Book: Pass the Butterworms by Tim Cahill

Most books nowadays have a subtitle also and so it is for Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered

I really, really enjoy what Tim Cahill does with his penchant for describing trips to here and there, to Mongolia, Alaska, the Amazon river basin, New Guinea, Honduras....

His tales are very funny, full of adventure, self-deprecating; he is inquisitive, sensitive, courageous, willing to try nearly anything, anywhere.

In a long chapter, he goes to Honduras with a guy who is scouting possible eco-tourism venues.
"And here we had the problem and paradox of eco-terroism in a clamshell. Git rid of the local people, who, it was clear, were overfishing the reef, thereby raising property values of the surrounding islands, which were, by and large, owned by wealthy foreigners...The argument is that traditional fishermen could be retrained to make good money busing tables at the luxury resorts....five dollars for a few found shells strung together with a length of discard fishing line would feed the Garifuna woman's family for a week. Eco-toursim. Of a type."

"And yet...the poverty in San Jose could make your heart ache in dozens of small ways every day. Look at the children...There was no dentist anywhere nearby, no money to get one up to the village, and no real understanding of the techniques of oral hygiene. When the children, these beautiful children smiled up at you, their mouths were full of rotting black stumps. So, yes, Peggy supposed, you could put in a visitor's center, charge a small fee of each trekker, and pay for monthly visits from a dentist. Thing was: Where did something like that end?"

He goes to Utah to learn to ride a horse more proficiently in The Purple Sage, at 180 Miles an Hour.
"We weren't on any trail but were galloping at 85 over a gently rising plain littered with sage so thick that if I fell off, no part of my body would actually hit the ground."

He scuba dives in Bonaire. "I stop to examine a truly alien being: the peacock flounder is a flat gold-and-purple-spotted fish, quite round and about the size of a 33 rpm record. The creature was born a symmetrical fish, but a few days after its birth, one eye migrated to the other. The fish swims a few inches about a sandy bottom, looking up at me, mildly, with two closely space extraterrestrial eyes."

He tells of wild sea-kayaking in The Tsunami Rangers. Totally serious wild sea-kayaking. "It is reasonable to assume--as the Coast Guard does--that a man paddling a small kayak through fifty-foot spumes of spray exploding off immovable rock is a man about to die. So Soares camouflaged the pads to prevent rescue attempts. He wanted to put himself in precisely those areas where small boat disintegrate, where men are picked up by the sea and hurled into jagged rocks, where bad timing and inferior equipment are worth a man 's life"

Awaiting his next book.....