• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I switched off the camera and stepped back. Still watching me closely, Anna was visibly relieved and more than happy to leave the vicinity of the nest to the patrolling ants. There are times and places in which I will take chances or push the envelope a little, but as I assured Anna, I do not do anything overtly dumb.

My incredibly understanding wife, of course, would sigh knowingly and beg to differ.

VI

SHARKS I HAVEN’T JUMPED

Bismarck Sea, September 1997

I’M OFTEN ASKED WHICH OF all the places I have visited is my favorite. The question is impossible to answer because one inevitably ends up trying to compare apples to oranges. Actually, apples are more comparable to oranges than Italy is to Indonesia, or Brussels to Burkina Faso. I can contrast Rome with Madrid, or Yekaterinburg with Chicago, but not Peru with Prague.

Every place I have ever been has something to recommend it; every person I have ever met something to commend them. Or as my wife succinctly puts it, “You have no taste: You like everyplace and everybody.” To this assertion, I must plead mostly guilty.

While it is impossible to offer an all-inclusive answer to the query, it is possible to break down encounters into categories. For walking, my favorites would be Manhattan and London. For history, Prague and Rome. For sheer surprise, Istanbul. For animal life, South Africa. For Nature in the raw, Namibia, Gabon, and Peru. The most beautiful natural places I have seen on Earth are the immeasurably vast Grand Canyon of Arizona, the Tolkienesque Lofoten Islands of Norway, Venezuela’s otherworldly Canaima National Park, the untouched underwater marvels of West Papua, and my number-one choice, the incomparable Iguazú Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil.

But for an all-around, utterly fascinating, highly diverse step back in time, the prize goes hands-down to Papua New Guinea.

This is a land replete with spectacular sights both above and below the water. Vibrant with amazing human cultures that have survived largely unchanged for thousands of years, swarming with remarkable animals, it can boast whole regions that have yet to be touched by Western civilization. There is simply no place like it left on Earth.

Among its unrivaled attractions, up in the Bismarck Sea north of the large, lush island of New Hanover, there used to be a place of magic called Silvertip Reef.

Sharks, I try to explain to the querulous who know them only from what they have seen in film and on television, are no different from dogs. Leave a shark alone, and it will behave very much like any neighborhood pooch. Encountering a stranger, it sizes them up, tries to take a sniff or two, attempts to ascertain if you qualify as either a danger (swim away!) or potential food (sniff harder), and eventually reaches a decision based on these observations. Dump a tub of blood and fish guts into the water in close proximity to curious sharks, and you sometimes are rewarded with what has melodramatically been labeled a “feeding frenzy.”

Now try this. Go to your local butcher. Buy twenty pounds of raw hamburger, complete with juices. Find an alley. Look for a pack of dogs. Toss the hamburger into their midst. You’ll get the same reaction impatient photographers do when slopping chum to sharks, only with a frenzy of legs instead of fins.

Regrettably, because of the way they look and are perceived to behave, certain creatures have always had a bad press. Sharks unquestionably. Among other similarly cuteness-impaired species can also be counted spiders, snakes, and rats. If not for spiders, we would be drowning in insects. If not for snakes, the planet’s pesky rodent population would be far more difficult to deal with. As for rats, they are intelligent, family-oriented, and make excellent pets. I’m sure if you asked them, not one would speak up to declare proudly, “Hey, we like being infested with fleas that carry bubonic plague! Chipmunks do, too, and they aren’t subject to universal condemnation!”

That’s because