder

This eight-day, 75-mile fjordland sea-kayaking trip begins near Narvik, Norway, and heads south along the Salten Coast to Skutvik. White beaches and clear water cast a Caribbean feel, and high-pressure air pushed out of Siberia sometimes makes for balmy weather; air temperatures can reach into the eighties, but 50 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit with rain is the norm, and inlets provide protection when storms swoop in. (Water temperatures hover in the low 50s.) You'll split your nights between tents and inns such as the Tranøy lighthouse, where you'll feast on local fare (reindeer and whale). Off your plate, puffins, seals, and porpoises play, and you'll find 8,000-year-old petroglyphs carved into granite cliffs and the occasional school of stark-naked kindergartners swimming at town beaches.Outfitter: Crossing Latitudes Sea Kayaking ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs When to Go: August Price: $1,675 Difficulty: Moderate—Mary Catherine O'Connor

Catch a Chill Antarctica: Climbing Vinson Massif
Spend 20 days traversing an enormous ice flat interrupted only by the jagged peaks of the Ellsworth Mountains as you make your way up Antarctica's tallest peak, 16,066-foot Vinson Massif. The weather is as fierce as you'd expect, sometimes dropping to minus 40 degrees (think of a shorter, colder McKinley climb), the moderately steep slopes require crampons, and the base-camp-style sleeping arrangements are, well, extreme.Outfitter: International Mountain Guides When to Go: ±·´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–D±ð³¦±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $26,000 Difficulty: Strenuous
Alaska: Kutuk River First Descent
A first-ever descent for whitewater canoeists who are long on pioneering spirit but short on technical boating skills. Aerial scouting of the Kutuk, in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, reveals Class II-III rapids cutting through 200-foot-deep limestone canyons. Start the ten-day, 27-mile float by hiking five miles to the Arctic divide and the headwaters of the Kutuk, a tributary of the wide, waterfall-fed Alatna. Then find your airdropped Grabner inflatable canoes and push off to ply the unknown, which is likely to include boreal-forest views of the 3,500-foot Arrigetch Peaks.Outfitter: Arctic Divide Expeditions When to Go: August Price: $2,950 Difficulty: Moderate
Canada: Walking and Kayaking Newfoundland's Labrador Coast Rivers
This is the African safari's cold stepsister. Arm yourself with down and a telephoto lens to explore the Torngat Mountains along the northern border of Quebec and Newfoundland, a mere five degrees south of the Arctic Circle. The eight-day trip consists of excursions from a base camp (heated tents that sleep three to four people), including kayaking the highest concentration of ocean fjords in North America, hiking 1,200-year-old glaciers, and climbing 5,418-foot Mont D'Iberville to see land's end, polar bears, and caribou.Outfitter: Rapid Lake Lodge When to Go: ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $2,200 Difficulty: Moderate
Greenland: Tundra Trekking
Hike across 93 miles of southwest Greenland's tundra toward the Greenland Ice Sheet, a polar ice cap, from Sisimiut, a former whaling town, to Kangerlussuaq, an abandoned army base. By August, the 20 or so other human visitors who walk this popular (by Arctic standards) route each year should be gone, as should the mosquitoes and no-see-ums. You'll need to be able to carry two weeks' worth of gear and food (about 40 pounds) across trail-less, rocky terrain and over 400-foot fjord wallsfor an average of 12 miles per day.Outfitter: Northwinds Arctic ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø When to Go: August Price: $2,360 Difficulty: Strenuous
Alaska: Backpacking the Brooks Range
The critters up north have to scurry to take advantage of the Arctic's short summer, and you will too if you want to fit in everything your NOLS instructors want to teach you. Grizzlies, wolves, muskoxen, and blisters will be your companions as you learn survival skills hiking over soft tundra and up braided river channels during your 15-day stay in the vast Brooks range. Outfitter: National Outdoor Leadership School When to Go: July, August Price: $3150Difficulty: Strenuous

Norway: Hiking Aurslandsdalen
You'll trek briskly through the countryside with the Norwegian Hiking Association for seven days on this trip, stopping along the way to spend the night in staffed lodges. Your speedy Norwegian guides will point out the region's flora and fauna as you power your way up the mountains. Few Americans end up in backcountry of Norway, so you'll have a chance to interact with European and Norwegian alpine aficionados. In the interest of national pride, try to keep up. Outfitter: Borton Overseas When to Go: July, August Price: $659 Difficulty: Strenuous
Alaska: Following Caribou Herds
Spend eight days following migrating caribou through glacier encircled valleys and wide-open tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You'll trail the herd to its summer grazing grounds, crossing dozens of unnamed creeks and mountains on your 40-mile trek. In addition to the thousands of caribou, there will be chances to see wolves, grizzlies, and golden eagles in action. This may be the time to cultivate a herd mentality. Outfitter: Arctic Wild When to Go: June Price: $2100 Difficulty: Moderate

Greenland: Kayaking Ammassalik Island
The fjords around Ammassalik Island are brimming with narwhals, seals, ermine, arctic wolves and dozens of other cold-comfort creatures. To see them, paddle your expedition sea kayak around four-story icebergs and forbidding mountains that rise directly out of the ocean. The 16-day adventure will also include time to scramble up unnamed peaks and chat with native Greenlanders who subsist on hunting and fishing in their unforgiving arctic homeland. Outfitter: Mountain Travel Sobek When to Go: July, August Price: $3190 Difficulty: Strenuous

Alaska: Rafting the Noatak Wilderness
Between fishing for grayling, climbing nearby mountains, and watching fattened caribou cross the river on their southern migration, you'll float 100 miles down the Noatak River on the edge of the arctic for nine days. Along the way, there will be an opportunity to scale a vertical mile on 7310-foot Mt. Oyukak and to watch the Northern Lights jig across the sky. Outfitter: Arctic Wild When to Go: August Price: $2600 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: A Better World

A Better World

Sacred stones: praying at a Mani Wall beside the Tsangpo River, Tibet

On each of these trips—and you just might help improve the planet.

Norway: The Book of the Living
Joining this Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge cultural preservation project is “like being one of the first groups to Mount Everest,” says Richard D. Fisher, director of trip-outfitter Wilderness Research Expeditions. Substitute the world's deepest canyon, the 16,650-foot-deep Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge in eastern Tibet, for its tallest mountain and you realize that this is not hyperbole. Fisher, 48, was one of the first Americans to explore the center of the gorge—which is four times the size of the Grand Canyon—in 1992. This year he'll return with 12 clients to hike, jeep, and camp for 21 days on the canyon's floor, heading west from sand-dune desert to thick jungle. Along the way the team will collect historical documents and take photos for Fisher's book on the history of the gorge—which is believed to be the birthplace of Tibetan civilization. Outfitter: Wilderness Research Expeditions When to Go: ´¡±è°ù¾±±ô–M²¹²â Price: $5,500 Difficulty: Moderate —David Friedland
Do Some Good

Spain: Mediterranean Marine Biology
Sail along the arid, deserted southern coast of Spain where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic for 12 days on a 91-year-old Norwegian fishing boat, helping University of Madrid biologists study the food-chain role of bottle-nosed and common dolphins, sperm and fin whales, and leatherback and loggerhead turtles. Plot positions, record behavior and sounds, and hoist sails as you attempt to identify critical habitats for future marine-protection areas. Outfitter: Earthwatch Institute When to Go: January, March, ´³³Ü²Ô±ð–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $1,995 Difficulty: Easy
Chile and Ecuador: Following Darwin's Footsteps
A 22-day exploratory trip to the major stops along Charles Darwin's 1834 Chilean route from Tierra del Fuego to Valdivia. The Nature Conservancy's local partner organization leads a hike through Torres del Paine National Park (a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve), and environmentalists talk about their struggles against the wood-chip industry. You'll visit a TNC marine-otter conservation project an hour's flight from Santiago, Chile, before heading to the Galápagos's Rabida Island, home to nine of the 13 species of finches that inspired Darwin's natural selection theory. Outfitters: The Nature Conservancy; International Expeditions Inc. When to Go: ±·´Ç±¹±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù–D±ð³¦±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $9,896 (includes international airfare) Difficulty: Easy

Russia: Investigating Lake Baikal's Pollution Levels
Help Russian scientists protect the deepest (more than a mile), largest by volume (14,000 cubic miles), oldest (20 million years) lake in the world and its 1,080 endemic species by taking water and fish samples from a motorized research vessel to measure chemicals and organic-waste levels. Then patrol the shorelines to observe sables and the world's biggest brown bears, and to scout potential nature-reserve sites. Hard work is rewarded with fresh salmon dinners and views of the 9,000-foot Sayan Mountains from lakeshore campsites. Outfitter: Earthwatch Institute When to Go: ´³³Ü±ô²â–A³Ü²µ³Ü²õ³Ù Price: $1,695 Difficulty: Moderate
Kenya: Studying Bats and Elephants
Spend 12 days walking and jeep-riding in the flat, butte-fringed Taru Desert and Masai Mara Savanna, working with scientists to catch and count bats and identify and classify elephants by their tusk lengths and ear markings. With mist nets, headlamps, bat detectors, and microphones, you'll learn to distinguish the calls and wing shapes of horseshoe, free-tailed, and yellow-winged bats, which inhabit caves and acacia trees. Then you'll impart your newfound wisdom to local schoolchildren during nighttime field trips. Outfitter: Bat Conservation International When to Go: May Price: $4,145 (includes international airfare)Difficulty: Easy

Australia: Wilderness Leadership in the Kimberley
Thirty days of trekking from one water hole to the next in Australia's Outback is an education in and of itself–add NOLS expert Leave No Trace instruction and the wisdom of the aboriginal Bardi and you've got yourself some first-class learning. You'll spend your days practicing the fundamentals of expedition camping, traditional hunting techniques, and the essentials of eking out an existence in a hostile environment. Outfitters: National Outdoor Leadership School When to Go: June, July Price: $3750 Difficulty: Strenuous

Oregon: Native American Sights in Hell's Canyon
Hop in a raft and take on the Class IV Snake River through Hell's Canyon National Recreation area with Jeff van Pelt, master flint knapper and Umatilla tribal historian. You'll stop along the way to learn about Native American petroglyphs, explore pit house sites and rock shelters, and examine some of the thousands of Native American artifacts on the shores of the Snake. At the end of each of the five days, sit back on the bank and contemplate the river crossing where Chief Joseph and his band fled the Wallowa Valley. Outfitters: Hells Canyon Whitewater Co. When to Go: August Price: $1000 Difficulty: Easy

Belize: Rainforests, Reefs, and Ruins
Belize sports the world's densest population of jaguars, the Western Hemisphere's largest barrier reef, and the sparsest human population in Central America. Researchers from the American Natural History Museum will guide you on a ten-day adventure through Belize's wild side with visits to Pook's Hill Nature Reserve, Green Hill's Butterfly Farm, and the Maya Medicine Trail, where coatimundi, potoo, and the endangered Morelet's Crocodile make their home. You'll also get a full day to explore Tikal, the massive Mayan ceremonial pyramid in nearby Guatemala. Outfitters: American Museum of Natural History When to Go: March, November Price: $3450, includes airfare from Miami, Dallas, or Houston Difficulty: Easy

South Africa: Monitoring Penguins
Each morning before breakfast on this two-week trip you'll take a stroll down to the beach on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 27 years) to observe Chilly Willy and his pals. Then, after a bite to eat, you'll spend the first part of the day checking nests, observing parent-chick interactions, and weighing African penguins. Dr. Peter Barham from the University of Bristol will brief you on how to avoid being snipped by the defensive birds and explain their behavior and what threatens them. Outfitters: Earthwatch When to Go: March, April, May, June Price: $1895 Difficulty: Easy
Dominica: Restoring Coral Reefs in the Lesser Antilles
No, Reef Ball is not the newest fun-in-the-sun watersport, it's a concrete modular reef system used to restore damaged ocean reefs throughout the world. Besides helping to build and deploy reef balls, this seven-night trip includes snorkeling, sea kayaking, opportunities to see some of Dominica's 7 species of whale and 11 dolphins, a guided hike to Boiling Lake, the world's largest volcanic lake, and trips to some of the Caribbean's premier scuba diving destinations. And best of all, you can tell everyone you took a “working vacation.” Outfitters: Reef Ball Coalition Inc. When to Go: February, April, July Price: $1399 Difficulty: Moderate

Best Trips of 2001: Over The Top

Over The Top

A remote Falkland island is the set for your own (untelevised) drama.

Want to hurl yourself off a 22,834-foot mountain, pretend you're on Survivor or crisscross the globe solving riddles? Look no further. Sure, you'll need to drop a grand or two—or 50—but consider the contribution you'll be making to cocktail-party-kind with your heroic tales of the most outrageous trips in the world.

Falkland Islands: Live and In Person
If spending a week among penguins, whales, and elephant seals with a group of strangers appeals, you'll come away a winner from this weeklong, mock-Survivor getaway. You and five others will fly from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a bare-bones cabin with a fully stocked pantry on a rocky, uninhabited island in the Falklands. Each morning for the next seven days, the group will vote off one of its members. (According to what criteria? That's up to you and your fellow travelers.) The banished will be flown to a second cabin on another remote island. Spend your days strolling warm, white-sand beaches or (if you're feeling hearty) taking an icy dip in the South Atlantic. No Letterman appearances await the winner, but the stargazing is exceptional. Outfitter: Tread Lightly, Ltd. When to Go: ¹ó±ð²ú°ù³Ü²¹°ù²â–M²¹°ù³¦³ó Price: $1,500Difficulty: Easy —Philip D. Armour

Go to Extremes Botswana: Hard-Core Safari
No five-course catered meals, no hand-holding by guides, no hot showers—there aren't even tents to sleep in on this weeklong Okavango Delta walking safari. Instead, schlepp your own 30-pound pack; machete your way through the thick papyrus forests; fish, hunt, and forage for food (roots and wild tubers); and sleep under mosquito nets in primitive, open camps, taking two-hour turns standing guard (with .458 magnums) against predators. Your one indulgence: quality time with lions, elephants, and cheetahs. Outfitter: Explore, Inc. When to Go: ²Ñ²¹²â–S±ð±è³Ù±ð³¾²ú±ð°ù Price: $2,450–$3,500Difficulty: Strenuous

Global: Who Wants to Be a World Traveler?
A quiz show for overzealous, overpaid wanna-be world travelers. Twenty-five two-person teams will spend three weeks jetting across the planet, earning points for answering location-specific riddles in each of the cities they visit. (Sample questions: What is Marrakech's “Assembly of the Dead?” What does Bobby do there? And what food does his cousin's stall serve?) The itinerary is top secret, but “contestants” can expect to travel by foot, bike, camel, elephant, ricksha, and oxcart in a minimum of ten countries on four continents and stay in first-class hotels as the teams battle for the grand prize: $50,000 and the honorific title of “World's Greatest Travelers.”Outfitter: GreatEscape ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs Inc. When to Go: MayPrice: $22,000 per team (includes international airfare) Difficulty: Easy
North and South Poles: Skiing to the Ends of the Earth
Few people ever reach one of the earth's poles, fewer still go to both the North and South Poles, and only the most masochistic attempt the two in one year. If you fit the bill, you'll ready yourself for the physical beating at a February training session in northern Minnesota. In April you'll battle minus-15-degree temperatures, 40-mph winds, and perilously thin, unstable ice on a 120-mile, 21-day dogsled-assisted ski from the 88th parallel to the geographic North Pole. In December, you'll do it all over again down south, skiing 60 miles from 89 degrees south. Outfitter: The Northwest Passage When to Go: February, April, December Price: $50,000 Difficulty: Strenuous

Argentina: Paraglide from the Summit of Aconcagua
Introducing the latest in high-adrenaline, high-cost sports: para-alpinism! Climb up, glide down. Ultimate Ascents, the only outfitter running such trips, launched a group from Kilimanjaro last February, and this year will be the first to soar with clients from 22,834-foot Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. After a week of glider training in Mendoza, Argentina, you'll begin a 21-day trek up Aconcagua on the Chile-Argentina border, for which you'll need basic mountaineering skills (familiarity with ice axes, crampons, and harnesses). At the top, you'll strap into a tandem paraglider with an expert pilot/guide and spend three glorious hours soaring over the Andes.Outfitter: Ultimate Ascents When to Go: January–February, December Price: $6,500Difficulty: Strenuous

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Islands

Islands

High Altitude

High Altitude

Africa

Africa

Most Remote

Most Remote

Open-Air Classroom

Multisport

Paddling

Arctic & Antarctic

Arctic & Antarctic

A Better World

A Better World

Over the Top

Global Warning

In these fragile, frigid ecosystems, the phrase tread lightly takes on a whole new meaning.

Grand Openings

The world’s newest adventure destinations

Biohazards

In certain corners of the globe, you don’t go without bug protection, you don’t swim in the rivers, and for God’s sake, you don’t drink the water. Here are the top ten cooties to avoid.

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