Tourism of Doom
DENNIS and STACIE WOODS, a married couple from Seattle, choose their vacation destinations based on what they fear is fated to destruction.
This month it was a camping and kayaking trip around the Galápagos Islands. Last year, it was a stay at a remote lodge in the Amazon, and before that, an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.
“We wanted to see the islands this year,” Mr. Woods, a lawyer, said last week in a hotel lobby here, “because we figured they’re only going to get worse.”
The visit to the Amazon was “to try to see it in its natural state before it was turned into a cattle ranch or logged or burned to the ground,” Mr. Woods said. Kilimanjaro was about seeing the sunrise on the highest peak in Africa before the ice cap melts, as some forecasters say it will within the next dozen years.
Next on their list: the Arctic before the ice is gone.
Mexico’s Little Lobster Town
Puerto Nuevo, a 90-minute drive from San Diego, is a teeny fishing village with less than 400 residents and a handful of roads that lead to one of three places — the ocean, the highway to Ensenada/Rosarito or a lobster restaurant. There are few signs of residential life, just some tilted shacks, a corroding trailer home, stray dogs — and 32 eateries serving the town specialty, Puerto Nuevo lobster.
