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The Dordogne River flows through some of the finest country of southern France. Truffles, cep mushrooms and wild pigs occur in the woods, while huge catfish and pike lurk in the slow eddies of the river. Photo courtesy of Flickr user davidmartinpro.

Ernest Hemingway popularized the cosmopolitan lifestyle of idleness, coffee shops and people-watching on the noisy boulevards of Paris. The author wrote some decent books in the process, but I still think Hemingway missed out every day that he wasn’t walking or cycling through the forested hills of the Périgord, the large agrarian region just east of Bordeaux and north of Spain and famed for its wild truffles, cottage fois gras industry and pre-modern cave art. There is a cafe here in the village of Saint Julien de Lampon, where we have a house for a week, and we can sit there if we like, watching the church tower and the villagers coming and going from the butcher shop, but I’ve got better ideas for the next six weeks that I’ll be traveling here, like these:

Search the shallows for pike. They’re as big as logs, mean as crocs and hungry as bears: northern pike. These spectacular predators eat ducks and rodents and will attack other fish their own size or greater, and they live in the Dordogne River. In his college days, my dad spent some time canoeing in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, where he and the boys went skinny dipping in pike-populated waters and jokingly called it trolling. Here, I’m keeping my shorts on when I go swimming. Probably the best way to see a pike is to peer off bridges into the slow current or stalk along the bank while watching the sloughs and backwaters for what seem to be submerged logs drifting upstream. I’ve already seen several near the village. Climbing out on horizontally leaning tree trucks and looking straight down on a slow pool for 30 minutes is a good method—and when you see one of these monsters drift past in the Dordogne, you can be sure that you’ve met the king. Or maybe you haven’t—because we just read in the papers that a local angler caught a 100-pound wels catfish recently, and the wels isn’t just a duck-eater; supposedly, it has swallowed children.

Ride a bicycle. They’ll hit you with extra luggage fees at the airport for daring to bring a bike overseas (and if you’re especially lucky, like me, they’ll leave it in London overnight), but once you’re rolling on the solid ground of France, a bicycle will set you free. A vast network of small, smaller and smallest roadways crisscrosses the nation. Many are paved paths hardly wide enough for a Fiat that lead through the woods and past forgotten farm houses and crumbling chateaus, along rivers and up mountainsides. Forget your map and just keep rolling–and if the road turns to dirt, don’t stop. It may even disintegrate into a rutted wagon trail or footpath, but almost without fail, just when you thought maybe you were in fact lost, the trail will dump you out again onto the highway. In this scheme of exploration, there is rarely backtracking or getting truly lost. Instead, one becomes familiar with a rare but thrilling déjà vu sensation—after a hungry day of pedaling in circles on unmapped roads—of winding up by accident right back again where you started.

Walk into a Cave. People have been doing it for millennia here, and in many nearby grottoes the paintings of pre-modern people remain on the walls. My nephew, who is seven, can paint better than they did, but to see bison, mammoths and bears scrawled by human hands 150 centuries ago is an awesome reminder of the reality of a history most of us only know from textbooks. The Lascaux, Pech Merle and Cougnac caves are three of the most famous. Lascaux, closed to the public, is only viewable via a reproduction of the original art, while at Pech Merle, you can see the real thing—plus animal bones and human footprints.

Tour the farmers markets. French chefs have taken crocks of credit over the years for wowing diners with their classic sauces, bricks of pate, rustic soups, wild game and pastries—but let’s face it: It’s the open air farmers markets where French food really comes from. Even the tiniest villages here host weekly assemblies of gritty-fingered peasants selling their cherries, beets, potatoes, walnuts, berries and greens. In Saint Julien there is a regular paella vendor, and makers of cheese, sausage, fois gras and wine do business here, too. Yeah, you could eat yourself ill at any local restaurant, where roughage from the garden and stewed potatoes soak in butter and duck fat. I say forget dining out, because no meal here is more gratifying than one cooked at home from a canvas sack of market goodies and eaten on the lawn until the sun sets at 10. The Saint Julien market arrives each Thursday. Souillac’s market is Friday. Sarlat, the nearest big town, has its market on Saturdays and Wednesdays. In, Gourdon, a medieval town on a hilltop, market days are Saturday and Tuesday.

American tourists negotiate for fois gras---or fatty duck liver---at the Saint Julien farmers market. Photo by Alastair Bland.

Buy bulk wine in a plastic jug. Fine restaurants in America are now serving wine on tap for $4 a taste, but in reasonable France, they’ve been selling table wine in bulk for ages. In the rear shadows of many wine  shops (behind all the labeled commercial bottles), you’ll find a spigot coming off a barrel of some local plonk, offering perfectly decent if cheap wine by the pint, liter or gallon. Fill your jug, screw on the cap and go find a bench along the bike path or a grassy knoll above the river.

Hunt the cep. Europe’s favorite wild mushroom floats in three sing-song syllables off the tongues of Italians, but in France, the porcini is just the cep. No matter. This renowned mushroom is the same across all Old World borders—fat pig-like stumps with white stems and tawny brown caps that bulge from the leaf litter beneath chestnut trees. That blue and beaten-up Renault parked at the edge of the forest? That’s probably a cep hunter’s. Follow quietly, track him down and discover his secret patches. Better not collect your own unless you really know your shrooms, but there’s no harm in taking a walk in the woods—though you’re wasting your time if you look up. Other fungi hunting opportunities: Its season is the winter, and if you come here in December, remember that the Périgord black truffle grows among hazelnuts and oaks. You’ll need a good dog to sniff them out, although some walkers watch for vertical columns of tiny flies just above the ground—often a clue that a cluster of the world’s most pungent mushroom is hiding below. Warning: Truffle patches are often on private property, and truffle hunter landlords may shoot trespassers.

Go to Spain. The cheese is just as smelly. The rustic country cuisine is by and large the same. The people, like their French neighbors, live by espresso and wine. But the crowds are less and cost of living about half. The mountainous border along the Pyrenees is just 200 miles south of here, and three days ago as my plane landed in Toulouse, I caught sight of these peaks, still buried in snow in this exceptionally late-blooming spring. Even Hemingway ditched his beloved France for Spain. Soon, so will I.

However much one loves France, it may be impossible to resist visiting the Pyrenees---and Spain beyond. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Laurent Jegou.

The deathstalker scorpion, a Middle East native shown here in captivity, kills several people each year and occasionally hammers its stinger into the hands of hobbyist collectors. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Furryscaly.

Give me a rainstorm in the night, a herd of pigs trampling past, even a bear—but if I’m camping without a tent, spare me the bugs. Because it’s the little things in the woods that creep many of us out the most, and the thing is, not all of them are so little—and worse, some have fangs and a hundred legs. Centipedes that can overpower a snake, spiders a foot wide, rodent-sized scorpions and other creepy crawlers of the forest floor offer good reason to sleep inside a tent. For years, I only camped under the open skies. If it rained, I would wrap up in a tarp or sleep under the awning of a church. But one night in Portugal while reading a book by the light of my headlamp, a huge spider with legs like an imperial walker came dancing onto my tarp and into my lap like a mad dervish. I screamed, panicked, flew home and bought a one-person, three-pound backpacking tent. That doesn’t mean I always use it, but here are a few good reasons why I should:

Deathstalker scorpion (Leiurus quinquestriatus). The deathstalker scorpion just might have the coolest name in the animal kingdom. A Middle East native, it grows to four inches or more in length, brandishes a horrifying pair of pincers and lives up to its name. Often described as “very aggressive,” it hammers its stinger into many people every year, killing several. Most victims, though, just suffer extreme pain in the region of the bite, along with drowsiness, fatigue, splitting headaches and joint pain, with symptoms sometimes persisting for months. Meanwhile, most scorpions are less dangerous than simply creepy. David Quammen—an admitted arachnophobe—elaborates on this in his essay See no Evil, published in his 1988 collection The Flight of the Iguana. He writes, “…scorpions are perhaps the most drastically, irredeemably repulsive group of animals on the face of the Earth, even including toy poodles.” Tent, please.

Goliath bird-eating spider (Theraphosa blondi). The biggest of the tarantulas and the world’s largest arachnid, the Goliath bird-eating spider lives in the rainforests of South America. Its legs can span the width of a dinner plate (should it find its way into your kitchen cupboard) and it’s large enough that it can, with ease, kill and eat mice—not to mention birds. The animal’s fangs may be an inch long, and yes, they will inject venom. However, the bite of a Goliath bird-eater is hardly worse than a bee sting to a human—but for campers, do you really think that matters? No way. This beast is among the nastiest things that could skitter across your face in the dark night of the Amazon. Zip up your tent.

Giant desert centipede (Scolopendra heros). On a hot afternoon in September 2003, I was bushwhacking out of the mountains in the Baja California desert not far from La Paz. I fought and kicked my way through the thorns, ducking through tunnels in the brush, and finally made it to the quiet shore of the Sea of Cortez. I plopped down in the sand, my back against against a rock, opened my backpack, and went digging for my mask and snorkel—and then appeared the ugliest monster I’ve ever seen: a seven-inch centipede that came snaking out of the pack, right past my arms and on a trajectory for my face. It was, I’m almost sure, Scolopendra heros. I screamed in a howling panic, leaped from the sand, and went backpedaling into the water, where I fell on my butt and and watched the centipede vanish into a rockpile. This creature, I later was told, is poisonous and can, if it feels especially wicked, bite and deliver venom with its fangs as well as some of its legs. And you want a much, much nastier story? In a documented case in Arizona, a man put a garden hose to his mouth and turned on the faucet to have a drink—and can you guess who came charging out of the nozzle? S. heros scuttled right into his mouth and bit his tongue, leaving him in pain for days.

This giant desert centipede has overpowered and killed a lizard. A tent may block your view of a meteor shower, but it'll keep monsters like this from scuttling into your sleeping bag. Photo courtesy of Cabeza Prieta Natural History Association.

Bullet ant (Paraponera clavata). An inch long and known to jump from trees upon its victims, the bullet ant of Central and South America delivers what is said to be the most painful sting of any arthropod. It hurts like a bullet wound, people say, and the pain may persist for 24 hours. In the ant’s defense, Paraponera clavata is not aggressive unless bothered—so if you get stung, you must have asked for it. The ants also offer fair warning before attacking, emitting a musky odor and an audible “shriek.” If you detect anything of the sort while hiking in the Amazon, turn and run—or just suck it up and experience this phenomenal bite like a man,which is exactly what teenage boys in certain forest cultures do to prove their manhood. Anyway, the bullet ant’s bite rarely kills. 

Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria fera). Widely considered the most poisonous spider in the world, wandering spiders reportedly hospitalized about 7,000 people in Brazil alone between 1970 and 1980 and may have killed more people than any other arachnid in the world. Phoneutria fera is often regarded as the main offending species, but others of the same genus, including the Brazilian huntsman, have similarly toxic venom. The spiders are known to wander and explore, often hiding in clumps of bananas, and often entering homes to have a nap in the toes of a shoe by the doorstep or a vacant pant leg in the clean laundry pile—and surely a cozy sleeping bag would be a fine dwelling site for a wandering spider. Symptoms of a bite include pain, redness and immobility in the area of the bite. Paralysis and death by asphyxiation may follow. In survivors, tissue affected by the poison may die and rot away. Another bizarre symptom immediately following a bite in men is a painful erection lasting hours and sometimes causing impotence.

Mosquito (Family Culicidae). Consisting of 41 genera and more than 3,500 species in the family Culicidae, mosquitoes may not inspire nightmares or make our skin crawl the way that arachnids can, but what other element of nature so frequently ruins a night of camping? Whether on the boggy tundra, in the blazing desert or in the swamp country, mosquitoes may swarm us in clouds. Even a bona fide house with walls and a roof can’t always protect against mosquitoes, and in parts of the world people sleep with permanent netting over their beds. These insects insect may be the most dangerous, too: in 2003, malaria killed 3 million people—infected thanks to mosquitoes. And these bloodsucking disease vectors dealt me what was one of the most torturous nights of my life while camping (with no tent) on the shore of a mangrove lagoon in Mexico. After about 500 bites, I went stumbling into the village around midnight and pleaded with a bartender for bug spray. He said citrus juice was the most potent mosquito repellent—trick from his grandmother—and he threw a lime at me from his cocktail making tray. It didn’t work. After bite 2,000 or thereabouts I wrapped a towel around my head, jumped in the water and breathed through a snorkel until dawn brought relief.

The handsome face of the bullet ant, a New World jungle native whose bite may be the most painful of any arthropod on Earth. Photo courtesy of Flickr user EOL Learning and Education Group.

King Juan Carlos, at right, stands with his guide from Rann Safaris as his dead Botswanan elephant lies propped against a tree.

The king of Spain visited Botswana recently, and on the famous savanna, teeming with animals familiar from the picture books we read as youths, King Juan Carlos shot and killed an elephant.

When I heard about the king’s outing, I decided to learn a little more about Botswana’s laws governing the protection—or lack thereof—of Africa’s most famous creatures. It turns out that many of them can be lawfully killed for those who buy the privilege. According to the website of Rann Safaris, the hunting outfit that guided King Carlos (who happens to be the honorary president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund) it takes $6,000 to shoot a leopard. For $1,200, you can shoot a crocodile. For the pleasure of killing a hyena, you must turn over only $500. For a rhino, sorry, you’ll have to visit South Africa. But if you’re content to shoot an ostrich, stay on in Botswana, where the permits will run you $550. Short on cash? Then there’s always baboons, which go for a paltry $200 a pop. And to shoot the greatest land animal on the planet, the one that lives in matriarchal herds and mourns somberly when a family member dies, the one that’s been targeted by tusk-seeking machine gunners for decades and which you’d think should be a protected species—to shoot an African elephant, you’ll need to pay $19,000. It’s a princely sum, but nothing for a king.

The world is full of opportunities to shoot at its mightiest creatures, whether they’re good to eat or not, and here are just several animals that some of us would love to see and photograph—and that some people just want on the rec room wall.

Sharks. There’s nothing politically correct about shark fin soup, but an annual killing contest goes on in Martha’s Vineyard, where hundreds of sport fishermen gather every July to compete in the Annual Oak Bluffs Monster Shark Tournament. The event’s website states that 98 percent of sharks caught in the derby are released (a change from prior years), but there are prize incentives to bring the largest fish in to the dock, where crowds gather expectantly to see dead and bloody “monsters” hoisted at the weigh station. Last year, the biggest sharks landed and killed included 630-pound and 538-pound thresher sharks, a 495-pound porbeagle and a 278-pound mako. In 2005 a fisherman took a tiger shark weighing 1,191 pounds.

Big cats. The African lion has declined in numbers from possibly 100,000 in the early 1990s to a current population estimated to be as low as 16,000 individuals. Yet hunting of this vulnerable species is legal in parts of Africa. By some reports, in fact, the number of lions killed by licensed trophy hunters each year is on the rise. In California, cougar hunting was banned in 1990—so when a member of the state’s Fish and Game Commission got the urge to kill one this January, he went to Idaho, where hunting the cats is legal. The hunter, Dan Richards, posed gleefully with the cougar in his arms, sparking an explosion of anger among animal rights activists and trophy hunting critics. The controversy centered on the question of whether a man charged with, among other things, protecting cougars in one state should go and hunt them in another. Richards pointed out that he and his friends ate cougar the evening after the hunt—an excuse often voiced by trophy hunters. If you want to put food on the table, shoot a rabbit or a deer—but please, not a top predator.

Dan Richards, of the California Fish and Game Commission, went out of state to shoot this Idaho mountain lion.

Bears. They reportedly taste vile if they’ve been feeding on salmon or marine mammals, but that doesn’t stop Alaskan hunters from killing brown bears. In fact, these animals usually aren’t eaten—just skinned and beheaded, as Alaska state law requires. Alaskan black bears, too, are often killed only for wall mounts. The state, to its credit, prohibits one from using the meat of a game animal for purposes other than human consumption, yet exceptions are generously granted to bear hunters, who can at certain times of the year (like during salmon runs) use a black bear’s flesh as pet food, fertilizer or bait. (For wolves and wolverines, the meat does not need to be used at all.) Elsewhere in the world, bear hunters sometimes participate in controversial “canned hunts“—such as the one in 2006 in which King Juan Carlos, our mighty elephant hunter, shot a tame, drunk Russian brown bear named Mitrofan, who was fed honey and vodka prior to being prodded into an open field, where the crowned noble had an easy shot. Even imperiled polar bears are still legally hunted for trophies.

Baboons. I’m almost reluctant to discuss this one, so similar are the animals to us and so grisly the nature of this hunt, but the fact that men and women shoot baboons for kicks needs recognition. Landowners consider baboons pests in some places and welcome trophy hunters, who often use bows to kill the primates. The animals are known to react dramatically when hit, and—much like a human might—a baboon will scream and holler as it tussles with the shaft protruding from its torso. Even hardened hunters reportedly grow queasy at the sight of a skewered baboon panicked with fear. If you have the stomach for it, look through this Google gallery of “baboon hunting” images, showing proud hunters with their trophy kills, or for some less graphic insight into the minds of the people who would kill baboons for the joy of it, read through this baboon hunting discussion. Here is a sample from the conversation: “Seems kinda twisted but given the chance I’d shoot one. Cool trophy.” And: “Good Luck, Hope ya get one. My next time back I’d like to kill one as well.” Someone get me a bucket.

Wolves. While this top predator reproduces relatively rapidly and can be naturally resilient to some level of persecution, sport hunting the gray wolf still stinks. To justify the hunt, wolf hunters describe the animals as having negative effects on deer and elk herds. In the Rocky Mountain states, where wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s, they are already being hunted again. Some wolves are baited into shooting range, others pursued via snowmobile, and in a few places wolves are shot from airplanes—like on the Kenai Peninsula, where a government predator control program is drawing fire from wolf allies. Wolf pelts, not the flesh, are the goal of the game, though cast members of the film The Grey reportedly ate wolf stew in order to prepare for a scene in which the actors, including Liam Neeson, would pretend to dine on wolf meat. Most of the cast vomited during their meal, donated by a local wolf trapper, though Neeson returned for seconds.

More top targets of the trophy hunter’s hit list:

Billfish. Anglers may eat sailfish sashimi or braised marlin, but let’s keep things real: These fish die for their swords.

And crocodiles for their hides.

And walrus for their tusks.

And hippopotamus for … honestly, I really can’t imagine.

This just in: King Juan Carlos has publicly apologized for killing his elephant. “I am very sorry,” he told the press on April 18. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.” Sure, now that he’s got his tusks.

David Baggett, famed among noodlers, explodes from the water with a giant catfish in his hands. Photo courtesy of Bradley Beesley.

Cypress boughs dangle over the still, mocha-muddy waters of an Oklahoma swamp as a gaggle of drawling Southern country boys walks waist deep through the sleepy current. The men, shirtless and tanned, feel their way with their feet, exploring for stumps or root tangles—and when a foot strikes a submerged structure, the man kneels, almost disappearing, and examines the underwater snag with his reaching arms. As his friends gather around to watch, the man grins, takes a deep breath, gives a sly wink and disappears. The brown water settles as the circle of men stand by, and the seconds tick past. No: This is not some strange baptism of the swamp country, or a rendition of Marco Polo, or a college fraternity initiation ritual. Just watch.

After 15 seconds, the top of the submerged man’s head appears again, and the water around him begins to swirl. It seems he’s struggling underwater, and after several more seconds, he bursts out of the river with a wild yeehaw howl as his friends whoop and cheer. The man’s arms are reluctant to follow, however, for he is hauling something up to the surface—a living creature, it seems—and in another moment, it explodes from the water, thrashing like a bobcat, three-feet head to tail, mustached like Rollie Fingers and with a mouth like a toad clamped on the man’s hands.

The animal is a flathead catfish, the number-one target in a game of unarmed man against fish called “noodling.” In this peculiar sport of the Deep South, barehanded men (and a few women) shove their hands into the lairs of catfish and goad the animals into biting. Catfish lack large teeth, and as a fish clomps down the noodler grabs back, and once he or she has firmly gripped the lower jaw of the fish, it only takes some muscle work to remove it from its hole. But here’s the most controversial part: Noodling takes place in June and July, precisely when large male catfish sit on nests of eggs, aggressively guarding the fertile clumps from predators. The big fish, which may weigh more than 70 pounds but usually go less than 20, will bite at almost anything that meets them at the door to their lairs—whether bass, bird or hand of a hillbilly. If the catfish are kept to be eaten or if the flustered animals fail to return to their nests even if they are released, the future brood is doomed.

Noodling, which may have originated in the pre-Columbian era, began going mainstream about a decade ago when a filmmaker named Bradley Beesley, an Oklahoma native, took an interest in the sport. In 2001, Beesley released an hour-long documentary called Okie Noodling in which he follows a group of noodlers doing their thing—laughing, splashing, screaming expletives as huge cats chomp their hands, and erupting from the water in glorious slow motion with 50-pound flatheads latched to their fists. Beesley was so enthralled by the activity and the surrounding culture that he became a noodler himself in the course of his work. In 2008, Beesley released a sequel to the first film, and just two weeks ago a miniseries called “Mudcats” wrapped up, but viewers can still catch reruns. Or you might also go to Oklahoma for the 13th Okie Noodling Tournament, which arrives on June 23. The event, which Beesley helped launch in part to promote his first film, includes live music and a catfish eating contest.

In an interview last week, Beesley described for me the thrills of noodling.

“It’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done,” Beesley said. It is also, he added, “the fairest way to combat these beasts.” Beesley says the sensation of having a catfish the size of a bulldog bite one’s bare hand is a particularly thrilling one. “It hurts,” Beesley conceded. “It’s painful, like a rat trap with sand paper. The fish start spinning and thrashing. You don’t get any deep cuts, but they turn your hand into hamburger meat.” But many noodlers, Beesley said, choose not to wear gloves to better experience the direct skin-to-fish contact.

Beesley is quick to explain that noodling rarely injures the catfish—except for those that get battered and fried, which may be the majority of the landed cats. Though Beesley says many noodlers let their quarry go (and that the fish go straight back to their nests), other sources, like Texas fishing guide Chad Ferguson, quoted last year in a Texas Tribune article, seem to believe that most cats caught by noodlers are destined for the kitchen. Most online videos of noodlers at work show the hand-fishers tossing their catfish into boats or clipping them to stringers, and many states prohibit noodling precisely due to uncertainty about the negative effects of removing the largest breeding catfish from a population. Only seven states, it seems, allow noodling, with Texas having legalized the sport just last year.

But killing the largest breeding catfish of a population isn’t the only concern of anti-noodling conservationists, rod-and-reel fishermen and authorities; the other is the common noodler technique of tossing junk, like large pipes and furniture, into lakes to provide catfish with nesting structure and themselves with an advantage in finding the fish when the nesting season comes.

A young noodler shows off his still-alive flathead catfish at the 2006 Okie Noodling Tournament. Photo by Alan Novey.

At last year’s noodling tournament in Pauls Valley, which drew more than 10,000 spectators, 183 people participated in the hunt for catfish. Among these competitors, 37 landed fish. The biggest was a 60-pound flathead wrested from its den by Mark Rowan, who took $1,000 for the prize and also won $400 more for having the heaviest stringer of catfish—150 pounds, to be exact. The top female noodler was Brandy Sparks, who caught a 45-pounder, and the winner of the kids’ division was Dakota Garrett, who took a 42-pound flathead.

The blue catfish is another resident of American swamp and slough country, and readers of Mark Twain may remember that Huckleberry Finn and Jim caught a catfish as large as a man. That, without doubt, would have been a blue. Noodlers certainly take blue catfish, though in some states blues, if not necessarily flatheads, are protected from the harassment.

Just how many men, women and children shove their hands into catfish lairs in America is uncertain, though officials in Missouri, where noodling is illegal, estimate that 2,000 people hand-fish for cats. Meanwhile, the game is catching on abroad. In the great rivers of Europe, for instance, hands are appearing at the den doors of the legendary wels catfish, which may weigh as much as a bear and which, like catfish in America, get ornery during nesting season.

Noodling has its risks, and every year newspaper reports tell of noodlers drowned when their hands or feet or heads become stuck below the surface, or when surprise currents drag them into deeper waters. Beesley guesses that in Oklahoma, “one or two” people drown each year while hand-hunting for catfish. But alligators and water moccasins are not the threats that the media sometimes makes them out to be. “That’s been sensationalized,” Beesley said. In his 13 years of documenting noodlers at work in Oklahoma, he once saw a man surface with a non-poisonous snake on his arm, and once with a snapping turtle.

“And there was one guy who was bitten by a beaver,” Beesley said.

Finding catfish is not always easy. It takes knowledge of the swamp and its underwater geography, and it takes some luck, too—and many a noodling excursion becomes, in the end, just a walk in the woods, under cypress and sun, waist deep in the big muddy.

The European wels catfish, shown here, has become the target of Old World noodlers. Photo courtesy of Flickr user helti.

The Great Blue Hole of Belize was named by Jacques Cousteau as one of the world's top diving sites. Photo courtesy of Flickr user DrJohnBullas.

I am not a SCUBA-certified diver and I may never be. Instead, I free dive and have been for about 13 years, mostly along the coast of California, and I have no interest in introducing tanks, tubes and pressure valves to the simple relationship I have with the water. I can only imagine the burden of swimming with all the mechanical gadgetry and gear on my back that tank divers must wear, or the logistical nuisance of having to fill the tanks prior to each dive. Free divers must fill only their lungs, and sometimes just 5 or 10 feet beneath the surface we find all that we might ever hope to: the mangrove thickets of Belize, alive with nurse sharks, reef fishes and even crocodiles, or the kelp beds of California, where many divers spoiled by tropical reefs may be born again as they discover this unmatched habitat. But SCUBA technology grants access to a deeper world that I, again, can only imagine. And I think that the magic of SCUBA diving can be simmered down to one flat and obvious fact which an old friend and diving buddy once illuminated for me as we debated the pros and cons of air tanks:

“Dude,” he said. “You can breathe—underwater!”

There’s no arguing with that. And so we go, tanks and tubes and valves flowing with pressurized air, into the finest SCUBA diving destinations in the world.

Great Blue Hole, Belize. Jacques Cousteau visited this site in 1971 and declared the Great Blue Hole of Ambergris Caye to be among the best diving locations in the world. The Great Blue Hole is a wonder of geology, a 410-foot deep sinkhole located within the Belize Barrier Reef system and was created through forces similar to those responsible for the underwater caves of the nearby Yucatan Peninsula. The Hole is more than twice as wide as it is deep, making it less like a bottomless pit than a huge pothole, yet the vertiginous void may offer divers something of the feeling of facing off with the edge of the world. Descending into the hole, one will encounter local residents like groupers, various sharks, great barracuda and a diversity of other species. Bottom topography consists of sand, reef, many varieties or coral and ancient limestone stalactites, as well as caves and dramatic outcroppings that look like cathedrals. Visibility may exceed 150 feet and surface water temperatures rarely dip below 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wrecks off Papua New Guinea. Things under the sea may be categorized into two classes: naturally occurring or the far less common anthropogenic. And that’s where diving can get creepy—coming across tools and devices and vehicles, objects that weren’t supposed to end up here but which, through some mishap or disaster up above, sank into watery graves. The sea floor is littered with manmade stuff, and few underwater adventures may be more thrilling than exploring a wreck. World War II was an era in which Davy Jones acquired a wealth of collectibles for his locker, and a great many planes and ships went down around Papua New Guinea. The Boeing Blackjack B-17 bomber is just one of the region’s popular dive wreck dives, sporting a very recognizable cockpit and turret guns. Discussing the “best” wrecks seems a bit callous, considering that many people have died on them. Some wrecks, though, are sunk intentionally, without casualties, as tourist draws and habitat enhancers, such as Papua New Guinea’s Pacific Gas, which has rested in 145 feet of water off of Port Moresby since 1996. On the wrecks where human lives may have ended, dive with respect.

On the Thistlegorm wreck in the northern Red Sea, divers find intact cargo from the World War II era. Photo courtesy of Flickr user mattk1979.

Red Sea, Egypt. Surrounded by land, the Red Sea experiences a temperature range much like that of a continental lake, with waters in January as cold as 65 degrees Fahrenheit and, in the late summer, as warm as the high 80s. Furthering the flux in temperatures is the north-south extent of the Red Sea, which crosses almost 15 degrees of latitude, from 30 degrees north into the tropics, where its waters touch the coasts of Eritrea and Yemen. The Red Sea wreck of the Thistlegorm, a British vessel sunk in 1941 during an air strike, is said by some to be the “best” shipwreck anywhere, with motorbikes, guns and vehicles still intact and viewable. In the realm of living things, whale sharks occur here in some abundance, and they’re just the biggest of the 1,100 fishes to be encountered in the Red Sea. About 200 of these species occur nowhere else. Marine mammals include the sluggish, vegetarian dugong, which grazes on sea grasses in the shallows and in lagoons. Further from shore, the sea floor plunges to some 10,000 feet deep. In many ways, the Red Sea is much like the equally splendid Sea of Cortez in Mexico—a sea also two miles deep, also a product of tectonic activity, also ranging from tropical to temperate, also of giant temperature range, also surrounded by desert and date palms, and also one of the most beautiful places in our mostly salt-watery world.

Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The most renowned diving location, the Great Barrier Reef is also the biggest barrier reef and, like nearly any tropical reef, a hotbed of colorful coral snags and zillions of striped fish darting in and out of the cracks and, well, you know—all the same stuff you’ll see in the travel brochures and computer screensavers. We could, I’m sure, go on all day about warm-water reefs—of Bermuda, Thailand, Micronesia, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean. Those and others like them are the places that most “best diving” lists consist of, and the Great Barrier Reef, like them, deserves every medal it wears around its neck. But what more is there to say by now about clownfish and big friendly grouper and how clear the water is?

Monterey Bay, California. And so I come home, to the waters of the American West Coast. They’re often murkier, surgier, spookier and gloomier than the seemingly airbrushed beauty of the tropics—but I’m just one diver of many who first fell in love with the world underwater in the stately kelp forests of the California coast. Those of Monterey Bay might be the most famous, teeming as they are with rockfish and surfperch in the water column, lingcod on the bottom, abalone in the rocks and, backstroking over the kelp fronds on top, sea otters. The average “vis” in places—such as Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, just south of Carmel—is 30 to 40 feet but can be as much as 60 on the best of autumn days. A jaded SCUBA jock who lives in a thatched beach hut in the Maldives might spit on such conditions and go back to bed, but for temperate-zone divers, even just 25 feet is like magic. The waters off Northern California, too, are frigid. Go in without a hood here, and it’s an instant head-freeze so shocking that you might almost pass out. Many divers even wear drysuits, though most can pull off several hours in the water with a 7-millimeter wetsuit. But for the beauty below sea level here, it’s worth braving the elements—the towering trees of kelp, the shafts of sunlight slicing through the canopy, the schools of fish silhouetted against the gloomy blue. Kelp forests grow all along the West Coast, Alaska to Baja, as well as around the world, from New Zealand to Chile to Japan to Scotland. Almost anywhere, in fact, where water touches shore is worth a dive—with or without air tanks on your back.

There are no clownfish or coral fans or gentle reef sharks here, yet the kelp forests of the California coast provide underwater scenery that no tropical reef can quite equal. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Diving_Mullah.