There is always more to see….

Sometimes, the basics are fine, especially if it’s a first-time visit or you don’t have a particularly deep interest in a destination or attraction.

Sometimes, though, you want to know a lot more than the broad-brush overview from walking around reading placards, and for that there are behind the scenes tours.

You might be surprised by how many places do offer their guests a peek behind the curtain.

For example, how about the wide variety of special tours offered at Walt Disney World in Orlando, including a three-hour look at the park’s steam trains?

My own most recent in-depth tour was aboard the historic battleship USS Texas, launched in 1912 and a participant in both World Wars.

Turned out in historically-accurate Measure 21 blue camouflage paint, she is permanently berthed in the Houston Ship Channel across from the San Jacinto monument.

I visited the ship to gather material for a story in Texas Highways magazine, and to participate in their volunteer-led Hard Hat Tour. It is only offered during the cooler months between October and May, because much of the tour is below decks in spaces that have not yet been fully restored and are not air-conditioned (thereby making them quite the hot, humid metal ovens during a Texas summer.)

Now, you really have to be a mariner, a history nut or a Navy enthusiast to fully appreciate and enjoy the tons of information pouring out of knowledgeable tourguides as you clamber up and down ladders (ship-speak for “stairs”) and in and out of rusty compartments that are still being fixed up.

As a Navy veteran myself, I loved seeing the old steam boilers and turbines in the engineering spaces, poking around inside gun turrets and hearing about 1940s-era fire control solutions – getting guns to hit what they’re aiming for – but that may be more “insider” information than you need.

Still, even when my own attention wandered, the chance to see areas that are normally closed to the public and still have that smudgy,  ”please make me shipshape again” look was irresistible.

Take the time to ask about special tours when you plan your travels; the cost may be quite reasonable and the immersion experience is priceless.

This week’s guest post in honor of the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day is from Kerry Dexter, a writer and producer who has written about music from around the world for MTV group’s Sonicnet, MusicRoad,, Gather.com, and Wandering Educators. For several years she was folk music editor for Barnes and Noble’s  online music site and for seventeen years she’s been contributing writer at the folk and world music magazine Dirty Linen.

Around Saint Patrick’s Day, and at other times of year too, it’s common to see lists of the best pubs to get drunk, plastered, ossified and totally steamin’ as a way to mark the day. In Ireland, though, I’ve found the pub to be more the living room of the community rather than the neighborhood bar. So while you’ll run into a few folk who’ve had too much to drink—and on Patrick’s Day or at a sports victory some other celebratory time, perhaps more than a few—you will also find a group of co-workers chatting over the latest events at the shop, a mother setting her teenage kids straight about something or other, a dad playing with his toddler, a couple of elders telling tales with their elbow propped on the bar, a man and woman getting to know each other better over a pair of pints, and a quiet thinker staring into the fire. If luck is falling your way, you’ll also get to hear really good music.

The Cobblestone in Dublin City is one place to do that. It’s a pub for a neighborhood in transition, with a back room performance space that’s just as likely to host rock or pop as Irish trad. There are tables around the long narrow room where you can sit for conversation, too, but it’s in the corner up by the front window that the real action, musically speaking, takes place. Traditional musicians from the city and musical travelers from other parts of the island—and sometimes the world—sit in for some of the hottest trad to be had in city center Dublin. Cobblestone is a short walk  away from the bustle of Temple Bar, just across the river in Smithfield. For the music, it’s a walk well worth taking.

Galway is filled with great music pubs, from the mighty Roisin Dubh to the legendary Tigh Neachtain’s. Those are both good places to consider spending a music-filled evening. Another fine place is Tig Coili. There’s a fresh and open atmosphere apparent in both the music and the conversation there. It’s on Mainguard Street, right in the center of town. Tigh Neachtain’s isn’t far away, and Roisin Dubh is a short walk across the River Corrib, so it’s easy to check them all out and see which suits your taste and mood.

The small town  of Carlingford sits about half way between Belfast and Dublin, in the brooding land of legend known as the Cooley peninsula. Should you make a day trip one weekend afternoon to try out the area’s famed oysters, you might just happen on a really fine singing session in the old bar at P.J. O’Hare’s on Thosel Street. Sessions (mostly instrumental) happen on some nights during the week, too, especially in summer. On those summer evenings you may sit outside with a view over the bay if you’d like, or try those oysters in the restaurant upstairs, but the music most often takes place in the original no bigger than a match box bar, and it’ll be well worth getting close to your fellow listeners to enjoy.

What you’ll hear at these places is music that’s part of the conversation, tunes and songs which arise out of the substance of daily life and are part of it. It’ll  not be Danny Boy or TooRaLoRaLoora. It will be sometimes funny, often sad, always engaging and varied. Just as there’s more to Ireland than shamrocks, leprechauns, and Celtic Tigers, there is more to Irish pubs than drinking in them, and more to be learned about the land its people by going deeper into the conversation, and the music. Stop in to a nearby pub, and take a listen.

- Story and photo by Kerry Dexter

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Going wild for Spring Break is a long standing rite of passage for hundreds of college students across America. After all, what could be better after a long, cold, snowy winter than to head for the beach and immerse yourself in good music, beer, and friends.

But for many students, going wild at the beach simply doesn’t cut it. Instead, they plan on heading for the hills where getting wild and dirty doesn’t revolve around binge drinking and becoming part of a MTV reality video.

Known as the Alternative Spring Break, it’s a chance for students to take time away from the books and get out and do some good by volunteering for community and environmental projects.

Some students are trading their swimming trunks for tool belts and volunteering to help United Way of South Mississippi in their efforts to help rebuild the Mississippi Gold Coast.  Or spending a week house building with a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate.

Others are trading in the swimming suit for hiking boots and camping gear and signing on for a American Hiking Society’s Volunteer Vacation where they will spend the week helping to build and maintain National Park and Forest hiking trails throughout the country.

It’s probably too late to sign on to these projects now, but students still looking for Alternative Spring Break options might want to have a read of Alternative Spring Break Ideas in 2010.

I was on a snorkeling expedition in Bora Bora, preparing to jump into its impossibly blue ocean waters — the very waters which I knew to be filled with sharks.

Now, I was with a seasoned crew, the InterContinental Thalasso had arranged it as one of their “Insider Experiences”  — and an insider is certainly what you want for such an occasion.

I’m not really known for my sangfroid, but I wasn’t particularly nervous. I’d never seen a shark outside an aquarium, so I was excited. Plus I’ve always find that ocean snorkeling offers a comforting sense of detachment –  when your mouth is stretched around your breathing tube, there’s only the faint anodyne taste of salt, and the sound of your breath like Darth Vader, all other sounds transformed into a tactile rather than a heard sensation. Whatever passes before your mask seems to be behind glass, in the palpable density of water.  Unless someone or something is brushing right up against you, it seems quite safely distant.

Once we’d all clambered down the ladder, one of the crew threw a yellow rope into the water, another attached it to the anchor line. We were asked us to grip on and keep our bodies behind it.

I submerged.

From the boat, fish, hacked into pieces, hit the water. In moments, the blue water delivered a group of black-tipped reef sharks. These sharks are not that big – perhaps three feet. Their fins look dipped in black ink and these had yellow spots on their dorsal fin as well, which meant that they were on the younger side. I watched them feed.  After a while, I looked down and that there were much larger sharks beneath me, well below the surface. They were swimming slowly.  These are lemon sharks, later learned were lemon sharks,  typically eight to ten feet long. Since it was day time, they were sleeping — they swim in their sleep to keep water flowing over their gills. But if you go into these same waters on a night dive, these sharks move fast, prowling.

The practice of throwing fish into the water so that tourists can have a shark encounter is called “chumming”.  It’s controversial, as the feeding of any wild creature would be – it affects their normal feeding behaviors.  There’s also a problem that’s almost always theoretical in the case of sharks, which is that the animals then associate people with food, which can lead to mishap. Hollywood to the contrary, any instance of a shark attack is a misunderstanding on the part of the shark – a shark doesn’t really want to eat a person, a shark doesn’t crave a new taste sensation.  Shark attacks are shark mistakes – it takes a bite to see what sort of fish or seal you are and when it turns out you’re not a nice tasting seal at all, the shark leaves.

Unfortunately, that single bite may also leave you permanently dead.

But again, this is unbelievably rare. I have read that there is a better chance of getting electrocuted by your Christmas lights. (The reason the rope was in the water, in fact, was to keep us snorkelers clear of the fish – lest a fish chunk hit a shoulder or an arm, leading a shark to take more than its share for a snack.)

In any event, these sharks were completely uninterested in their rapt audience.

A couple of days later,  while I was on a Paul Gauguin cruise, docked off the island of Moorea, I lept at the opportunity to go on another shark snorkel. This time, the water was only up to my waist, and as clear as a crystal pitcher. The rope was thrown again, and the chumming , but this time the number of black-tipped reef sharks was impressive –  more than a dozen, perhaps as many as 20.  I grabbed onto the rope, and the sharks came quite near. I could see right into their expressionless silvery eyes, and got a good look at the dark pilot fish swimming with its fin on the shark’s belly, ready to snatch up any shark leftovers.

It had been stormy the night before, and the current was pushing me into the sharks. As I tried to maneuver my body backwards, but when I twisted around, I saw sharks there too — very close to my kicking feet.  I looked forward again: a shark whipped around to get the fish thrown at him, and I could see its teeth. That snapped my illusion of distance, of detachment. My stomach knotted and I felt that primal “get me the hell out of here.”  I returned to the boat.

Of course, sharks are predators and they can be dangerous.

But the reality is human are not their natural prey, and we are much more dangerous to them than they are to us. The number of shark attacks each year is very small, at the same time, the number of sharks fished or worse, finned – pulled from the water, their fin hacked off for food, and the body returned to die – is huge.

According to Pew Shark Conservation Project:

• Up to 73 million sharks are killed for their fins, valued for the Asian delicacy “shark fin soup.”
• Some shark populations along the eastern U.S. coast, such as scalloped hammerheads and dusky sharks, have plummeted by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s.
• Several species of sharks, such as the porbeagle and spiny dogfish, are also fished for their meat – a staple of the fish-and-chips dish served in Europe.

Today, the Maldives banned shark fishing, the second nation to have done this – after Palau. Both are diving destinations, both realize that sharks are worth more alive and in the water where tourists can come see them, than in a fishing net. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora is meeting now in Doha, Qatar, and shark conservation is an important part of the conversation. In the US, a shark conservation bill, which would severaly limit finning, has passed the house and is awaiting its turn in the Senate. (One hopes that shark health will be an easier sell than human health.)

Honestly, even if I’d never gotten into the water with sharks, I would be philosophically inclined to want this bill to pass.

But the fact that I saw sharks and swam with them and yes, even got a little panicked by them, was an important part of making me care about it even more. Travel is supposed to be a social good because, as a certain Mark Twain once said, it’s fatal to prejudice. I’m not sure that’s always true, but I do think that travel always stimulates curiosity, by making some part of the unknown world immediate.   Before I left French Polynesia, I made sure to catch a documentary about sharks, which I probably wouldn’t have made a special effort to see before. It’s made me closely follow the shark conservation story.

I say all this because it’s hard for an amateur to see sharks without chumming. I understand that the disruption of eating patterns is no small thing, that it’s not what you’d want, ideally speaking, for a shark population. But at the same time, I’ve got to believe that the costs of chumming are probably more than worth the gain in shark awareness.

From a distance, it might just seem to be another small country town. But visitors soon discover that Tirau, located on a busy highway two hours south of Auckland,  is anything but ordinary.

Driving down the highway that cuts through the town, visitors are greeted with the vision of a six meter high dog façade fronting the town’s Information Center. The locals call it The Big Dog. Nearby, an enormous sheep shaped building sells local wool products and arts and crafts.

A gigantic corrugated iron shepherd stands alongside Big Dog and Big Sheep, watching over the growing collection of corrugated  teddy bears, hearts, birds, and poppies that have sprouted up on buildings and sign posts.

Tirau has , in fact, become New Zealand’s corrugated capital.

See more of Tirau’s unique art works with this EyeballNZ Tirau slideshow.