January 23 2024

Elephant in the room

Place

Swimming with sharks is nothing to be scared of

The small South African coastal town of Umkomaas hosts many scuba diving operations and resorts; its local reef system, the Aliwal Shoal, is one of the top fifty dive sites in the world. It contains the usual attractions like schools of tropical fish, turtles, rays and a few shipwrecks. The real attraction though — the reason people come from all over the world to this sleepy town — is to dive with sharks. Without a cage. For up to sixty minutes at a time. The Blue Ocean Dive Resort, where I stayed for a week, specializes in these dives, employing several experts to maximize the shark sightings. During my time there, I must have seen over fifty different sharks, including oceanic blacktips, bull sharks and tiger sharks.

Adrian Brune

The vagabond spirit of Mirleft, Morocco’s surf nook

At first, the sleepy little town of Mirleft looks like all the others on the 600-mile trek through the sands of the Sahara: half-gravel, half-concrete sidewalks, faded paint, brightly painted schools and the minaret of a new mosque jutting up toward the sky. But a mile past Mirleft’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match. The cliffs arch down at a near forty-five-degree angle and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. It’s here that a group of ten French and German surfers have joined up with Issam Surf School, heading down to Plage Sauvage, the beach below, in a 4x4.