Kim, the shark lady, from Gansbaai, is doing for sharks what Disney did for lions.

While sharks are not easily rendered endearingly anthropomorphic, they are, nevertheless, one of evolution’s most successful experiments. One of the oldest living species on Earth, sharks have remained unchanged since the dawn of their creation. Probably because they have no enemies… other than Man. And his movies.

With mass hysteria, trophy hunters and shark nets taking their toll on this apex predator of the ocean’s ecosystem, South Africa was the first country to legislate protection in 1991. Today, it is the premier destination for close-up encounters with the Great White Shark.

Contrary to their man eating image, the Great White is a shy ,cautious and timid killing machine, Kim maintains, and incorrigibly inquisitive. “Its hands are its teeth.” Hence, I suppose the misunderstanding.

Kim, with her background in marine research, sought to bring the myth to the surface and in so doing pioneered another, characteristically South African, extreme sport.

Hermanus hugs one side of Walker Bay, Gansbaai the other. The sleepy shores and somnolent mountains of this old fishing village give little away about the nature of its real attraction – the heart-attack inducing pleasures of diving with the Great White Shark.

Dyer Island lies five nautical miles off the coast. Named, somewhat intriguingly, for an American guano collector named Samson Dyer, this spattered lump of rock is separated from its smaller twin by Shark Alley.

36 000 seals cluster on Geyser Island and in the winter months of June, July and August when the fish have fled for warmer seas, the sharks come in search of seal meat. And the intrepid come in search of adrenaline.

The channel between the two islands is relatively shallow offering close-up viewing from the 30 foot catamaran but for those with Open Water 1 and death defying compulsions, there is… The Cage. A ringside seat at shark level.

The historic South African town of Grahamstown was founded as a British fort in 1820 during the fierce frontier wars with the Xhosa tribes in what is now the Eastern Cape. In that year, twenty four ships from England left for Algoa Bay, their passengers lured by promises of free passage and prime agricultural land. Upon arrival, however, they learned that the Zuurveld wasn’t called the Sour Land for nothing. Moreover, they were to be a buffer between the warlike black tribes and the newly entrenched European colony.

The new arrivals duly swelled the colonial population until gold and diamonds were discovered inland and the town’s improving fortunes proved to be a flash in someone else’s pan.

Today, Grahamstown’s place on the map is assured by two things: Rhodes University and the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts held every year in July.

Little-known Grahamstown is a fitting setting for what started out as a celebration of South Africa’s English heritage only to become Africa’s largest Arts Festival. This is an event with a capital ‘E’. Only the Edinburgh Festival is bigger.

Upon arrival, the visitor could be in any 19th century English university town. Victorian houses, Gothic cathedrals, settler cottages and old English pubs help stage-manage the illusion. The erstwhile 1820 Settlers Monument squats in monolithic sandstone above the city, much like Edinburgh Castle.

There are other similarities between this African festival city and its more famous European cousin.

Edinburgh’s past is mirrored in its twisted cobbled streets; the unlikely stairs that erupt from innocent street corners and the arches and statues that adorn preserved Victorian tenements. Replace the cobbles with streets wide enough to turn an ox-wagon and you’ve got Grahamstown.

Known as the City of Saints for its many churches, the High Street is dominated by the Cathedral of St Michael and St George. The spire is the largest structure for miles around; its only rival, the giant pineapple in nearby Bathurst which leaves any sightseer in no doubt as to the principal farming crop in these parts. Prickly pears come a close second.

Pineapples and prima donnas may seem a strange brew but for ten heady days in July the rustle of books and tussle of harvest is upstaged by greasepaint and sequins. Here, upon this historical battleground, Europe and Africa collide, in a jarring, jostling, jamboree of Africa’s past and present. Here, too, the future is being forged. Don’t expect to get much sleep.

The Festival began in 1974 with sixty-four items including Shakespeare’s King Lear, the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, the opera, Cosi Fan Tutti and the prophetically entitled settler play, Take Root or Die. Indigenous contributions ran to art work from “coloured” schools in the Eastern Cape, Bushman, Okavango and Ovambo handicrafts from Windhoek State Museum and the Royal Lesotho Tapestry Weavers. The foreword to the first programme trumpeted, “You have come to celebrate the opening of a Monument designed to perpetuate our many-sided heritage.” In light of the government of the day, this was an ambitious undertaking.

The Cutting Edge multi-media exhibition at last year’s Festival was a forceful reminder of the repression of the past. Copies of the Government Gazette of those years list cultural bans on material as subversive as Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” album and Chris de Burgh’s “Spanish Train”; the musical “Hair” in its entirety and even the “Best of Bill Cosby.”

However, throughout those years the Festival attempted to remain true, to a greater or lesser extent, to its founding mission statement and somehow the soapboxes were tolerated. Pieter Dirk Uys, South Africa’s foremost satirist and unofficial “first lady” has been performing on the Festival since its earliest days. He remembers, “In the past the Festival always had free speech but it was risky.”

He waged a second war, in those early years, against Eurocentricity. “We were hippies, mavericks. The Festival was an arena to irritate.” The Festival’s twenty-fifth birthday last year marked a coming of age of his own. His five productions in the thousand-seater main auditorium were all sold out. “The edges move to the centre and a new fringe forms,” he comments, unmoved by mainstream success.

Twenty-five years on and a new-look country later, the Festival is not only a South African event but an international celebration of the arts – a veritable “supermarket of culture.” 1999 saw over four hundred events showcased on both the Main Festival and Fringe circuit with close on fifteen hundred performances taking place over the twelve days of festivities.

The new South Africa paraded its colours in productions like a South African Siddhartha, a stirring masala of Zulu, Xhosa and classical Indian dance with a dash of classical ballet. Continental Africa strutted its stuff with Ivory Coast puppet theatre, the Pan African Orchestra from Ghana and Ugandan New World Music. Street traders from Zimbabwe and Malawi and Tanzanian herbalists solicited business on the streets. International contributions ranged from a Sami throat singer from Lapland to Czech experimental theatre, the Netherlands Dance Company, French circus theatre and Andelusian flamenco.

Like the cosmopolitan content of the shows, the audiences too have become more colourful. Vignettes of the new South Africa are everywhere. Neatly uniformed high school kids, black and white, share an ice cream. A white woman walks by, coloured child draped over her shoulder. A barefoot street urchin rediscovers African rhythm on white hippie drums.

Yet at the camera obscura museum, we meet the local guide. The winding wooden stairs of the viewing turret has done little to reduce his comfortable shape in the last twelve years. According to him, “Nothing’s changed in twenty-five years.”

Up in the turret, watching real-life/ real-time reflections in a white convex bowl – High Street below and the townships on the outskirts – as people were doing in just this spot, a hundred years ago, I can believe him. Time, in Grahamstown, wouldn’t dream of running the lights.

Speak to a local artist, however about the changes time and a new dispensation has wrought on the Festival and you’ll get a different perspective. Lennox Faba is a man who grew up in the townships of Grahamstown and now sits on the Festival Board as an elected representative of the Grahamstown Central Forum for Arts and Culture. A choreographer of Xhosa traditional dance, among other things, his “Isizweni” recently won a Gold award at the national Eisteddefod.

The conditions in which he works are unthinkable to a western artist. He staggers his rehearsals in order to fit his dancers into the 2 to 3 metre rehearsal space which is all he has in which to work. Transport is also a problem from the carefully planned, far-flung townships to theatre venues in town. Often, he has to cadge lifts from obliging policemen, themselves also short of vehicles.

While he agrees that up until now the Festival has had little direct benefit for the local community and that it doesn’t yet reach into the townships, he is upbeat about the progress being made. “Before 1994″, he says, “there was no awareness of the Festival in Rini but it started generating interest with the advent of popular musicians like Bayete and Rebecca Molope.”

Now there is Dakawa, a business training ground and showcase for local artists; the Studio where the best of local stage-talent is spotlighted and the Playhouse Theatre’s free stage where township residents flock to watch traditional dancers in warrior skins pound out rhythms to make a white suburban madam blush.

In response to my question about change, Faba asserts, “The Festival has to have all the colours of the rainbow and the will is here, the commitment to make it more colourful and representative. I’ve never had a white friend before. Now, I’m beginning to have lots of white friends. The festival could become a unifying force in South Africa. Politicians have failed to unite the people but the Arts have done it.” “But, we need to make the Festival everyday. I have a vision of Rini in three years time where each and every citizen will be holding the Arts. It is our duty – the people who live here – to make sure the streets are buzzing.”

And for those two weeks in July, buzz they do.

Tens of thousands of visitors descend every year and the whole town is pressed into service. School and church halls, university residences and even car showrooms are used as venues for the art, music, drama, cabaret, films, lectures and workshops which vie for the limelight. Fly-by-night bistros spring up in schools, sandwich dens huddle under the Drostdy Arch, coffee shops bloom down side alleys and cafes spill onto the street.

Over on the Village Green, Woodstock lives on in the thousand stalls of the Craft Fair. This is tie-dye territory. Rain sticks and rain gods, fetishes and flares, buskers, bohemians and beggars abound.

The Rastas in their dreads and burlap are not keen to be photographed. Might that have something to do with that bulging sack? I wonder, but don’t ask. Manicured matrons are eclipsed by their teenage daughters in flowing tresses and face paint. Three township teenagers pose in front of some well-wheeled festival-goer’s prodigious Mercedes. Proceedings are called to a halt as one reaches for his sunglasses and applies the fininshing touch before the flash goes off.

Posters decorate every available space; they daub trees, walls and even the pavement underfoot. One house has put up its own posters pleading a case for its newly-painted walls. Miraculously, a week into the Festival and it remains unmolested. But not for long. By the next morning, the virgin canvas has been deflowered – the nocturnal ravisher, a spray-can artist known only as DOOG. Seditious creativity has long been the Festival’s speciality.

As for the future, in the words of sedition’s (and the new South Africa’s) chief proponent Pieter Dirk Uys, “If we don’t fall off the bus with a speed wobble, in five years time we’ll be the most amazing country in the world.” The same might be said of the Festival.

The first few times other drivers held their thumbs up as they passed I rather suspected a regional version of the traditional Italian palm to biceps gesture. I must confess that I babied my Bel Air, even though driving at the speed limit seemed rather odd. That’s the starting point on California freeways, but the classic old girl deserved the best. I had not checked oil with every fill up for a long time either. Each night I lovingly put the old girl’s top up; then carefully lowered it in the morning. That special “old car” feeling had started.

I had not enjoyed so much approval since I ran for High School office on a “less homework” platform. Parking attendants at the hotel insisted that I park in “celebrity slots” at the entrance where all who passed would stop and admire my classic wheels. Saturday night, I joined a group of professors from local colleges in the lounge. The main topic of conversation was “that great Chevy outside.” When I ever so casually mentioned it was mine to drive, and offered a ride, rarely have five adults over fifty moved so fast to gather jackets for a “cruise.”

We got more attention than kids with new sports cars. Later that evening, when I pulled into a 1940’s drive in for nostalgic shakes and malts, the owner refused my payment for a chocolate malt. He said, “Fifteen cars came in to see your convertible. Business was never better” When we left he was considering a rental of his own.

The reactions of other drivers in Orlando reinforced my lust for my own classic. One rather conservative looking fellow in a Continental offered to trade vehicles “even up.” When I declined he suggested he would “sweeten the deal with the kids in the back seat.”

Later that day, as I waited in the slow lane for the light to change a fellow in a new Camaro leaned across his wife and rolled down the window.

“My folks had a car light that before I was born.” he said.

“They still look great.”

The light changed. Then, as we waited, at the next light.

“I might have been conceived in the back seat.”

General laughter as he turned left, and I almost hit the bus at the stop across the intersection.

Some days the attention was a bit odd. When I returned from a fishing break at the lake in DisneyWorld, I found a white haired stranger polishing the fender of my Bel Air.

“Son,” he said, “You should never park a car like this under a tree. The sap spots the finish. You should buff off the dew marks too.”

He went on to tell me his name, Frank, and that his first new car was an identical model that he used to drive home his first son from the hospital. He kept the car long enough so the same son totaled it on prom night in 1975. When you’re fat and fifty “son” certainly sounds good. So I risked a loss of status and mentioned that the car was a rental from National.

“Son”, he snapped, “When do you take this baby back?”

“I catch an early flight out. About six tommorow morning, I suppose.” The next morning I got to Orlando Airport at five thirty. Frank, my new friend, had been waiting for a half an hour. As I left I heard him ask if he could keep the car out for a week. I found out later that he had waxed and polished it “for fun.”

Such strange behavior should be no surprise. It’s testimony for American’s love for their vehicles. As Bob Knapp, who owns a fine auto museum near San Diego noted, “I guess I have a particular fondness for the cars I lusted after when I was young.”

So I flew back across the country marshaling arguments I could use to convince my wife we really “needed” a classic Chevy like Harrison Ford’s 1955 from AMERICAN GRAFFITI or James Taylor’s in TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. Never, on a business trip, had I had so much fun just driving around.

So much fun, in fact, that my wife insisted we try a similar convertible on an assignment in Los Angeles and San Diego. I suspect she wondered a bit about my stories. We quickly named our bright orange Bel Air convertible, “Mandarin.” While it was not quite as well-detailed as my Orlando vehicle it certainly drew as much attention. When I drove into the lot at the Rose Bar and Grill, a 1940’s cafe in Pasadena that may serve the largest chicken salads in America, the car jockeys almost came to blows to see who would park the car.

When we dropped by the Rose Bowl, I’d last visited as a student in 1959, and a bus load of Japanese tourists must have shot twenty rolls of Fujichrome of our vehicle. My wife noted, “Now I know how celebrities feel. Buy a car like this and you are an instant star!”

Such a remark particularly suits Los Angeles where, more than any other city save possibly Detroit, cars, not cloths, make the man or woman. That’s no surprise if you consider the hours locals spend either tailgating at kamakazi speeds or grid locked on the drunken spaghetti tangle of local freeways. Drivers of an amazing variety of cars waved or honked their approval during the four days spent sunburning our noses with the top down.

Every stop drew a crowd. When we pulled off the Coast Highway in Malibu to review a bed and breakfast inn for an article the owner rushed out and exclaimed, “My God, that’s the exact car my first boyfriend had.” Then, after a embarrassed laugh and a pause, “He was a creep, but the car was a dream.”

When I drove into our favorite aunt’s driveway in Escondido, the woman across the street offered to pay me if I would let her sit in the car. When took her photograph in the driver’s seat she got tears in her eyes at the memory of her first car “fire engine red with black leather upholstery.”

Even blase’ film crews lust for old cars. We stayed at a historic B&B in the Eastlake District of Los Angeles near Dodger Stadium where a great many movies are filmed. When I passed a film crew everything stopped. Crew, director and cast all came inspect the car. One of the police there from crowd control offered “$3, 000 cash.” When he found out it was a rental he thought a bit and noted, “I think I’ll rent one, leave the kids home and take my wife to the drive-in next week.”

In Malibu, I barely parked in front of the B&B we came to review when the owner came firing out the door. “What a great car, ” she said, “My first boy friend had one.” Then with after a pause, she continued, “He was a creep, but the car was wonderful.

I did discover you need to allow extra time when you drive a classic conversation car. When I parked at the historic Del Coronado across the bay from San Diego for a memorable Sunday brunch, it took twenty minutes to escape the crowd that gathered to admire our car. A brand new convertible in the next parking slot got little attention. A surprising number of those who commented had owned either owned, or lusted after, Bel Airs. All remembered them fondly.

Over the years we’ve stayed in flats, homes, villas, castles, inns, boats, barges and a host of other spots where your corner pub or bar owner or cook may not speak English and shopping’s a bike ride down the road. I’ve tried houseboats in Kashmir and huts over the ocean in Bali; and shivered out a day in a villa outside Paris when we discovered the furnace didn’t work, but the owners more than repaid us with pasta making lessons. There have been villas with ghosts, leaks, pools — one with an alligator and more with salamanders — and even a barge where we parked our bikes on the bank and woke up 10 miles down a canal. Fortunately, the barge skipper stuck the bikes on the bow deck.

Most of the larger villas offered up to eight or nine apartments, pools, private fireplaces and more history than most American towns. Some places we booked on our own were dumps. Other lodgings are treasures. Our favorite might be a ground floor flat in London where double French doors opened to a private garden. Then there was a converted stable in Paris where you awoke to the smell of fresh bread, an old mill outside Brussels with the rustle of the millrace to ease you to sleep, rooms in a gatehouse on a Yorkshire estate that smelled of new hay and where pheasants cackled, and a winter sunrise over Czarist Palace near St. Petersburg where I discovered the dubious joys of pepper vodka.

Such delights enchant one beyond description if you earn them with a tolerant attitude about the proximity of showers or baths to sleeping quarters. Such seems a fair exchange for ocean or vineyard views and walls so old they had moss before Columbus left Italy for Spain.

Some spots come with characters for plays unwritten. Such experiences put you in touch with another culture in a way no city hotel or guided tour affords. Finally, I suppose, they provide you with a batch of stories to entertain your acquaintances, bore your family and entertain you in your old age — like the daughter of a British hostess who, after I broke my foot, spend three days exploring the range of possible crisp –potato chips to Americans– flavors. They stopped at 43! You can reach out and become a traveler. You don’t need much of a foreign language. Do adjust your expectations to that of the locals — for example, Italians have, on the whole, a rather cavalier attitude toward plumbing, Germans go bananas when mechanical bits and pieces don’t work and the French get extremely testy about food failures. The British seem to muddle through no matter what. Relax, it’s only a week, just enjoy your visit as a tourist or traveler and you’ll have many nice memories to cherish.

I started canoeing years ago. Today, my wife and I pack our canoe with camping gear and enjoy remote boaters-only campsites. We paddle or sail to prime spots to fish rivers and lakes. I add a camo cover and shoot ducks and geese from our boat. When tides ebb we canoe to clam flats. In the spring we often spend an afternoon floating down moderately frisky whitewater. Even a short trip across the lake in the front of our home to a shore picnic more than repays our effort. Best of all, we pay no slip rentals, and need neither a boat trailer nor a launch ramp as we launch and retrieve our canoe down banks without much trouble.

You can learn to paddle on a lake to gain confidence, but after you master basic paddle strokes, move to rivers where currents do 80 percent of the work. You can plan tidewater and flatwater trips so you take advantage of tides and/or winds.

Try to start on a nice 75 to 80 degree F day, on water at least 60 F degrees, so you stay warm and comfortable. Note: safety experts say you need wet suits if the sum of the air and water temperature isn’t at least 100 degrees.

Once you locate or reserve a canoe, pick paddles long enough to come up to your armpit while you stand — paddles run short at rental agencies so you need to search — to more easily reach the water. Note: before you buy single paddles for your own use, try double paddles which get you there faster and seem easier to use.

Make certain that you have and wear the life jackets its now politically correct to call “Personal Floatation Devices” or PFDs. Frankly, life jackets tells a better story. Sit on flotation cushions to pamper posteriors if you like, but wear life vests or jackets. Children need special jackets with straps under the legs or other attachment arrangements. It is lots easier to fish out gear in case of an upset if a jacket keeps you afloat!

A good way to see this is to deliberately dump empty canoes in warm water on warm days to practice getting back into and emptying water out of the canoe. Pick a calm spot with little current upstream from a shallow. Realize that, in current, you should always be on the upstream side of your canoe so you do not get caught between the proverbial rock and hard spot.

Do cover up. Sun reflects off the water and the bright inside of the typical aluminum rental canoe and those who wear bathing suits or shorts fry fast! Long sleeve shirts and long pants, a broad brim hat and tennis shoes — bare feet mean bone bruises when you hop in and out of your canoe — do the job. Add a windbreaker if you plan an all day trip and always bring bug dope. We find Ben’s 100 and other 100 percent DEET effective. Add an extra set of dry shoes and socks — a complete change of clothing if pessimistic! — and you are just about set.

Bring a lunch to break up a three or four hour trip during the middle of the day when the weather’s warm. A small ice chest — we like the new Coleman model — tied into the canoe keeps things dry even in the unlikely case of an upset. You might want to add a short length of line, just in case you want to tie up or an anchor if you plan to fish.

Try to start around nine or ten in the morning when the weather’s warm. On moving water figure three to four hours actual paddling time. Most beginners paddle a mile or two an hour and you can add another mile or two per hour for the current on rivers. Don’t forget to add in time to portage or enjoy lunch or fishing breaks. The key to first day enjoyment seems minimal effort for maximum fun so a short route seems best.

Do realize that the key to upright canoeing remains a low center of gravity. If you sit on the bottom of a canoe it’s almost impossible to upset it. If you kneel — a padded cushion protects knees — your center of gravity is lower than if you sit on the seat.

However, upsets are not likely if you gradually build skills. For example, like many long-time canoeists who fish, I sometimes stand to flycast and to pole my Coleman Scanoe® upstream on fastwater. Poling, a traditional east coast method, moves a canoe upstream faster than paddles, but it requires special skills best learned by more experienced canoeists. Don’t try this to start!!

Two paddlers fit canoes best; three’s a crowd but you can stash kids or duffel amidships. If you plan to paddle a canoe alone, sit facing the rear on the front seat and you keep the center of gravity more in the center of the boat. You may need to add a rock or full water container at the opposite end of the boat for balance even here.

Don’t get too ambitious to start. A slow stroke, pause, stroke glides you farther for the same amount of effort. Try paddling in a straight line and some easy strokes to each side. You will find two should paddle on opposite sides of the boat and that changing sides from time to time reduces arm fatigue.

As a rule the “captain” sits in the stern and adjusts his or her stroke to the bow paddler who’s responsible for noting underwater hazards. TIP: if traveling downriver, put the heaviest paddler in the bow so the canoe stays in line with the current.

If you take these simple measures, review a canoeing book if you have time and start your first trips with rental craft on safe waters, there’s little question but that you might want to own your own gear. Tip: try lots of rentals first. Consider canoe classes at your local YMCA, think about joining the your national Canoe Association or your local canoe club and you can learn skills that let you paddle a canoe for years. How long? I regularly share downriver trips with a couple in their late 60’s! With the canoe carrying the load you can relax and enjoy, that’s the reason you should find you too can canoe.

Once you’ve mastered the basics all sorts of opportunities open. You can use canoes as fishing or hunting tools, as a means to get to isolated camping spots on the other side of a lake or down the river. You can travel hundreds, even thousands of miles. You can learn to sail canoes. You can race canoes in flat or moving water. We’ve even used “Canogagons” to race down ski slopes, but injuries and insurance regulations killed that. You can, however, learn to pole canoes upstream instead of portaging them. Canoes are, after all, one of the most efficient watercraft anywhere. Models in wood, hide, canvas, aluminum, kevlar, Ram-X and other materials exotic or historic are found all over the world. There’s a good reason for that. You’ll see it if you, too, try a canoe.

Good Reading

INTRODUCTION TO CANOEING; Angier & Taylor; good inexpensive introduction. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of canoe guides to easy waters world wide.

Picnic baskets packed with fresh French bread, spicy sausages, aromatic cheeses and fruit not long from the tree once made travelers’ meals memorable. As did that rusted crab shack half-way to the summer cabin where steamed clams came in huge galvanized buckets, or the cafe’ in a one gas station village that served spoon-thick chocolate malts with hamburgers so juicy that Mom had to remind Dad to ask for extra napkins. Today, few prepare their own boulevard baskets. Few leave the freeways to savor local specialties. Instead, we rely on golden arches and orange roofs for safe, if boring, instant meals that vary little across the country.
There are alternatives. Baskets filled with fresh, home-made or deli foods let you eat what you like where you like with less salt, sugar, fat and empty calories.

Packing meals for the road isn’t difficult, and given the trend of airline meals, works nicely for fliers too. Finger foods should appeal when hot, warm or cold. Sandwiches delight when made with crisp French rolls or special breads and stuffed with succulent fillings.

Rather not cook? The gastronomic riches of the world lure at delis, markets or food halls where you can sample as you shop for Italian salami, German sausage, Greek olives, tub-fresh kosher dill pickles or French Brie and other cheeses, which Clifton Fadiman called “Milk’s leap towards immortality.”

Split a French or Kaiser roll or nip the top off a round of Pita bread that embraces sandwich ingredients securely to reduce the chance of spills. Then layer imported Blue, Fontina or Stilton cheese and slices of salami or pastrami with a thin sliced tomato and, for the brave, sliced red onions. Try a sprinkle of wine vinegar and a dash of olive oil instead of mayonnaise and mustard. Assemble sandwiches at the last minute so ingredients stay fresh.

Worthwhile alternatives to sandwiches include red and green apples chilled in a cooler and served with slices of Cheddar or Brie, crackers and other deli treats. For a Ploughman’s lunch — British Tourism’s dubious, if delicious, contribution to ersatz tourist food, add a “real” deli pickle. Or try slices of melon wrapped in proscuito or Smithfield ham.

Chicken has ranked high as vehicle vittles from carriage days when Henry IV of France said “I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he is unable to have a chicken in his pot on Sundays.”

You can buy a whole roasted chicken and portion it in the car; deep fat fried chicken has its fans. We like the chicken served at mom and pop cafes throughout the south best.

Chicken also works well in pasties, a traditional Welsh dish, often eaten underground by hungry miners. You can find these and Russian or Polish piroghis — the spelling varies — are available at many delis today. They microwave beautifully and a rather odd friend of ours even heats his on his engine!

While these delights can be eaten as you drive — at least by careful eaters or those who favor washable clothing — you might add checkered cloth for stops at roadside rests or scenic shore vistas and enjoy a picnic break before you continue. Just add bug spray to your usual picnic tools, which should include a knife, spoon and fork, packets of salt, pepper, mustard, mayonnaise or malt vinegar and napkins, plates and other needed utensils.

Offshore Street Food

After you practice in your country of residence, you’re ready for trips abroad. We favor English food halls for hunter’s pies to take into St. James Park. We try Brazilian stands — salty but good — or go for the al fresco offerings of Quebec’s cafes or the vendors that hang about Japanese parks. All of these, like New York City hot dog stands, flaffel stands everywhere or the classic vendors of hot chestnuts put you in touch with the people’s food of a region or country in a way those that stick to tourist hotels and upscale restaurants never know.

However, while a fancy British basket with willow pattern china looks attractive and might suit a polo match or a cricket game, an inexpensive cooler keeps food fresh and drinks cool. Tip: wet extra paper napkins before you leave home and seal them in a large zip-lock bag until you need the napkins for cleanup. Use the bag to store garbage until you reach a disposal area.

Rain need not drive you to chain food. You can also capture the flavor of the area at roadside fruit stands, crab or lobster shacks and local restaurants. Home-made chilled apple cider quaffed just feet from the press ranks with finest wine. When Mark Twain said, “When one has tasted watermelons one knows what angels eat.” You know he wasn’t talking about a plastic wrapped melon! For no corn is sweeter than that fresh from the field and slathered with butter, and no clam or lobster tastes better than those hot from steaming saltwater.

If you find stands too casual, local cafes and restaurants offer their own delights. Check listings in regional guidebooks, magazine articles and AAA ratings. Ask friends, that’s how we discovered our favorite lobster shack at the right side of the causeway over the bay to Arcadia National Park.

Truckers Don’t

Don’t eat where truck drivers shoal; they seek parking first, but it’s worth noting that truck stop food has improved considerably and most big stops even offer salad bars. Portions of generally plain, and sometimes wonderful regional foods, are liberal too.

Instead, look for local licenses on parked cars at mealtimes. Stop and send a scout in. Good cafes and restaurants can be tattered, but clean, and still have that distinctive fresh kitchen smell.

As is the case with restaurant exteriors, don’t rely too much on the look of food. For as James Thurber noted, “Looks can be deceiving — it’s eating that’s believing.” Every wonder what hero first ate raw oysters?

Of course, there is always risk if you stray from chain meals. In gastronomic wastelands in some parts of the West where there’s only one cafe in town the safe thing to do is order steak and eggs or pancake breakfasts three meals a day. But good food is worth the search and the risk of disappointment. As Oscar Wilde noted “After a good dinner, one can forgive anyone, even one’s own relations.” Such may be quite necessary after a long day on the road or several hours of airline food!

Travel literature is different from guidebooks in that the author’s voice and eye is your guide. The emphasis is not on listing the best hotels and restaurants, but on the personal travel experience and its meaning.

In the past when you went to the travel section of a bookstore, the best travel literature was lumped in and hidden among the guidebooks. But now that literary travel books are becoming hot in the publishing world, bookstores are starting to wise up and have a separate section for travel literature. In 1987, there was an upsurge of travel book stores. There are now more than 200 specialty travel book stores in the U.S.

What to look for? Well, fact is most of the great writers traveled. After all, what is traveling but exploring, and what is a writer, but an explorer? To name a few: Evelyn waugh, Graham Green, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Lawrence Durrell have all leant their knowing eyes to travel and to capture the soul of other countries.

The following is a list of this writer’s favorite travel books:
A Taste for Travel, John Julius Norwich. A great anthology of travel writing.
Rodeo, Cunninghame Graham. An excellent but rarely read British writer whose travel accounts excel.
Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain. A hilarious account of his travels with a group of Baptists going to the Holy Land.
Eothan, Elexander Kinglake. On the near east, this is what a travel book should be.
Riding the Iron Rooster, and Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux. Two excellent books by America’s premiere current travel writer.
The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt. This anthology gives us the wonderful stories of the great English women travelers, such as Mary Kingsley and Dame Freya Stark.
West of the Night, Beryl Markham. An Englishwoman raised in Kenya, a friend of Isak Denison and a bush pilot, Markham’s story is extraordinary and poetic.
Tschiffely’s Ride, A. F. Tschiffely. 10,000 miles on horseback, across mountain and desert, jungle and swamp, from Argentina to New York City. When other adventure stories have turned to mold, this will still be read. For both spirit and amazing travel feat, this book is eternal.
The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller. Unlike anything else ever written about Greece, this book is incandescent with the author’s feeling for a great people and their past.
Traveller Through Time, Freya Stark. A photographic collection of the work of the fearless and indomitable Dame Stark, who traveled alone in Arabia where few foreigners, even men, had dared to venture.
Cities, Journeys, Spain, and Oxford, Jan Morris. Jan Morris has a fine and discerning eye for the unique place.
Holidays in Hell, P. J. O’Rourke. A funny compilation of worst trips – and Mr. O’Rourke’s trips, if you know his writing, are rather unusual anyway.

And also:
Under a Sickle Moon, P. Hodson
In Bolivia, Eric Lawler
Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy
and any books by these excellent women explorer/authors:
Dervla Murphy (biked Egypt and the Nile)
Bettina Selby (biked Pakistan to Nepal) and
Christina Dotwell (traveled Turkey on horseback)

These books will take you to the best of foreign worlds with a good read if you’re an armchair traveler – and then make you want to get up and go there.

A good portion of the diving here is in the Coral beach national reserve about ten minutes by bus or cab south of Eilat where you need to bring gear as only snorkel gear is available for rent. So as soon as you arrive in the area make reservations and organize tanks and such at one of the many dive centers. Do realize you can only enter and leave the water at specific point to avoid damaging the coral and, of course, submarine souvenirs are not allowed. Many snorkel here, as the water’s only 30 to 50 feet deep. There are two dive centers, Aqua Sport and the Red Sea Sport Club just a couple of hundred yards from the north end of the beach.

There’s a nice Eel Garden right in front of Aqua-sport that are in the nature of pets, so don’t molest them as they slide into and out of holes.

Perhaps the most interesting dive is at Dolphin Reef where nine or ten dolphins are willing to have tummies rubbed and suffer other indignities. One of these friendly creatures even works with the underwater rescue team. Others fool around with divers, frolic in bubbles and offer playful bumps and, for dummies to stick their hand in the dolphin’s mouth, painful nips. At about $58.50 for adults and $56.50 for children this is excellent value if you consider the duration of the memory.

This is a full-service operation with changing rooms, showers, a restaurant, rental gear and a lot more. Scuba and special Nitrox courses, even diving trips to the almost totally untouched waters of Sinai and Jordan are available. The only drawback here is that dives are strictly timed in groups of six, and this is an understandable way to avoid overwhelming the dolphins.

If you like underwater caves head south of town to the lighthouse where Lighthouse Caves are located. This is wonderful snorkel country as the waters only 15 to 20 feet deep. It’s also a killer spot to night dive, if you let the locals at Diver’s Village know you’re there. Otherwise you may find yourself on the wrong end of an Uzi. As is the case with airport security, the Israeli’s take potential terrorists very seriously. Far as that goes, trespassing into reserves and other out of bounds areas may bring Israeli frogmen down you and a potential $100 fine.

To do all this without getting wet or to simply see a reef site well “seeded” by the Marine Institute, try the Underwater Observatory. It’s a good first stop for some basic Red Sea fish ID and they’ve specimens of very rare fish not usually seen.

On the certification side, Israel is unique. They accept CMAS, NAUI, PADI, BSAC, ANDI and the usual alphabet soup of certifications. Dives with transport vary from $23 to $54 for one or two dives. A PADI/ CMAS or BSAC open water dive course runs about $275 for five days with tanks and your snorkel, fins and mask — rentals available. Advanced courses, specialized wreck, night, reef, boat or underwater navigation course for two days run about $200. Those who don’t dive might want to try a $40 SNUBA introduction.

NOTE: If it’s your only visit to Israel, make sure to check out Petra in Jordan and the religious sites, and then head for the Med where a batch of sites wait. As in Eilat prices seem reasonable. A two-tank dive day with rental gear might run $35 US. Boat dives add about $10 — the trip over to the Coral Island with the Red Sea Dive Club is good value. Hotel rooms run from $50 to $100 and food costs are very affordable if you stay with the local produce, fish and other Israeli items.

It started out innocently enough. I chose to take my first stab at fly fishing with Mama because she was a Bass Master of the First Order, the Blood Bait Queen of my youth. But at the age of seventy-two, Mama discovered fly fishing, and as usual, she took something complicated and learned it in about three weeks. Face it, for a woman who took eleven years of Latin in Charleston, South Carolina, anything is easy.

At first she had been skeptical.

“Buncha little snots,” she’d remark about fly fishermen. “Effete elitist purists,” she’d add.

Then one day she was forced to stop at a little specialty angling shop instead of her usual Live Bait Marina. It was the kind of place that displays fly fishing ensembles and the only reason she went in there was to look for a particular fishing book.

Mama stood there in the front of the store with her calico mane flying and took in the woven creels, leather belts, fifty-dollar floppy fishing hats, and six-hundred-dollar graphite rods.

“HEY!” she shouted. “What kind of foo foo fish shop is this?”

Several customers looked around at her and a pony-tailed young man wearing a very expensive fly fishing shirt with a little fly and hook embroidered on its breast pocket rushed forward.

“Yes, ma’am? May I help you?” he asked. “Where the hell are your foo foo fish books, young man?” She looked him up and down, then jabbed his chest with one big-knuckled forefinger.

“Young man, you have feathers embroidered on your chest. Just what does that mean?”

He stammered and opened his mouth.

“Nevermind!” she interrupted. “I don’t want to know. Hey, here it is.” She reached behind a polished wood counter and pulled out the book she sought.

To make a long story short, Mama and the young man got into a conversation, most of which consisted of her railing about how none of her daughters could fish worth a plugged nickel. The young man turned out to be John Tavenner, a well-respected fly fishing guide from Santa Fe who pulls trout regularly out of the Rio Grande, which hardly anyone could consider a trout stream. He showed my mother boxes of thousands of flies he’d carefully constructed out of chicken necks, hare’s ears, and the like. He was twenty-eight but had started fly fishing with his father at the age of twelve.

As happens often to those who meet my mother, Tavenner became intrigued. Mama has a blunt exterior, but you never doubt she’s a lady. A Southern lady, at that. Her piercing china-blue eyes shine with intelligence and interest . . . she simply exudes life. The two began to talk fishing, and it wasn’t long before Tavenner invited her to attend one of his fly fishing clinics. And that was that. She was the best he’d ever instructed, he told me later. She had the knack.

Working relentlessly, Mama became an expert in about four months, then a total convert. There is nothing worse than a convert, you know, and the next summer she all but forced me to join her and Tavenner at the bottom end of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River known for its gold-medal waters. We camped in a delightful overhang of cliffs, where the river was crystal clear and lively and the rapids abundant.

On our first day out, I watched Tavenner land and release one rainbow trout after another. He approached fly fishing as kind of a cross between religion and reincarnation.

“You need to become the fish,” he explained excitedly to me. “You visualize what the fish wants, not what you want. You let your intuitive side override the thinking part of your brain.”

“Right-brained fishing?” I inquired.

He considered a moment. “Yes. You’re triggering their fish archetypes which have evolved over generations to strike at a certain object. So you have to be intuitive to anticipate what they want. Thinking is a slowing-down process. Action and reaction. That’s why it’s spiritual.”

“So what’s the first commandment?” I asked.

“Presentation,” he replied. “Presentation is everything.”

“Ah,” I nodded knowingly, not having the faintest clue what he meant. But I learned.

The Gunnison happens to be perfect for trout. It is not just one river, but a series of them layered into a single, sometimes chaotic unit. At the bottom is the river of sand, then there is the river of water above, and above that a river of air. Within those three are the rivers of life: the snails, insects, snakes, frogs, cephalopods, nutria, beaver, otter, and then the eagles and ospreys that swoop down to snatch the top of the water food chain, the trout.

Trout, as everyone knows, are wily, skitterish and fine-tasting. They are the highest predator in the river, except for the fly fishermen, who attempt to imitate what the trout are eating, often at great trouble and expense, and talk about the “hatches” as if they were Saint’s Days. It so happened that the Gunnison had just seen one of the biggest hatches of stone flies, and as a result the trout had “shoulders.” Anyway, that’s what Mama told me.

“How can a trout have shoulders?” I asked. “They don’t even have necks.”

“They’re hogs,” she replied. “Fat and sassy.” Mama goes for only two kinds of fish, hogs and lunkers. These are left-over terms from her bass days, and they’re self-explanatory.

Of course, fly fishing has a language of its own — a litany as oblique as any service in Latin. Tavenner was well-versed in the arcane terminology. He spoke to us of P.M.D., which at first I assumed was some kind of insect P.M.S., a femme fly in a nasty mood. It turned out to be a Pale Morning Dun. I was relieved P.M.S. had not invaded the bug world.

Later he announced that he was going out nymphing and invited us to come along. Visions of young things flitting through the wild Colorado woods, with Tavenner, his ponytail flapping, in hot pursuit raced through my mind.

“I’ll be using a common nymph,” he added, as if in explanation. Dang it, I thought, there’s vulgar ones. Then he talked about the prince. I thought the prince would probably be the one after the nymphs, but no, this guy’s made of green hare’s ear, imitating an emerging caddis. Only a trout would go for a green hairy fake prince, I thought. No, wait a minute, I’ve dated a few of those myself.

“Of course, we could use the Girdle Bitch,” Mama suggested helpfully.

“What!” I exclaimed, summoning from the past nightmarish visions of my large aunts with too-tight corsets under their cotton dresses spraddled over lawn chairs in the shade after too much pecan pie at our family reunions. Seeing my expression, Mama explained that a Girdle Bitch was just another fly — a Bitch Creek Nymph with Spandex legs. Even the explanations were surreal.

“A lot of people don’t tie Girdle Bitches with Spandex legs, but I do,” Mama said proudly. “They’re ugly, but I’ve caught fish on them.”

I took her word for it.

Naturally, I made all the first-timer faux pas on our initial foray to the river.

In fact, the list of my sins is excruciatingly extensive:

1. I called the custom-built, monographed, nine-foot, lightweight, five-hundred-dollar graphite fly rod Tavenner let me use, a “pole.” “Lemme see that pole,” I said cheerfully. His face contorted in pain.

2. I asked Tavenner why he didn’t have “a bigger bobber.” “That’s a strike indicator,” he informed me, his voice dripping disgust.

3. I put my arms inside my chest-waders. (I was trying to pull up my socks.)

4. I fell over in the rushing water with both my arms inside my chest-waders. I needn’t tell you how bad a mistake that was. The river ran over me. Baptized me. In the name of the Mother, the Sun, and the Holy Float. It would have drowned me, too, if Tavenner hadn’t caught me as I washed downstream and dragged me to shore by my suspenders.

5. I hooked my hair, my leg, my backside. Mama and Tavener moved several hundred paces upriver from me.

6. I fished with moss. “Clean the moss off your fly every second cast, why don’t you, honey?” suggested Mama in a kindly fashion, after noticing my half-hour’s moss-casting.

7. I forgot to look at the strike indicator. I was too occupied watching my mother jerking in hogs and lunkers repeatedly. Suddenly, I had a strike myself, but the fish was gone in a flash when I didn’t set the hook.

8. When we rafted downstream to fish the riffles, I actually succeeded in hooking and landing a rainbow trout, but got so excited I fell out of the boat onto my fish. It swished a lot under me. Scared me. Scared the fish, too, no doubt. I could be the only fisherman who has ever squashed her fish in the water.

But for all these transgressions and more, I did penance. All fly fishermen do, whether they sin or not. Standing in freezing water for long periods of time: that’s the flagellation part of the religion. When I got to where I enjoyed it, I began to worry.

Mama, however, had risen to a higher plane, Cardinal status at least, if not exactly Joan of Arc. She cut an intriguing figure out on the river, constantly moving with the smooth, fluid motion of an expert caster. It was meditational. Every once in a while the rhythm would be interrupted with an abrupt yelp, which meant she’d caught another lunker with shoulders.

All this spirituality hadn’t been free, of course. Like all sects, this one included tithing. Why, one rooster neck for making flies is forty dollars, and one packet of green hare’s ear hair, twelve bucks. And when you add to it the state-of-the-art graphite rods, reels, vests, waders, hats, bags, nets, and so on, it makes you gasp.

Yet the most unique item Tavenner had sold to my mother, which she wore around her neck like a vestment and never removed, was the least expensive. This was the fisherman’s tool lanyard, a tool originally used for bait rigging while fishing offshore, but adapted for fly fishermen. It’s particularly advantageous for deep-river waders and floaters because all the tools you need are visible and securely fastened on a lanyard around your neck, handier than having to dig through a tackle box or vest.

The typical setup includes a Swiss army knife or small scissors to cut line, hemostats to remove hooks, small needle-nose pliers to debarb hooks, a leader straightener, a leader sink, silicone floatant, a hook file, and finally, a stomach pump.

This last item was a revelation. I’ve seen some pretty outrageous things done in the name of sport, like whacking off bull parts in Spain, but trout stomach pumping has to be at the top. With the first trout Mama caught, she, without warning, began to suck all the insides out of the thing.

“What are you doing to that fish?” I shouted, making her leap in alarm.

“Pumping out the little bugger’s belly,” she replied nonchalantly. “You have to see what they’re eating, you know,” she added instructively.

I hadn’t known that. “There must be a better way,” I insisted.

She examined the green stuff in the tube. “Shoot, nothing but moss,” she muttered and dropped the dripping mess onto her shirt front, where the stain spread.

“Think I’ll get another cup of coffee,” I gagged.

You can renounce all these worldly goods and take your fly fishing back to its simplest state, as the ascetics do in any religion. For instance, Tavenner told us about a client he’d once guided on the river who fished with spines from the barrel cactus with a fly tied on. This man, Tavenner said, had explored the length and breadth of fly fishing and discovered its pure, natural form.

“That’s the largest wad of horse crap I ever heard,” Mama exclaimed, staring at Tavenner. She was about to say something else, but just then one of those Amazing But True Fish Things happened. I got a strike, a good one. All of us turned our attention to the end of my line. The fish dived straight down, then shot straight up, hit the water, and flew several feet into the air. It was so fast, I couldn’t keep the tension on my line. The huge rainbow coiled high in the air for a moment, glistening, poised, droplets of water spraying outward and catching the sun. Then, facing its hunter, the fish turned and spat the fly out in my face. It was well-timed and altogether amazing. I heard Mama laugh.

“That fish has been in this game before,” she remarked drolly.

“That fish just made my trip,” I sighed lightly with satisfaction. Gazing at the rippling water, I reflected, “It’s funny, but in all my years of fishing, the ones I remember most are the big ones I’ve lost.”

And somehow, that seemed a perfect benediction for the day.