A Trip to Build a Dream On

The world is full of the most extraordinary surprises. There’s no telling what you might see once you open your eyes to them!

IN THIS ISSUE, Katie Jackson, a writer who roams to some of the world’s most interesting locales and winds up in some of the most unexpected situations, shares what it’s like to go looking for the Big 15 — that is, the 15 most distinctive creatures you can meet on a Galapagos cruise. She describes an up- close encounter with a marine iguana, which, if you’ve never had the experience of getting to know one, is a creature that seems absolutely fantastic (as in fantasy, as in you couldn’t make it up if you tried).

They are gigantic lizards that grow up to 5 feet long, swim like dolphins to graze underwater, hold their breath for up to an hour, sneeze out jets of salt to expel it from their bloodstream, and during mating season turn from black (their usual color) to every shade of the rainbow — including white from getting sprayed with each other’s excess salt. They’re like sea monsters from a children’s book come to life.

Thinking about marine iguanas, and the other 14 creatures Katie discovers in her adventure (on p. 44), sends my thoughts back to all the other things I’ve seen that seem like something from a dream. House temples overlooking the terraced rice paddies of Bali. A giraffe slowly and carefully taking a drink of water from a riverbank in the South African veldt. The city lights of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Even the beach five minutes from my home in South Florida is a kind of miracle if you really look at it with fresh eyes, like someone in a dream.

And that — looking at a thing with fresh eyes — is really the best thing that travel can do for us. In this issue, we find new ways to look at all kinds of things.

• On page 20, we go to the volcanic island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, and learn about how the eerie black sand has nurtured an amazing winemaking tradition.

• On page 38, we follow a remarkable Mediterranean itinerary aboard the newly christened Azamara Onward, a ship that’s been rebuilt for a different kind of cruising.

• On page 62, we get a delightfully surreal first-person perspective on one of the ocean’s most misunderstood sea creatures as a conservationist sits down to interview a shark.

• On page 68, we visit the world’s most luxurious temporary lodgings: hotels built like igloos in the Arctic ice.

Every page of this issue, and in fact every page of Porthole Cruise and Travel, should give you food for thought and nourishment for your sense of wonder. It’s a wonderful world.