Jim Eagles: Mysterious monsters

Travel books can change your life. Reading the classic 1000 Places To See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz, this year underlined for me how many places there are that I do want to see and how little time there is to get there before a ticket arrives from the big resort in the sky.

So, as you read this, I'll be heading for Cambodia to see one of those places, the amazing temples of Angkor Wat. Yippee.

Middle-aged women - and men, for that matter - may well have their lives changed by Nancy Cawley's subversive little book, Divorced and Gone to Europe, about the joys of leaving marriage and family and doing your OE at 49.

Rugby players may find the lure of playing overseas enhanced by Kees Meeuws' account of the joys of playing in France.

But travel books can change your thinking in other ways, too. I've done a lot of snorkelling and scuba diving and never really thought about sharks - after all, you're much more likely to be killed driving to the airport than to be attacked by a shark - until I read The Devil's Teeth, which is reviewed below.

This book about the great white sharks is not the thing to take away on your dive trip to Fiji even though the likelihood of running into one of these monsters there is rather less than that of winning Lotto.

In my case the book's impact was heightened by the fact that I had only just put it down when the phone rang to ask if I was interested in diving in the new shark tank at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World. And less than two weeks later I was about to hop into the warm waters of Shark Bay, in Western Australia, for a snorkel when our skipper said, "In fairness I should remind you that this area has a big population of tiger sharks."

I still had three snorkels in the bay and enjoyed them hugely - and I'd like to do the shark tank dive, too - but I did find myself looking over my shoulder rather more often than usual in case there were large hungry shapes lurking in the distance.

As if that wasn't enough, when we stopped for lunch a cute little 1.5m tiger shark swam up to examine our paddling feet, and a little later its 4.5m big brother cruised along the beach to check things out.

By now I'm starting to wonder if someone is trying to tell me something. If they are, then I think the message is that this is an amazing world we live in, and we share it with some extraordinary creatures, and we would be the poorer without them.

Well, I hope that's what the message is.

The devil's teeth
By Susan Carey
Macmillan ($34.95)

This is a scary book. Read it and you may never swim again. I definitely won't be hopping in for a snorkel anywhere near San Francisco any time soon.

The Devil's Teeth tells the story of the great white sharks which thrive around the Farallon Islands just 50m west of the hustle and bustle of the Bay City - that's sharks 6m long, 2.5m wide and 2m deep - and of the scientists who study them.

A visit to the islands doesn't sound on a par with a week in the sun at Phuket but, according to Amazon.com and the Economist magazine, this is the fifth best-selling travel book worldwide.

And, if you want, you can indeed - though the scientists strongly disapprove of it - take a cruise out to these rugged, storm-lashed rocky outcrops or even dive in a cage with a fair chance of seeing a great white at close range.

But I suspect the book's success has less to do with folks planning their next holiday than the fascinated horror with which we view these mysterious monsters of the deep.

That we know anything at all about great whites is largely thanks to the two scientists who form the focus of this book.

For more than a decade they have endured considerable hardship to study the sharks during the period each year when they gather at the islands to dine on elephant seals and, possibly, to mate.

Susan Carey first met them with the aim of writing a magazine article but she soon caught an obsession and the article has become a book. The result is a remarkable mixture of history and biology, travel and psychology, against a terrifying backdrop of arguably the most ferocious killers and one of the wildest places on the planet.

Not a book to read en route to your diving holiday in the Yasawas.

Dancing with cranes
By Alison Ballance
Longacre ($29.95)

Plenty of people will have seen Alison Ballance's work as producer of some wonderful natural history documentaries on Mongolian horses and Bactrian camels, demoiselle cranes in India and Mongolia, Asian and Siberian tigers, and our own endangered kakapo.

What a great job, you may have thought, flitting round the world to beautiful places and taking lovely pictures of amazing wildlife.

This book makes it clear that it is indeed a great job but not an easy one. Working for Natural History New Zealand has allowed her to visit places the average traveller can only dream of.

But she has also had to surmount extreme cold, hunger - not least from being a vegetarian in meat-eating societies - inhospitable landscapes, uncooperative animals, obstructive officials and pig-headed local support staff.

This book provides an excellent insight into the effort which goes into producing those amazing wildlife programmes we get to watch from the comfort of our living rooms.

Only someone of extraordinary patience, determination and skill - not to mention a huge enthusiasm for the beauty of nature - would be able to do it.

Le Rugbyman
By Kees Meeuws (with Heather Kidd)
Hodder Moa ($34.99)

An increasing number of rugby players are heading overseas to pursue their sporting careers in places such as Italy, Japan and France. Mostly they seem to do it for the money. But what do they make of the lifestyle, the culture, the people in these foreign lands?

Being a member of the front row society - by repute the slowest moving and thinking members of a rugby team - Kees Meeuws might have been expected to find the South of France tough going.

Instead, as this book makes clear, he thrived on it.

Meeuws was already famous - or infamous - for mixing a love of fine art with his rather more proppish passion for pighunting, so the fact that he adored the access to marvellous art galleries should be no surprise.

But he also thrived on the food, the climate, the locals, the rugby and the way of life.

This isn't the best-written book on the shelf but it gives an interesting perspective on how one fairly typical New Zealander found life in one of the world's most romantic regions.

Divorced and gone to Europe
By Nancy Cawley
New Holland ($29.99)

Most of us do the big OE in our late teens and early twenties. Christchurch journalist Nancy Cawley waited until she was 49 before leaving her husband and four children and heading off on a world tour of adventure and excitement, boozing and bonking. And by the sound of it, she's still going 20 years later.

Mountain climbing and working for a sports company in Europe, housemaiding in the frozen wilds of the Yukon, waitressing and skiing in Utah, sleeping with the hunky ski instructor ...

It sounds like every young Kiwi's dream, but this time it's being done by someone who is, er, more mature.

She also made an emotional return to the land from which her father emigrated, the Norwegian island of Vega, to explore her roots.

Cawley's description of her sudden mid-life change of direction, the challenges she successfully met and the joy she found in remote parts of the world, is inspirational.

It shows that it's never too late to get out of what seems like a rut, find a new life - in her case as a travel journalist - and enjoy more of the rich pleasures the world has to offer.

And, by the way, she seems to have managed all that without losing touch with her children - several of whom joined in sections of her travels - and seven grandchildren.