I am not normally a big fan of scuba travel books, but Fifty Places by Chris Santella was going cheap on Amazon so I thought I would pick up a copy. Normally dive travel books fall into one of two camps: coffee table books with lavish photos, or detailed descriptions of unusual dive locales to visit. This book sadly manages to fall between the two.
Inauspiciously the author starts by admitting that he doesn't know much about diving, but gets his information from consulting with experts (who are a curious collection of explorers, tourist industry divers, explorers and minor diving celebs). He then rattles of a pretty decent list of the world's best know diving locales, pepping up with a couple of unorthodox ones to be quirky (starting with Antarctica) and to his credit, a good selection of colder water sites (Passamaquody Bay, Maine and Browning Pass, BC amongst others). Although the book does contain some handsome photos, it is certainly not lavishly illustrated. No locations has more than one photo, and several have none.
People normally criticise the choices, but Mr Santella has generally gone pretty mainstream. Oddly he has no place for anything in the Red Sea (which most Europeans will insist has the world's finest diving) and many locations smack of laziness. The Great Barrier Reef has one entry for better than a thousand miles. Yet the island of Grenada gets the same coverage, essentially dedicated solely to the wreck of the Bianca C. The Cayman Islands gets in (bizarrely under the "United Kingdom", which it isn't, whereas Scapa Flow (which is in the United Kingdom) gets put in under Scotland). But in Cayman they plump for Grand Cayman, whereas most divers from Cayman rate the diving in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman as superior. Balanced against that, he went off the beaten path in Belize instead of just routinely settling for the Blue Hole.
My overall feeling at the end was that whilst it is fun to "tick off" those places you have been to (I had done 7 of the 50), I didn't learn anything I didn't already know from reading the book, and it was not sufficiently lavish or big to fulfil a life as a coffee table book. The "How To" info for each place was pretty sketchy and could be superceded with a few minutes searching on the internet. Frankly it felt like a little bit of a lazy cash-in by someone who had some success publishing a book called Fifty Places To Sail Before You Die.
Inauspiciously the author starts by admitting that he doesn't know much about diving, but gets his information from consulting with experts (who are a curious collection of explorers, tourist industry divers, explorers and minor diving celebs). He then rattles of a pretty decent list of the world's best know diving locales, pepping up with a couple of unorthodox ones to be quirky (starting with Antarctica) and to his credit, a good selection of colder water sites (Passamaquody Bay, Maine and Browning Pass, BC amongst others). Although the book does contain some handsome photos, it is certainly not lavishly illustrated. No locations has more than one photo, and several have none.
People normally criticise the choices, but Mr Santella has generally gone pretty mainstream. Oddly he has no place for anything in the Red Sea (which most Europeans will insist has the world's finest diving) and many locations smack of laziness. The Great Barrier Reef has one entry for better than a thousand miles. Yet the island of Grenada gets the same coverage, essentially dedicated solely to the wreck of the Bianca C. The Cayman Islands gets in (bizarrely under the "United Kingdom", which it isn't, whereas Scapa Flow (which is in the United Kingdom) gets put in under Scotland). But in Cayman they plump for Grand Cayman, whereas most divers from Cayman rate the diving in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman as superior. Balanced against that, he went off the beaten path in Belize instead of just routinely settling for the Blue Hole.
My overall feeling at the end was that whilst it is fun to "tick off" those places you have been to (I had done 7 of the 50), I didn't learn anything I didn't already know from reading the book, and it was not sufficiently lavish or big to fulfil a life as a coffee table book. The "How To" info for each place was pretty sketchy and could be superceded with a few minutes searching on the internet. Frankly it felt like a little bit of a lazy cash-in by someone who had some success publishing a book called Fifty Places To Sail Before You Die.
