Ultimate Adventure Bucket List 2012 #1: Explorer Enric Sala’s Dream Diving Trips

For our second annual Ultimate Adventure Bucket List, 20 of the world's top athletes and explorers share their wildest dream trips—a dazzling list of never attempted feats daunting to even these world-class competitors. For the rest of us, consider their must-do adventures—and start planning.

As a countdown to the new year, we will be sharing two adventurers' dream trip pairings every day to hopefully inspire you to plan some great adventures for 2012.

Photograph by Norbert Wu, Minden Pictures II/Getty Images

Dream Trip: Dive the Poles

Enric Sala, Marine Ecologist and Diver

Most divers gravitate to tropical waters teeming with corals, colorful reef fish, and sharks. Not Enric Sala. The marine ecologist and seasoned diver daydreams of something a little more remote. “I dream of diving in two places where I have not been yet,” he says. “One is Antarctica, because of its crystal clear waters and amazing fauna, in addition to the ice cathedrals. The other is the Arctic, where I'd like to see the northernmost kelp forests.”

Diving in polar regions comes with its dangers, like utterly frigid waters and the possibility of getting trapped under the ice, but Sala is lured by the promise of Antarctica’s wild creatures, like giant crustaceans, and astounding underwater visibility. “It’s like flying,” he says. As for the Arctic, he doesn’t know what to expect, which is a large part of the draw. “It’s a poorly known ecosystem, so it’s pure exploration.”

Photograph by Flip Nicklin, Minden Pictures/Getty Images

Must-Do Trip: Dive Cocos Island, Costa Rica

Enric Sala, Marine Ecologist and Diver

Three hundred miles—and a 36-hour boat ride—southwest of mainland Costa Rica, a lush volcanic island rears up improbably out of the Pacific Ocean. Cocos is at once a geological anomaly, a stopover for big pelagics like sharks, rays, and whales, and a divine gift for recreational divers willing to make the schlep. “It's the last place where one can always see big schools of large fish, including hammerhead sharks, whitetip sharks, and trevally,” says Enric Sala.

At the dive site Dos Amigos Grande, divers swim through an enormous underwater arch and see schools of hammerheads and mating eagle rays, or at Manuelita, a night dive might reveal hundreds of darting whitetip sharks. “It’s hard to find another place in the ocean with the same tons of large animals per hectare,” says Sala. “If it's not a school of 200 hammerhead sharks, it is a bait ball attacked by Galápagos sharks, dolphins, and seabirds.”

Undersea Hunter Group offers ten-day liveaboard dive trips to Cocos Island from San Jose, Costa Rica starting at $4,895.