Adventure Travel -- Sharks And Bat Soup Vs. Tennis And Chicken

A few years ago, I found myself on a dive boat off the islands of Palau, in the western Pacific north of New Guinea. Looking down into the swell, I could see the coral heads of Blue Corner, where a reef begins in the sunlight just beneath the ocean's surface and plunges 900 feet straight down into the darkness. As I strapped on my air tank, our dive master said we would be meeting some large sharks.

Back on shore, my hotel offered a private beach, a pool, tennis courts, restaurants and indoor and outdoor bars. The cheerful staff had strewn my room with hibiscus blossoms.

But instead of indulging in luxury, I was getting into deep water with a 22-year-old dive master, a tourist from San Francisco and large wild carnivores with brains the size of walnuts. I was wishing I were somewhere else - a sure sign I was about to have a memorable vacation experience.

I jumped into the ocean with the two other men, and we descended to 80 feet. The great coral cliff pulsed with life. Bushels of small fish spilled down the wall like gemstones and wheeled over the abyss. I turned my back to the coral just in time to see one of the big fish we had been promised, a six-foot reef shark. As it eased by and looked us over, its caution and curiosity seemed to match my own. My fear dissolved.

This animal was not a senseless killing machine. Just the opposite: It possessed a primeval elegance beyond any I could have imagined.

For me, that revelation made the risk well worth taking. The people playing tennis back at the resort might have thought we were fools had they known what we were doing, but I would have felt like a fool traveling 10,000 miles to play tennis. What's worse, I would have missed some of the world's most spectacular diving.

Later that evening, the San Franciscan and I, having survived our swim in "shark-infested waters," went in search of fruit-bat soup, which did not appear on the hotel menu. We had seen the crow-sized bats winging over the jungle that morning, and we wanted to sample the local cuisine. For some reason, this confused our taxi driver.

"You want fruit-bat soup?" he asked incredulously. Once we convinced him we did want to eat bats, he set off for a dockside restaurant where he knew they were served.

During the ride, we asked the driver how to eat the dish. We understood that the bat was traditionally served whole, complete with fur, in a bowl of hot water. We had also been told the animals smelled extremely bad, dead or alive. Our driver told us that most people simply chewed on the skin.

Once we were seated in the restaurant, our waitress seemed startled by our order. "You want fruit-bat soup?" she asked several times. Then she and the other waitresses retreated into the kitchen for a conference. Finally, one emerged to say they had just run out of fruit bats. Although I didn't say so at the time, I felt relieved not to have to chew on any bad-smelling bat fur, just as I would have been relieved not to meet any sharks that morning.

But I was sorry to have missed a chance for a real vacation experience. Having come so far, I got chicken-in-a-basket.

As far as I know, eating fruit bats isn't dangerous, but for me it falls into the same category as swimming with sharks. If life is short, vacations disappear in the blink of an eye. I find it easy to choose between a glass-bottomed boat ride and a scuba dive, or fried chicken and fruit bat. But there's plenty of controversy on this point, and not only among Palauan waitresses.

Our calculations of risk and reward are complex and mysterious, and we have trouble explaining our reasoning, such as it is. Besides meeting reputedly dangerous animals in the wild, I've jumped out of an airplane and climbed the highest mountains in Europe and North America. But I prefer not to ride in a compact car on the highway, and I avoid doughnuts and sunburns.

I began wooing the woman who is now my wife by teaching her to rock climb. She and I wouldn't plan a ski trip that didn't include extra steep double-black-diamond slopes. How can we explain our preferences to someone with different ideas of what's reasonable and prudent?

My late friend Scott Fischer, a mountaineer and professional guide, said he didn't climb to be scared, but not to be scared. I took that to mean he thought hanging around his office in Seattle was more frightening, in an existential sense, than climbing a mountain. Scott was killed on Mount Everest last May, leaving a wife (who happens to fly jets for a living) and two young children.

Big-time climbers came under harsh criticism in the wake of last year's Everest disaster, which took 11 lives in all. One letter to the editor of a major magazine, for example, referred to the "egomania" of those who would strive to climb the world's tallest mountain. But the critics fail to understand that nothing cuts an ego down to size more surely than the implacable forces of nature, like truly bad weather, the vacuum of outer space or big, sharp-toothed animals.

The search for adventure defies explanation because it is not a means to an end. For a professional like Scott, missing a chance for adventure meant missing life itself. For me, an amateur, it means missing a real vacation.

When people talk about somebody "swimming with the sharks on Wall Street," "at the peak of her career" or "willing to go to the moon and back," they're using analogies. In a world of ambiguity, some of us look for sharks, mountain tops or the moon because they're unambiguous - they're not mere analogies. They're the genuine article, like Jim Lovell and Scott Fischer.

If you order chicken in-a-basket, I won't object. But I hope you won't mind if I have the fruit bat. I may not get another chance to try it.

Howard Tomb is a New York freelance writer.