Blame it on Curacao’s Technicolor coral reefs that stretch as far as the eye can see underwater. Fault Catalina Island’s famous kelp forests undulating in the emerald currents of the Pacific. Or Bermuda’s mysterious shipwrecks, like the Constellation and the Hermes, which look more like watercolors painted in shades of blue than sunken vessels. Then again, maybe it was the Web site that made me take Scuba diving to the next level, figuratively speaking. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors wastes no opportunity to plug its professional programs – in its literature, classes, but perhaps most effectively, on the Internet.
Destinations
There’s no feeling like scoring a “slam” – hooking a trout, snook and redfish – in the seemingly endless saltwater flats of Florida’s west coast. One minute you’re distracted by an Osprey soaring above the perfectly calm sea as the fishing line floats in the shadows beyond your flat-bottom boat. The next, the water is boiling with an angry game fish fighting to free itself of your rig. Of course, the excitement is somewhat tempered when it’s not you, but your fishing buddy, who pulls in the coveted threesome (within the first few minutes on the water, no less) leaving you to catch a sorry collection of catfish and mangrove snapper the rest of the morning.
When it comes to adventure travel, cyberspace is the final frontier. That, to borrow an overused TV cliche, is the premise of the Online Adventurist, a biweekly feature that begins today on this site. The Internet is the last unexplored realm – a place with few guides, maps or navigational tools to help illuminate the way. Sure, you can logon to the likes of Gorp.com or Away.com and read about whitewater rafting in Nepal’s Tsangpo river or a Tanzanian Safari. You can page through National Geographic and Outside magazine, watch the Discovery Channel, or read any of Paul Theroux’s travelogues.
The beach looked like a battleground. A group of unshaven men clustered around a dinghy under a blazing midmorning sun. There were other revolutionaries, in tents, speaking quickly in Spanish. A camera crew filmed the spectacle from a safe distance. Only the hand-painted sign near the road told a different story: “Civilian Zone,” it warned. All members of the military “and their friends” are forbidden from entering.
The lone bluegill sunfish circles at a polite distance, but when my depth gauge passes 20 feet, it moves in for the kill. The creature charges one diver’s elbow, chomping down and leaving a tiny red bite mark. Even as I think to myself, “Well, at least it wasn’t me,” I feel a thousand dull needles on my thumb.
After my first bite of barbecued iguana, Vicki the diving instructor asked, “So?†I was tempted to say, “Tastes just like chicken,†because it did taste like chicken, but that’s not what she wanted to know. Curacao’s giant lizards, when properly prepared, are thought to have aphrodisiac qualities. Even the word for iguana in native Papimentu sounds suggestive: yawanna. I jokingly raised my eyebrows. Vicki laughed. The rest of the students giggled. They looked as if they were wondering too — well, is he or isn’t he? When I passed the plate of hot lizard around the table for everyone to sample, those that dared took small, cautious nibbles.
It’s sunset on the Gulf of Mexico’s saltwater flats and Richard Stanczyk, the master of Monster Alley, is ready for show time. “They’ll be biting anytime now,” he whispers as he sends a writhing crab hurtling silently off the boat into the darkness, attached to a hook, line and rod used for salmon fishing.
Few places on earth are as strange as Park City, Utah, at the end of ski season. I arrived at this unlikely conclusion after spending a March weekend in the mining-town-turned-millionaires’-playground. The First Family happened to be vacationing at nearby Deer Valley only days after the President’s Senate trial acquittal. Secret Service agents in suits mixed uneasily with late-season skiers waddling down Park City’s Main Street in short-sleeves, jeans and unbuckled ski boots.
If someone handed you the keys to a late model convertible that had never been driven and cut you loose on Florida’s West Coast in late January, what would you do? Forget business and hit the road? My thoughts exactly. So you won’t blame me for putting 600 miles on that Chrysler Sebring convertible last week. Or for permanently lowering the top, even when the mercury dipped below 70 degrees. Hey, after all, we’re talking the Sunshine State here.
Savannah is for squares. The 24 open areas that define this Southern city tell a bittersweet story you won’t read in any tourism brochures. It’s a tale that pits preservation against ‘progress’ – parks versus three-story parking garages and advocates of renovation against the market forces that want to raze every architecturally significant building. I set out on this unauthorized tour of old Savannah on a late Winter morning. It was cool and sunny, and I was armed with a good book. No, not Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the enduring John Berendt bestseller. I mean, A Visitor’s Guide to Savannah, by Emmeline King Cooper and Polly Wylly Cooper.
If you want an entire tropical island to yourself at this time of year, skip the Caribbean. Try Bermuda instead. Balmy but not oppressively humid, cultured but not pretentious, quaint without being antiquated, Bermuda is practically abandoned between Thanksgiving and Easter and, for all intents and purposes, visitor-free during the two weeks leading up to Christmas. It makes this the perfect time to spend a long weekend on the former British colony, which is located 568 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and a relatively painless hour-and-a-half flight from Washington.
