Check out dive in the South Pacific

My experience, as they say in this French territory, plongée, for one thing, the dive answers a question I've always harbored about underwater world: the "do" is beauty, new and different with every turn of the head, each flip of the fin. Endeavoring to remain calm - so as not to think about how strange and alien and improbable what I'm doing actually is - I discover that diving is like flying slowly through an endlessly alien landscape, as arresting vertically as it is horizontally.

It is the wonder of seeing a school of exquisitely colored, electric blue Fairy Basslets, as precisely coordinated as ballet choreography, disappear into a coral shelter. It's encountering your first up close, disinterested Black Tip Shark not separated by aquarium glass, or Rangiroa's largest nearsighted Green Moray Eel, with head as big as a man's torso, emerging from its murky den, jaws chewing water in the absence of anything more substantial. It's chasing with your most admirable Spotted Eagle Ray that swoops pass you like Albatross gliding in the clear blue sky with the wind beneath its wings. It's the hysterical frenzy that you are fighting against when being chased by the giant notorious and territorial Trigger Fish even in calm water of the lagoon. It's a world whose only music is the draw and exhalation of your own breath, a place where every inch of your body shares the embrace of buoyancy. It's a place where no movement lacks grace, where light is not yellow but turquoise mixed with just a thread of golden sun. It's a place where there are only two categories of emotion: utter peace tinged with a continuous state of awe and panic. No in-between, at least for me.