I was scheduled to speak in Cancun, Mexico, to an international dental meeting. My wife Elaine and I decided to go a week early and do some cave-diving. The Yucatán Peninsula is the world’s best cave-diving area. Resting entirely on limestone, this porous stone sucks up water like a sponge. The tropical rains get absorbed and collect as underground rivers. These groundwaters can bubble up to the surface emerging into cisterns called cenotes.

The Maya, who inhabited this land for thousands of years, believed these openings to be the gateways to the underworld, where the spirit beings dwelled. Mayan shaman explored in these caverns and underground rivers, until they became entirely filled with water and have left their marks. You can find remnants of their drawings on the walls, as well as their offerings. There are pottery shards, precious stones, animal and human bones in these caverns. The Maya are often remembered for their spiritual practice of human sacrifice and bloodletting, but they were also a civilization who discovered the mathematical concept of zero, whose astronomers mapped the heavens with pinpoint accuracy, more than 1000 years ago.

I love to dive, but I am the world’s worst dive-partner. I have a tendency to lose sight of time, and sometimes my partner, in the magical aquatic world. Cavern-diving is different from open water diving, in the ocean you can always come up if there’s a problem. In caverns you can’t because there’s usually only one way in and one way out. You have to depend on a flashlight and a good guide.

We had a great guide in Tito, he was intimately familiar with the caverns and laid down some of the lines with the directional markers that guide the way out. It’s difficult to describe the experience — awesome, incomparable — seem insufficient. It was like swimming through Karchner Caverns, there were stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, bacon strips, columns both massive and tiny. We came to a place where the salt water mixed with the freshwater; this point of convergence creates an effect called a halocline. The salt water loses its salinity, and the resulting solution creates an effect as if you’re looking through a fog. In this surreal place, it’s easy to see why the Maya believed the gods lived here. The sense of awe in this place was so overwhelming, I forgot to breathe.

Somewhere on the journey I became so entranced that I strayed long enough to lose sight of Tito and Elaine. In this trance-inducing world, you lose track of time, minutes can seem like hours, and vice versa. But when you lose your orientation in a cavern, with only a flashlight in your hand, it takes awhile to get reoriented. What felt like an eternity, was only seconds, but in that period, I had enough time to check my gauges and discover I’d used almost two thirds of my air supply. Those seconds were enough time to feel the cave getting smaller and scarier. In that moment I became aware of a different sense of awe, as I hoped and prayed for a sign to quell my rising anxiety. And then I saw a flash of light in the distance and saw Elaine’s purple swim fins.

You don’t have to face the fear monster to appreciate the awesome, but it can serve as a goose to get you to take yourself less seriously and look at life from another perspective. Seek out the awesome, it is the mechanism by which we tame the ego.

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At the New Year, I visited Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where the anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the remains of our earliest hominid ancestors. It was the greatest archeologic find of the century.

Now we have another astonishing discovery: scientists have just found a new human species. A dwarf with a brain the size of a small grapefruit was found in a tropical lost world. In a cave, on the remote equatorial, Indonesian island of Flores (east of Java and northwest of Australia), they found a three-foot-tall adult female skeleton, estimated to be 18,000 years old.

This finding smashes the long-cherished belief that our species, Homo sapiens, crowded out other upright walking human cousins beginning 160,000 years ago. It turns out that we have not had the earth to ourselves for all these tens of thousands of years. Scientists have named the extinct species, Homo Floresiensis, or Flores Man.

Scientists are not even sure it belongs in the genus Homo Sapiens. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh says, “I’m not sure how to classify it. We have to rethink what human is.” This is a fundamentally new creature and “the most extreme figure” to be included in the human family.

These pygmy creatures with small brains bore more of a resemblance to fictional barefooted hobbits than to modern humans. Millennia ago, there was a real-life Middle Earth, inhabited by a menagerie of fantastical creatures like giant tortoises, elephants as small as ponies, rats as big as hunting dogs, and giant Komodo dragons.

I must say, I like the idea that we could be descendants of Bilbo Baggins and Smeagle. Mostly, it comforts me to know that if we are directly related to dwarfs with midget-sized brains, it explains the stupidity of some of our leaders as the simple inability to escape our genetic ancestry.

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Seven subway stops on the “A” train local took me from my house in uptown Manhattan to the Museum of Natural History, which is where I first fell in love with Africa. I made that trip weekly from the age of 10 to 12, took my lunch, and spent Saturdays exploring the treasures.

The Museum’s main hall features an entire herd of stuffed elephants that mark the entry to the Africa exhibit. Every African animal species is stuffed and presented in their unique environment. There were stories and replicas of the lion hunting, Masai warriors, descriptions and pictures of Pygmies killing elephants; one day I would see them all, live in their own habitat. But I’d never done it and after last year’s thyroid tumor scare, I decided this was one trip I didn’t want to put off any longer.

This safari was not a primitive wilderness experience. We stayed in 5-star game lodges and permanent tent-camps with private baths and hot showers, good food, and sunset happy hours. A travel agent pre-arranged everything. From Kenya to Tanzania she took care of every detail, from hotels to guides. Bush pilots took us on game drives, even one at night. I saw the “big five”: elephant, lion, rhino, buffalo and leopard. We saw giraffes, wart hogs, antelope, flamingos by the millions, and 300 other species of birds. We watched hippos and the crocodiles in the rivers, and danced with the Masai at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was the “A” train local dream come true.

The world’s ultimate wild animal park, is Ngorogoro Crater, a 100-square-mile caldera of an extinct volcano, which has a resident population of virtually every species in Africa (no giraffes because they couldn’t climb the steep walls to get in). These animals have grown accustomed to human beings in Land Rovers, have even learned how to use the vehicles to hunt more effectively. I watched three cheetahs stalk a gazelle, using the vehicles as cover to get closer without being detected. The animals have adapted their behavior to take advantage of human presence.

The earth and all its inhabitants are changing — in 50 years half of the existing species will become extinct. The thought scared me enough that, upon returning, I told my grandkids they had to see it while it was still there. But there is hope! For the first time, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an environmentalist. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan government Minister, has said, “If you don’t manage your natural resources equitably you cannot have peace.” This is the first time that the struggle to preserve the earth’s resources has been linked to the promotion of world peace — cheers to Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai.

Take your “A”train to a museum or zoo close by, where you can kindle dreams about faraway places. And then, let’s hope there’s still a station at the destination, when your dream comes true.

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The New York Times’ fashion and style section (Nov. 28, 2004) reported the newest trend in plastic surgery, and it has left me wide-mouthed in disbelief. The latest cosmetic craze according to Dr. V. LeRoy Young, chairman of the emerging trends task force for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, is labiaplasty.

In less than two hours, in an outpatient surgical procedure that costs anywhere from $3500-$8000, plastic surgeons are reshaping the women’s labia. Why are women paying big bucks to sculpt their labia? Doctors say women tell them it’s because they are uncomfortable in tight pants, thongs, and riding bicycles. However, most surgeons say patient requests are the result of aggressive marketing and fashion influences (flimsier swimsuits, the Brazilian bikini wax, and over-exposure of genitalia courtesy of the pornography industry).

Apparently, the industry standards for an attractive vagina are prepubescent hairlessness and flat labia. As soon as a woman bears children, her labia may seem droopy by those standards. Who cares? Who sees them? Most men don’t even know where they are. In an informal survey at my health club, I asked a dozen men where the labia were. Although most had a sense of the general area, they weren’t exactly sure what they were. And one guy thought it was a country in North Africa.

Ladies, here are the simple facts: when it comes to vaginas, men are universalists — they like them all. They don’t care whether the labia are indented, hanging, beaded, pierced, shaved or tattooed, all they want is to get close to it. I’ve listened to thousands of men complain about women and never once had one come to me because he found a woman’s labia unsightly.

Plastic surgeons are calling this industry “Gynecologic Cosmetic Care” and “Vaginal Rejuvenation.” A cheaper, safer and more effective program to rejuvenate your vagina is to exercise it (you’ll find lots of happy trainers).

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