Tired of New England winters, literature...

Tired of New England winters, literature professor James Simmons chucked his job at Boston University in 1973 and started driving. About 13,000 miles and four months later, he turned off the freeway in San Diego and fell in love with the warm climate and postcard-perfect beaches. It took him another year to find out he could turn his passion for travel into a paying job. Now a free-lance writer specializing in adventure travel, he authors articles and books, including one on his favorite corners of the Earth and another about Americans as others see us. Simmons, a Pacific Beach resident, was interviewed by Times Staff writer G. Jeanette Avent and photographed by Vince Compagnone.

While I was teaching, I had been doing a lot of traveling on my own, but it was a real different kind of traveling from what I do now. I’d spend three months traveling through Asia by myself. It was pretty solitary, which was fine. But, once I started doing adventure travel with naturalists along, I was hooked. You get into a group of people with shared interests and it becomes a traveling seminar.

In 1974, I did the best trip I’ve ever done, a 30-day cruise to Antarctica which was real frontier at that time. There were about 80 of us on board, including six naturalists and Roger Tory Peterson, the No. 1 name in ornithology. We spent five days doing the first tourist exploration of South Georgia Island, which had been the center of the Antarctic whaling industry. That was all closed down, but everything was intact. You’d walk up to the dock, and all the whaling vessels were there with their big harpoon guns. There was the chart room, the dining room china, the galley. Sitting out in a mud bank was a well preserved, Norwegian three-masted whaling vessel from 1885. You’d go into the movie house, and the walls were all lined with posters advertising Randolph Scott Westerns from the ‘30s and a Gary Cooper film from 1943.

We had some good weather, and we went south where the pack ice had split up. We went into areas where there were no docks and you had to go over the side of the ship in Zodiacs, which are small, 16-foot inflatable motorboats. Antarctica is so splendid. It has one of the great profusions of wildlife in the world. It has penguin rookeries where there are 2 million birds. There are no predators on land in Antarctica so you can walk right up and practically touch a penguin. It boggles the mind.

I suppose the most dangerous trip was the one down the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. We had a hippo attack on the boat. The Omo was the last pocket of territory to be explored by Westerners. I went in 1975 on the first commercial expedition, and the first natives we saw had never seen Westerners. It was Africa the way it was 150 years ago.

We were 25 days on the river and covered about 300 miles. For the first half, we were at the bottom of a canyon at 4,000 feet, which had some splendid scenery and excellent white water. The second half was savannah country, and that’s where the people were. The trip was wonderful but what made it dangerous is the difference between African river running and American river running. If you flip over in a raft at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you know exactly what to do. You have your life jacket on, and you go into the rapids feet first and you come out. In Africa, when you come out in the calm water, you’ve got the crocodiles to contend with.

We never had a boat flip, but you always knew if something happened, it’d be you and the crocodiles. They’re big ones, 18 to 20 feet long, and we’d see six or eight of them at a time lying on the bank. We had these croc rocks so when the crocodiles came close to the boat we were supposed to shout obscenities and throw these croc rocks. That was a requirement.

At the time of the hippo attack, we were going through a place on the river called hippo alley where as many as 500 to 600 hippos have been counted passing through during the day. What hippos do in the heat of the day is walk on the bottom of the river. They come up every five minutes for air and then go back down. You have to be careful to stay in shallow water so you don’t have hippos coming up underneath you. One of our boatmen got careless and wasn’t in shallow water, and a hippo surfaced right along side of the boat. The hippo panicked. These enormous jaws opened and he bit down on the boat. He just missed a passenger by a foot. It was over in two seconds, and then the hippo was gone. We had to go ashore and fix the pontoon. We just all thought it was a great adventure.

In March, I spent my birthday on Pitcairn Island where the Bounty mutineers ended up in 1790. Pitcairn celebrated its 200th anniversary this year. We were the first cruise boat to stay overnight. It was interesting seeing Pitcairn through Pitcairn eyes. At the top of a hill was a house, so we asked them about that. That’s our vacation house, they said. That’s where we come when we want to get away from the sound of the sea. It’s fascinating because everywhere you turn there’s the ghost of the Bounty. In the town square there’s an anchor from the Bounty. In one of the houses, there’s was a canon from the Bounty. The Bible from the Bounty is in the church. One of the very earliest homes is built from the planks of the Bounty. Nearly half of the population has the last name of Fletcher Christian. You can see the cave where he hid out. It’s a ghost-ridden island. That’s why they landed there; it was uninhabited. It is way off the shipping lanes. I love end-of-the-world places.