What was your favorite place visited while researching for your book?
We are always asked that question, and our answer is always the same: It depends on the moment. I might be longing to wander the ancient walled city of Saint-Malo, France, and watch the 42-foot tide gather force until it pounds at the 10-foot-thick city walls before retreating along a golden beach. Chris might be missing the marine action of the Galapagos. From a land base (not liveaboard), he saw scalloped hammerheads, whitetip reef sharks, schools of tuna and barracuda, a squadron of mobula rays, a sea lion and a mola mola—all on a single dive.
But it changes. Five minutes later, we might be wanderlusty for another location or lost in another memory.
Travel is transformative. It gets under the skin, changing hearts and minds, revisiting us like an old friend when we least expect it to. And dive travel (or ocean travel) is no different.
A Remarkable Journey
Our book, A Diver’s Guide to the World: Remarkable Dive Travel Destinations Above and Beneath the Surface, was born from love—a love of travel and a love of the ocean, the blue expanse that covers more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface.
Although the land and sea are wonderfully and inextricably interconnected, travelers tend to visit one or the other. Scuba divers seek out underwater realms, impatiently counting down surface intervals until their next dive. Land-lovers might venture out for the occasional snorkel, but they’re glimpsing only a pixel of the bigger picture. Exploring both underwater and on land is the most holistic way of experiencing a destination—it’s seeing the complete picture, the best of both worlds.
Ours is a book for those explorations—for ocean travelers. It’s a different kind of guidebook, written for divers who like to travel, travelers with an interest in the underwater world or divers traveling with non-diving companions.
To create our book, we traveled to 50 locations in 35 countries over 14 continuous months, spending more than 250 hours underwater. At the start, we each had different experience levels. (Chris was an experienced diver; Carrie was brand new.) Learning to dive gifted me a new perspective; it made my world bigger. It also gave our book a point of difference: We’re writing for seasoned divers and new, inexperienced or out-of-practice divers. Our book contains some tried-and-true favorites like Mexico and the Bahamas, as well as some off-the-beaten-dive-track destinations, like Easter Island and Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
We take you on adventures with dragons and manta rays in Komodo. We ride horses in the opal-tinted Indian Ocean off Zanzibar, and linger in the land and sea gardens of Bormes-les-Mimosas, home to the first marine park in Europe and a stone’s throw from the glittering Cote d’Azur. We dive in with white sharks and whale sharks in Australia, and experience surf-and-turf safariing in South Africa.
