Some of you long-time readers may remember that when we launched the Perceptive Travel Blog on March 21, 2007, one of the original contributors was UK-based travel photographer Steve Davey.

Eventually, Steve had to move on to other obligations, but he still helps judge the Perceptive Travel Remarkable Photo Contest and he also wrote about Debre Damo monastery in Ethiopia for the magazine.

While we were sorry to lose his wit and fabulous photos on the blog, we’ve continued to follow his travels with interest, including the photo tours that he leads all over the world with the support of Intrepid Travel.

The good news is that his latest offering looks really interesting, and we thought we’d share it with our readers.

The “Impressions of Ladakh” photo tour is scheduled for 12 – 27 July, 2010 starting in New Delhi, and Steve will lead a small group (12 people maximum) through this wild mountainous region on a trip that offers….

“A unique opportunity to improve your travel photography, whilst exploring the highlights of Ladakh in the company of a professional travel photographer.”

It’s a wide-ranging itinerary, with notable monateries and towns, the Tak Thok Tse Chu festival and Dharamsala, the home of the exiled Dalai Lama and the government of Tibet in exile.  Note that:

“This tour will be travelling through some difficult territory, and much of it will be at altitude. It will be a more physical trip that others which Steve has run, and a reasonable level of fitness and mobility will be required. If you are concerned about this, please contact Steve to discuss your situation.”

If you’re interested, contact Steve and tell him his old Perceptive Travel blogging friends sent you!

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.

We announced recently that we’re looking for a new blogger to replace Antonia Malchik and that those who applied would get a spot to do a guest post. First up is Brian Spencer, who has been an editor at About.com, IgoUgo, and sports site Empty the Bench. But that’s not the real story…

Ask 50 travelers to define their dream vacation, and you’ll probably get 50 different answers: a wildlife safari through Botswana’s Okavango Delta, riding the rails across the European countryside, relaxing in a thatched-roof hut on a remote island in French Polynesia. I’d never put much thought to it myself… until recently, when my travel outlook for 2010 suddenly, improbably, brightened.

Everybody enters sweepstakes now and again; nobody expects to win. Some question whether anybody wins at all. Well, people do win, at least in the case of Lonely Planet’s recent “Subscribe and Win” competition, which promised US$10,000 worth of travel money to an email subscriber who, in 20 words or less, best described a feature they’d like to see in future LP newsletters. There were “thousands of great entries,” but in the end the lucky winner was… yours truly.

No joke.

I was naturally skeptical when I opened the email (subject: “Lonely Planet Subscribe and Win Competition – Winner Annoucement”). I carefully read it at least five times, Googled the sender’s name, and finally thought to check LP’s website for verification. And there, unbelievably, was my name and my winning entry listed as the first-prize winner. My head buzzed with the realization that no corner of the world, no matter the location nor the cost, would be off limits. Wow.

Where do you go when you can go anywhere?

Since that fateful January morning, my girlfriend and I have been in somewhat of a dream (vacation)-like state, endlessly fantasizing about how to best take advantage of my insane luck. Japan by bullet train! South African wine country and safari! The beaches of Fiji! It still seems too good to be true, and it’ll probably feel that way until we board our plane bound for… we’re undecided.

It’s coming down to a process of elimination. Southeast Asia, as much as we love it, is probably out since we’ve vacationed there twice and recently spent 8 months living in Bangkok, which afforded opportunities to visit parts of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan we hadn’t previously seen. Plus, we know we’ll be back sooner rather than later.

Europe, particularly during the summer months, would be lovely, but for some reason doesn’t especially scream “dream trip.” Australia and New Zealand, in a weird way, seem too close to home despite being nearly 10,000 miles away from New York. North America as a whole isn’t anywhere on our list. That’s hardly enough to narrow it down, but it’s a start, and yes, I realize this is a good problem to have.

Travel writer Alexia Nestora recently completed a study entitled “The Trip of a Lifetime Travel Report 2010,” which sought to determine the “motivations and preferences behind vacations that are considered ‘a trip of a lifetime.’” Her findings aren’t far off from our thinking:

Seeing the World Wonders, safaris and rain forest expeditions are the top experiences travelers are most interested in for a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Seventy percent of respondents said they are most interested in visiting natural and man-made wonders on a once-in-a-lifetime trip such as Machu Picchu, the Pyramids or Victoria Falls. Beyond that, 53% said they were very interested in going on safari and 42% were very interested in a rainforest expedition.

(Download the full report for free here.)

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it, I guess this is how I’d define my dream trip: exotic, far away, well outside the normal budget, extended travel time, touches of luxury (but not exclusively high-end), a mix of city scenery and natural landscapes, and having my favorite travel partner there with me.

I’ll let you know once we’ve made our final decision. For now, I’d love to hear where you’d go and what you’d do if you could travel anywhere in the world.

- Brian Spencer

My copy of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey quotes the Washington Post’s review on its back cover: “There are far too many books in which a travel writer follows in the footsteps of his or her hero—and there are far too few books like this, in which an author who has spent time and energy ferreting out material from archival sources weaves it into a gripping tale.”

As much as I’m inclined to defend those footstep-following travel writers, an actual reading of The River of Doubt bears out that reviewer. A narrative that depends on the writer’s own observations and experiences, with flashbacks and notes regarding those whose footsteps they’re following, no matter how well written, cannot give readers the visceral experience promised by a narrative relying solely on the original explorers’ writing.

Author Candice Millard delivers the kind of heart-in-mouth, exquisitely detailed tale you’d expect from a former writer and editor for National Geographic. The River of Doubt is a careful and riveting story of the journey that former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt took after his depressing failure to win a third presidential term in office.

In 1912 Roosevelt corralled a naturalist, a famous Brazilian explorer, and his own son Kermit into an expedition to chart one of the Amazon’s unmapped, jungle-choked tributary rivers. The river had so thoroughly defeated previous attempts at exploration that it was dubbed the River of Doubt.

The expedition was poorly equipped, having relied on a supplier whose previous journey into the Arctic had ended in disaster, and a priest, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who had little idea of the true physical hardships an Amazonian exploration would entail.

Millard is a master storyteller here, telescoping in to a tight focus on experiences from first-hand journal entries from the expedition’s commanders, including Roosevelt’s, then out briefly to a modern understanding of the Amazon jungle’s ecology and the native Indian tribes who inhabited it at the time, and back in again to the expedition’s heartbreaking and often deadly trials.

The book is fascinating on so many levels. There is the journey itself, the kind of knowledge-or-death scientific endeavor of that era we can’t seem to get enough of. There is the everyday drama of near-starvation, a constant battle with malaria and dysentery, the haunting survival-of-the-fittest ethic of the Amazon ecosystem, losing essential canoes and supplies to the River of Doubt’s many rapids, murder among the ranks, a drowning, and Roosevelt’s own near-suicide when he becomes so injured and ill that he fears costing others’ lives through his inability to function.

There is the tension surrounding this great man, who, although he had served two terms as president and would become one of the country’s most remembered leaders, felt that he hadn’t done anything of significance in his life. Millard skillfully weaves in his own restless energy, his fears for his son, the punishing and self-reliant way he’d raised his children, his essential if unacknowledged humanism, his lonely wife, and his bullish and bullheaded beliefs about America’s place in the world.

But what caught my attention more than any other detail of this incredible book was the way Millard dealt with class, and with it, racial tension.

As with any expedition of the time, the high-class (usually white) leaders got the credit and glory, while their adventure was made possible only by the underpaid, backbreaking, life-threatening labor of many unknown local men. The River of Doubt is one of the few books I’ve ever read that handles this issue without either turning it into a classist manifesto (that is, railing against Roosevelt and others who have cost countless lives through their desire for adventure), yet without ignoring the contribution that the expedition’s camaradas made to its—and indeed Roosevelt’s and his son’s—survival.

In other words, Millard balances respect and acknowledgment of all contributions (including the role a local Indian tribe played by choosing not to murder the entire expedition—a decision the expedition members were never aware of) without ever letting myriad issues cloud the story she is telling.

And what a story it is. It’s been a long time since I read a travel book that was as well put together, where not only the quotes chosen but the words used showed the hand of a craftsperson who didn’t let her own ego get in the way of the narrative.

I came away from The River of Doubt with a renewed respect for the Amazon jungle and its incredible ecosystem, but also with renewed respect for Theodore Roosevelt. In this book Millard has given us a new understanding of what drove the man through his life, and the dual thrills of adventure and scientific discovery he craved at its peak.

Like snow and rain, winds have developed their own vocabularies. Their personalities evolve in the geography that nurtures them: the damp Chinook that signals the end of a Rocky Mountain winter, the soft zephyrs that cool a hot beach, the bone-gnawing barbers of a Saskatchewan January, and the Harmattan desert breezes that scrape sand over every particle of exposed skin.

And then there is the wind that lingers after a New England Nor’easter, the kind of wind that rips your hair right out of your head, the nameless wind that feels like a beating, and all you want to do is curl up in a corner and wait for it to pass.

This wind attached itself to the three-hour whale-watching catamaran out of Boston Harbor when my in-laws were visiting from England. It bore down upon us with the force of an iron door being slammed until Liz, my mother-in-law, shrank to about half her size. But I couldn’t shrink, much less curl up in a corner. I was crouched on the bucking deck, pissed off and terrified, trying to hang onto a leaking sick bag that flapped over the side of the boat.

“Don’t litter,” they’d told us as the boat moved out of the dock near the New England Aquarium. Don’t throw anything over the side; don’t leave things on the deck to be picked up by the breeze. “It’ll be a little rough today,” they added as an afterthought. I fiddled nervously with a thumb. My earliest memory is of a canoeing accident when I was two that nearly drowned my family. I ignored Liz’s mention of her tendency to seasickness, and thought instead about the water phobia that grabs my ankles on occasion. Before I could suggest sitting inside—where the water couldn’t threaten me—the crew powered up the jet cat and smashed their way to the whales, plunging up and down the leftover waves of yesterday’s storm.

That was when Liz went very, very silent. “Don’t talk to me,” she said to our husbands, her clipped British accent still unfailingly polite, her uncreased linen clothes rippling in the wind. She turned pale and gripped an empty Starbucks bag whose contents were soon returned to it. Boston Harbor whizzed by.

I eyed each wave as if it held the grinding teeth of a sea monster. I think I whimpered. Above us, someone narrated the passing of islands and lighthouses. Liz did not turn to look at them, but kept her eyes fixed on a horizon that the bow, most unfortunately, interrupted every few seconds. I tried to ask my husband Ian why on earth he’d sat up front, but the wind forced the words right back down my throat.

The little paper Starbucks bag was insufficient. Ian staggered inside for a stock of plastic-lined sick bags. We huddled in our seats as Liz, and then her husband Tony, filled one, two, three, four of them. I pressed my fingers around the tops to keep the bags from being whipped to sea. Didn’t want to mess up lunch for the fish.

Some time later, Ian lifted his head, sniffing, then mouthed something at me as his mother retched into a fresh bag. I shook my head, wanting only for the boat to stop, not caring about the prospect of seeing whales, definitely not caring to hear a witty comment from him about the healthfulness of fresh air. He brought his mouth to my ear and bellowed into it.

“The bags. Are leaking.” A forefinger pointed to the trail of puke glistening its way across the deck.

Well, damn. I thought about racing at a crawl back to the trash bags inside. I thought many unkind things about the teenaged crew members who’d sold Liz the acupressure motion sickness bracelets when we boarded. “Yes, they really work,” the girl had told me. A wave lifted me from my seat, scattering more drops of vomit around, and I thought nastily about bringing the bracelets back inside, dripping bags in tow, to ask for a refund.

There was no way to make it to a trash can without leaving evidence of that morning’s breakfast all over the boat. I couldn’t even stand up without falling over, and the wind, egalitarian in its direction, made sure anything in remotely liquid form got everywhere.

I slunk from the seat to the starboard rail, where I hung on, petrified, as the bags leaked their contents into the sea. I hung on tighter, gulping back tears of anger at the weather and the stench, and at uncontrollable terror of the dark water. My fingers grew numb around the bags. The wind fingered the holes (all along the seams—who makes these things?), widened them, and gleefully ripped the bags to shreds.

At times like this, exposed to Mother Nature and helpless before her, some people like to think that they are getting back to their roots as human beings, planting themselves in the earth from which cities and air conditioning so often separate us. Full engagement of life, rather than fear of death, becomes their focus. It’s a nice thought, one I’ve indulged in on occasion. But this time, faced with a deep-water phobia and the demon wind drilling into my eardrums, I found myself commiserating more with merchant sailors and fishermen who have fought with nature over the millennia: dropping my litter into the sea, I cursed the nameless wind.

After two hours the invisible navigator enthusiastically announced that whales had been spotted and we raced to the site. When the boat halted a young woman came up from the back of the boat to view the three humpbacks. Her flat, bright green shoes reflected sunlight off their suede and gold embroidery.

“You might want,” I coughed, waggling my fingers at her feet, “you might want to move back. The sick bags leaked.” She looked down at her jeans dragging above the film of sludge, and jumped.

“Oh!” She ran back to the cabin, pausing only to flick a glare at us.

Even the most brutal wind cannot erase the reek of bile. My in-laws’ misery ensured we had the entire front deck to ourselves. Liz and Tony trembled their way to the railing. Three humpback whales cavorted in the sea.

“Oh,” whispered Liz in an entirely different tone of voice from the young woman, “oh, it’s wonderful. Fantastic!” she said a little louder as two whales exposed their tails in a dive. Inhaling stench along with the fierce fresh air, I looked at her, standing there in her now-creased linen, her face pale, thinking what a wimp I was compared to my determined, delighted mother-in-law. She wiped her watering eyes to peer through the sparkling waves at the whales, and laughed as another tail splashed down.

“Worth it, mum?” Ian asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, blinking. “Look at ‘im!” A flipper flapped the water. The boat rocked gently. Liz handed her camera to Tony. “I think I’ll sit down now, luv.” Tony handed the camera to Ian.

“I think I’ll sit down, too.” They shuddered against each other on a bench in the sunshine. Ian took pictures and I double-bagged several sick bags for the trip back. The wind, in one last slap, stole one out of my pocket and littered it into the sea.

Some days later, while researching ancient mythologies, I decided on a name for this malicious wind: I call it the Tiamat, named for a Babylonian goddess whose province included war, despair, and destruction. It couldn’t be coincidence that she was also the goddess of salt water.