Travel Guidebook Review: Diving The World
August 7th, 2006
A Greatly-Needed Guidebook
A great travel guide is hard to come by. As someone who has traveled rather extensively, I have become a fan of the Lonely Planet guidebooks for general, land-based travel. However, a great dive travel guide is even harder to find, since most of the information becomes quickly outdated and some of the best dive destinations are remote and hard to get to, much less document with photos and information. A number of years ago I set out on a mission to dive some of the most beautiful reefs around the world on assignment for Untamed Travel. I had to painstakingly piece together dive trip itineraries by reading messageboards such as ScubaBoard, Thorntree and others, and by talking to divers and travel agents at each stop along the way. Still, I found myself coming across some of the most undiscovered jewels of the diving world, which went completely unmentioned in conversation with experts from those regions. Also, I arrived in some ‘dive meccas’ that turned out to be rather unimpressive. What I always wanted was a compendium of information about dive destinations around the world with which I could sit down and create a worldwide masterplan of getting to the best place with the greatest efficiency. Though my travel days are limited now, I have finally come across such a publication: Diving the World, by Beth & Shaun Tierney - A Guide to the World’s Coral Seas. (I found this terrific book through Divester. Thanks Willy!)
Authors & Publisher
This book comes from Footprint, a well-respected publisher of travel guidebooks that cover regions around the world. Diving the World was written by Beth and Shaun Tierney, a couple whose travels have brought them around the world. Their story is a bit similar to mine, in that they both had a love for travel prior to discovering the wonders of the aquatic world. Shaun was a studio photographer who eventually set his sights (and lenses) below the surface for some of the most stunning underwater photography I’ve seen in any publication. Beth completes the left side of the brain with a history in advertising, consulting - and now - consulting in the dive industry. The tandem duo cast their net wide in an ambitious attempt to catalog and reference dive sites around the world, which they eventually wove into a stunning guidebook that can read like a novel or function as a reference for planning. This was not a rookie homerun. I looked into the Tierneys’ track record of work and what I found was a long list of top-shelf contributions in a variety of well-respected publications.
From the Tierneys’ site:
For the past 10 years they have been increasingly involved in diving and as a photojournalist team, their editorial work covers both land and dive travel, marine biology and conservation. They have been published in many dive magazines worldwide as well as newspapers, books, travel guides and on the Internet.
Actually, just yesterday I lent a book to a friend heading overseas and while I thumbed through the book I realized that Shaun contributed to Periplus’ Diving South East Asia, another favorite of mine.
The Guidebook
The first thing that stuck me as great about this guidebook was the fact that it was peppered with stunning photography. I’m not talking about the obligatory type, to fill space… I’m talking about the type of photographs that make your eyes pop wide-open. If all the text were removed from the piece, I’d still have plenty of page turning to do, simply for the photos.
Next, I dug into the opening chapters and realized that this book is really designed for the type of person, like me, who wants to sit down and architect some really involved dive trips. Though the casual vacationer can certainly flip to the chapter on Belize daytrips to the Blue Hole, the book offers so much more than that. Let me explain: There are pages that breakdown the biological diversity of organisms by country, on a color coded world map. Bar graphs indicate the relative population densities of Corals, Bivalves, Echinoderms, Fish, Sponges, Crustaceans, Seagrasses and Mangroves, all of which are a good measure of what type of marine ecosystem you’re planning to visit. Frankly, I haven’t come across another guidebook that approaches the planning of dive travel to that degree of specificity, yet also keeps it simple enough to fit into a couple of pages.
Following on the narrowing down by region, a section devoted to educating the soon-to-be seasoned traveler of basic preparations and planning tips, details such things as: land-based vs. liveaboard diving, weather, exposure protection, costs, insurance, currency, tipping, advance booking and transportation. Then, as if this didn’t prepare the diver enough, there are helpful pages on diver training/certification, photography and health & first aid. To be fair, many of the other guidebooks provide basic information on preparation and transportation (airline info, etc.), but Diving the World takes this essential info and culls together all that is appropriate and essential for the scuba diving traveler.
Breadth of Coverage
You can’t do it all in one book and expect someone to be able to carry it. The Tierneys do a fine job of selecting the highlights of the underwater world. This book doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of each and every available dive site in all of these locations, but they do a terrific job of hitting the must-sees, leaving room for improvisation on the ground. Countries covered include:
- Australia
- Solomon Islands
- Belize
- Egypt
- Thailand
- Malaysia
- Papua New Guinea
- Fiji
- Mexico
- East Africa
- Indonesia
- Philippines
- Galapagos
- Honduras
- Maldives
- Micronesia
(Absent are cold water and European destinations, but perhaps they will don their drysuits and/or head to the recently opened Grecian waters for their next book.)
Quality of Coverage
The first thing I do when evaluating any guidebook is flip to a page detailing a dive site or destination I have been to, comparing what I find with my personal experiences and lasting impressions. I found the Tierney’s accounts to be very accurate and fair of the sites I was able to cross reference with records of my own (via dive log, notes and memory). For instance, small details surrounding the current affairs impacting Sipadan Island (Malaysia) were as I remember them, from facts about the Turtle Cavern to buzz about the local government’s stance on visitors to the island. The maps are good and helpful tips and information are spread throughout the book, including simple words and phrases in the local tongue, population statistics and dive site information. One minor observation is that though they provide information on visibility of particular dive sites, these values can change dramatically from season to season and even year to year, but I’m splitting hairs at this point (or grasping at straws rather, in trying to find a criticism).
The photographs are generally of the types of usual suspects you’d expect to find in these reefs, with the exception of the quality of photography being much higher than that you’ll likely come home with (Kudos!). Some of the photo captions even mirror those in my gallery.
Summary
Beth and Shaun Tierney’s Footprint guidebook, Diving the World, is essential to the traveling diver’s library. I am a big fan of ‘winging it’, but you’d be silly to not have this book around if you’re planning on schlepping yourself and all your gear to remote corners of the globe, spending a great deal of money in the meantime. As a critic of most travel guides, I have to say that I’ve finally come across a book that can be the starting point for both my next adventures overseas and into the seas.
