Pink Boots and a Machete

by Mireya Mayor

  These were the kind of arguments I used to convince myself I should be relieved to be filming sharks and not cows!

  As I gathered my diving gear and prepared to head to Guadalupe Island, all my thoughts turned from sharks to packing bikinis. Let’s face it, when I think of Mexico, I think of margaritas and Cabo. And if I’m going to be filmed being eaten by a shark, I might as well look good. What I didn’t know was I’d spend the next month on the top bunk of a boat’s very confined quarters with four other people, including a snorer, retching my guts out from seasickness. The only time I was not seasick during this expedition was when I was actually in the water. This was no umbrella-drink vacation.

  My grandmother, Mima, along with thousands of other Cubans, was forced to “volunteer” cutting sugarcane in the early days of Castro’s regime.

  In 1965, at age 20, my mom made the news as she stepped onto a boat fleeing Cuba, the only home she had ever known.

  Here I am with my three mothers and grandfather. Left to right: Aunt Ica, Pipo, Mami, and Mima. I am wearing a Snow White dress Mima made me for my birthday.

  I proudly wore the nurse’s outfit Mima made for kindergarten career day. But it was not to be.

  This was my chicken, Maggie, a beloved member of the large menagerie that shared our Miami house. I bet she thought my orange socks were cool.

  On this day I was a beach babe on the lookout for sharks, though usually I ran around with a net catching hermit crabs or anything that swam into it.

  Game day was the payoff for hours of grueling cheerleading practice. Nothing beat standing on the field listening to thousands of screaming fans—or hearing the national anthem performed.

  We Miami Dolphins cheerleaders were a wild bunch with big hair. Several of the girls remain among my closest friends. But we’ve straightened our hair. I am on the right, second from the top.

  I got to play with a capuchin monkey on my first expedition, to Guyana’s Amazon, in May 1996. From then on, I have never stopped dreaming of my next adventure.

  A seemingly magical force drew me to the edge of Guyana’s spectacular Kaieteur waterfall and made me want to spread my wings and fly.

  Dr. Patricia Wright and I took the first ever measurements and genetic samples from endangered silky sifakas in Madagascar’s Marojejy National Park. Later I posed with Pat, my mentor and friend, and two silky sifakas.

  When I first read about the black Perrier’s sifaka, an inhabitant of Madagascar’s Analamera Special Reserve, it had scarcely been studied and there were no photos. The genetic samples we obtained confirmed it as a distinct lemur species.

  No one said expeditions were easy, especially in Madagascar, where heavy rains often wash out roads. If I pretend to be taking this picture, maybe I won’t have to push.

  Who knew La Macarena would be such a hit among the Congo BaAka?

  Standing over the severed hands of murdered Congo gorillas marked one of the worst days of my life. It’s hard to believe tourists buy them to use as ashtrays.

  You should’ve seen the faces of the human patients as we pushed a gurney carrying this leopard—en route to a “cat scan”—down the halls of the Namibia hospital.

  Capturing a giraffe here on the Namibia plain is incredibly intense. I was extremely relieved when the tranquilizer wore off and the giraffe began rising to its feet.

  To my surprise, I encountered an American, Pygmy music aficionado Louis Sarno, living in a remote BaAka village in the Congo. A kind soul with an adventurous spirit, he could be called the world’s tallest Pygmy with a Jersey accent.

  Even with hundreds of sweat bees hovering—not even my eyelids are immune—the gorilla in my sight keeps me smiling.

  Leopards can be killing machines, but this one is like a large house cat.

  My big, small discovery in 2001. The mouse lemur of northeastern Madagascar is the world’s smallest primate. If he looks a little spacey, it’s due to the tranquilizer, not my squeezing.

  Education is key for conservation, and it’s vitally important the locals be involved—especially the kids, who will inherit this land and these animals. Many children in Madagascar have never seen a lemur, even though lemurs are only found there.

  On the side of Mount Roraima, a tepui, or tabletop mountain, in Guyana. I had never spent the night with a more gorgeous view. It was also the only time I lay suspended above the clouds with a small pin holding up my tent.

  My grin atop Mount Roraima comes from having survived the climb and near starvation. We found a spectacular landscape up there—black, forbidding, primeval.

  This worm, found on Mount Roraima and weighing a third of a pound, is the biggest I have ever seen. Can you imagine the fish you could catch with this thing?

  I have yet to meet kids, such as these in an Amerindian village in Guyana, who don’t love to pose for the camera.

  Don’t let the cage fool you on this expedition to study great white sharks in Baja California. The opening was wide enough for the shark to swim in but not for it to turn and swim out. See why I needed a frying pan?

  One of the most epic journeys of my life—a 1,000-mile expedition across Tanzania for the 2009 reality show Expedition Africa—began on this ancient boat, which sailed us from Zanzibar to Tanzania.

  Here I am at one of our Tanzania camps. It’s the simple moments in the bush—savoring a cup of tea, watching wildlife, or basking in the African sun—that I miss most when I’m back in “civilization.”

  The two Maasai warriors who accompanied us for protection, Rafael and Lesordo, would stay up well into the night, keeping watch for lions and other predators.

  Seems more often than not we found ourselves trudging through swamps, trying to avoid the crocodiles in the tall grasses.

  This picture is classic. Just look at the faces on these guys as they argue. Kevin’s jaw is clenched and his arms are crossed, Benedict is waving his hands in frustration, and Pasquale is staring at the ground contemplating murder. Also look at the Maasai sitting patiently, waiting for them to quit bickering.

  My most cherished memory of the trek across Tanzania is captured here—time spent with Maasai tribesmen and Benedict Allen, modern-day Indiana Jones and kindred spirit.

  This was my favorite part of the day. The African sun is starting to set, and after many hours of trekking, we would soon set up camp for the night.

  I’m clinging to Rafael, dreading our goodbye. He gave me his warrior shield, which now hangs in my living room.

  My favorite team picture. This was taken the moment we finally arrived at the very spot—in Ujiji in modern-day Tanzania—that Stanley shook hands with Livingstone. We had come a long way. Left to right: Benedict, me, Pasquale, and Kevin.

  Watching gorillas can sometimes feel voyeuristic. Here I am observing the male silverback Kingo in the northern Congo jungle.

  Kingo and his son, Ekende, share a moment.

  Coming full circle: 1978 and 2010

  I married my Tarzan, Roland. But this Tarzan wears suits. And he’s German.

  So excited, nervous, thrilled, and terrified

  My little newborn monkey, Emma. It was love at first sight.

  Just call me Dr. Mommy!

  Roland is an amazing father. I can go off deep into the jungle knowing my girls are in the best hands.

  My wild life…happily ever after

  I was met at the airport by the assistant producer, who was waving from behind the fence wearing a large Mexican sombrero and several local necklaces and holding a Corona in each hand. He had not been able to sign for the car because he was slightly inebriated, but they had let him drive off with it, anyway. I offered to drive us to the hotel, where we would meet up with the rest of the crew.

  The next day our journey to the sharks began with a 12-hour boat ride to scout the remote cove where as many as 20 great whites had been spotted from the air. Guadalupe Island is a wild, harsh, forbidding place. Located 200 miles off Mexico’s coast, it’s a starkly scenic collection of cinder cones, r
idges, and dramatic offshore rocks. The sea can be flat calm or brutally rough. This remote island is host to a large number of northern elephant seals, California sea lions, and Steller sea lions, all of which inhabit Guadalupe year round.

  It was the second group, California sea lions, that raised the question of why these sharks were coming closer to shore. Hundreds of them frolic on the rocks and in the waters off Guadalupe Island, and they’re usually the sharks’ first choice of prey. So why were these sharks congregating in shallow water and not feeding on their usual diet of sea lions? Bob was no scientist, but he had an interesting theory. He believed that the sharks were after tuna, a somewhat bizarre hypothesis since tuna swim at about 40 miles per hour and are the fastest creatures in the sea. Even a determined great white would have a tough time catching one tuna, let alone enough to satisfy its enormous appetite.

  While Bob surveyed the water conditions, I spoke to Terry Ingram, Al Schneppershoff’s spearfishing buddy, who in exactly the same spot a year to the month after his friend was killed barely survived an attack by the same bad shark. Terry explained how Guadalupe Island used to be known for the biggest fish around, which is why the participants in his sport held their competitions here. Thirty years before, large schools of tuna were easily and frequently hunted by the Bottom Scratchers Dive Club, which both men belonged to. Yes, the Bottom Scratchers. The tuna disappeared, perhaps due to overfishing, at the same time the sharks vanished, and now that the tuna were back in numbers, the sharks were, too, lending credence to Bob’s theory.

  But it was this next piece of information that sent chills down my spine. It seemed that no one knew exactly how long these predator sharks lived, but some scientists had speculated it could be as long as 40 years. According to eyewitnesses, and Terry is one of them, the shark that attacked both him and Al was relatively small for its species, about 12 feet long, probably a young one. This meant that the rare man-eater might still be among the school of sharks we’d be diving with. The chilling part is that we would be filming on the exact day of the fatal attack, which also happened to be my birthday.

  Bob and I began preparing our gear. He was diving with a re-breather instead of scuba (acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). A re-breather recycles exhaled breaths and allows a diver to spend up to 11 hours underwater. It has an added advantage in that it emits no exhaust of bubbles, thus not scaring away the tuna. Having more tuna swim nearby would attract more sharks. If the sharks became overly aggressive, and there’s a good chance they would around the tuna, Bob would need to wait unobtrusively on the bottom until they left the area. Too rapid an ascent, especially with a re-breather, risks compression sickness.

  Underwater visibility was close to 100 feet, and the sun was just peaking over the barren hills of Guadalupe Island. Bob declared the visibility good enough for a test dive. As far as we could tell, the “monster” shark was not around, but at least six good-size sharks circled our boat, and it was anyone’s guess how many remained unseen. As most people know, it’s not the shark you see that you need to worry about, it’s the shark you don’t see.

  We had a short safety briefing during which Bob handed me a frying pan. At first I thought it was a joke. My next thought was that it was a weapon. Turns out, it was to bang on the cage we’d be descending in. The metal box offered a very false sense of security. To begin with, I would still have to swim for at least 20 minutes among the sharks before I could reach the cage, which was submerged far below the boat (we didn’t have the mechanical apparatus to get in the cage and then have it lowered). They’d be the longest 20 minutes of my life. To make matters worse, one side of the cage was open so that the camera could get good shots of the sharks as they swam by. This meant that a shark could also swim right into the cage. More worrisome than a shark coming in was its inability to get out of the small cage, meaning I’d be in a cage with a stuck, pissed–off shark. Awesome.

  Despite knowing how exaggerated the danger factor is, there was something very eerie, not to mention terrifying, about jumping into the water with aggressive great whites, in the exact place someone had been killed three decades before, on the very day I was born. Nevertheless, clutching my frying pan, I jumped in and, with my heart pounding out of my chest, began swimming like crazy for the cage.

  But as I swam past the sharks, my fear turned to awe. I couldn’t help but notice the beautiful fluid motion with which their mammoth bodies pierced the water. They were graceful like ballerinas, menacing-looking ones with big teeth.

  Once inside the cage, we began testing our equipment. You see, my job was not just to stand in the cage. I had the important role of keeping a constant lookout for sharks that might sneak up behind or beneath Bob while he was filming outside the cage. My breathing air was supplied from the surface and fed through an apparatus nicknamed a “hookah” that would allow me to communicate underwater. That meant I could breathe normally through my nose and also speak, keeping in constant contact with both Bob and surface support.

  Bob slowly swam off, spinning into the blue. Between us swirled hundreds of tuna. Soon I could make out several curious, 12-to 14-foot adolescent sharks gliding toward Bob. I apprised him of the whereabouts of each as they appeared and then disappeared amid the sea of tuna. Their proximity to the tuna seemed to further support Bob’s hypothesis, though their taste for these lightning-fast fish was still a mystery.

  One of the sharks started swimming straight toward my cage, and my eyes became locked on his. Looking into the eyes of a shark is nothing like looking into the eyes of the gorillas I am used to. When you look into a gorilla’s eyes, you can see there is thought, insight, and emotion. Looking into the eyes of a shark, I saw nothing but steely black circles attached to an eating machine. I felt foolish but grabbed the frying pan. The shark swam right up to the cage opening and took a quick bite at the metal bars. He then just as quickly turned and disappeared into the blue abyss.

  While I watched my shark swim off, a “monster” shark appeared like a ghost ship. One look and Bob signaled his belief it was the one that had been haunting him. This wasn’t just another predatory fish; this shark was colossal. As it swam toward me, growing ever larger, my heart rate doubled and my respiration sped. I gripped the frying pan. Everyone topside was on edge. The crew strained to see over the side of the boat, but Bob was too far away for them to tell what was going on. As best I could, I continued to give them a play-by-play account. “Holy crap!” I yelled into my helmet. “Do you see this? It makes Bob look like Raggedy Andy in a wet suit.” Just then something caught the enormous eating machine’s eye, and it started zeroing in. “Ummm,” I said in one of my more brilliant microphoned moments, “I think Cujo just noticed Bob.” The giant shark was becoming too interested in him for anyone’s comfort. No one knows why a shark turns aggressive toward humans, but it may be that fishing and chumming waters make them confuse us with their food. It was time for Bob to head back to the boat—fast. But there was a major problem: The enormous shark was now between Bob and the boat. I let the crew know to lower the cage.

  The boat crew manned the winch, and the cage descended deeper into the water. Still filming, Bob started a steady kick to safety. As he grabbed on to the cage, the great white circled slowly. The crewmen gradually lifted the cage, keeping the shark closely in sight. Not a moment too soon, they yanked us into the boat. Huge, angry jaws shot skyward as the immense predator hurled nearly half its body out of the water.

  Bob had finally faced the shark that had given him nightmares and perhaps obtained some closure. I, on the other hand, now had fodder for nightmares of my own. What brought the sharks back up to shallow waters was still uncertain, though Bob’s idea about the renewed presence of tuna made as much sense as anything.

  We breathed a giant sigh of relief to have survived our encounter, but we weren’t done yet. Sharks are not the only underwater giants with a reputation for bloodthirstiness. There are far lesser-known man-killers lurking in the ocean’
s depth.

  Next we would be going into deeper waters to film the giant Humboldt squid.

  These extraterrestrial-looking sea creatures have powerful arms and tentacles, excellent underwater vision, and razor-sharp beaks that easily tear through the flesh of their prey. The elusive Humboldt, or jumbo, squid have a reputation so fearsome that they have earned the nicknames “devils of the deep” and “red devils.” They are also known to eat each other, at least when one squid is caught on a fishing line. Such cannibalistic behavior has fueled the squid’s reputation.

  Finally back on dry land, the film crew and I headed to the eastern side of the Sea of Cortés. Bob and I met up with William Gilly in Guaymas, a port in Mexico’s state of Sonora. To “Gilly,” a biology professor at Stanford University, the mysterious squid, which can reach six feet in length, is a beautiful sea creature that provides important ecological clues. Gilly had studied the biology and behavior of the Humboldt squid for more than two decades, tagging them in the Gulf of California as part of a larger study of their movements in the Pacific Ocean. But very little had been learned about them, as these squid spend 95 percent of their lives at depths of 660 to 2,300 feet, well beyond those safely penetrated with scuba gear. They may be elusive, but they’re not rare. Gilly estimated that ten million squid may be living in a 25-square-mile area outside Santa Rosalia, Mexico. At night the squid are known to rise from inaccessible depths to depths that are accessible but dangerous for divers. Bob and I would go in search of them. I couldn’t wait to see one. Well, I could…but the prospect had my juices flowing.