IF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY saw the accessibility of air travel turn the world into a smaller place, the first few years of this century have seen anxieties about world travel increase.
     SARS, chicken flu, Al Qaeda and its friends, natural disasters; they have combined to give people second thoughts about going east, while paranoia among US immigration officials has made going west more stressful, even if you are only in transit through the States.
     So where can you get good diving and good infrastructure without the worry about getting there? The Bahamas is one option. It has 700 different islands which, between them, can give divers what they want, and it's all via a direct flight to Nassau from London.
     I recently travelled there with a group of diving-holiday operators on an educational visit. After our first day's diving, one fellow-traveller confessed that he could see little reason to send any of his customers to the Bahamas.
     But that was because we were in the wrong place - for his tastes. Things changed dramatically after he had savoured the next location on our whistle-stop tour.
     That's the Bahamas. Stay on the wrong island and it's a bore. Stay on the right island and you'll be glad you did.
     So what are you interested in? Do you want high-voltage diving during the day and a high-voltage night life to follow? Do you want a Robinson Crusoe existence in a community of divers much like you would meet on a liveaboard, but based in a remote shoreside settlement with good diving to order?
     Do you want the variety that only live-aboard diving can provide? Or do you want the remote land-based aspect combined with unadulterated luxury and haute cuisine, with some relaxing diving the cherry on the cake?
     You can have any one of the four provided you choose the right holiday. The Bahamas is all about diversity. I'll tell you about our trip, and you decide.

Kinda nice
Nassau is the capital and it's on New Providence island. There you will find the razzmatazz of the Bahamas, with luxury hotels on Cable Beach; the billionaire's retreat of Lyford Cay; and Paradise Island, a place that can outdo Miami in its Miami-ness!
     But you don't have to subscribe to that. We stayed at Orange Hill Club, the Fawlty Towers of New Providence. It's quirky but kinda nice!
     The name Bahamas comes from baja mar, the Spanish for shallow sea, and most of the islands are surrounded by seductive turquoise water made luminous by the sunlight reflecting up from the shallow sandy bottom.
     New Providence became the capital because it is surrounded by deep water suitable for big ships.
     The Tongue of the Ocean is a dark blue shape on the map that licks around the western side of the island. This provides excellent diving, because the fish of the ocean come up the steep reef walls to visit us in the shallows. New Providence is famous for its shark dives, and nowhere is more famous for these than Stuart Cove's Dive South Ocean.
     Stuart and Michelle Cove are the glamorous couple who supply under-water facilities to Hollywood's film- makers, including both sharks and wrecks. Their can-do attitude gives them unwavering popularity with producers.
     If you have seen a movie with sharks in it, there's a good chance that the Coves were involved. That includes Open Water. Even their dive centre was a set from the movie Flipper.
     And what a dive centre it is! It's probably the busiest in the world, and the number of modern purpose-built dive boats that leave the dock each day is surpassed only by the number of wrecks (13) sunk specifically for divers to visit.

Sensayuma
Unsurprisingly, many of the other customers are American and may be a bit brash. Don't let that worry you. Bahamians have a wry sense of humour, as do the European and Commonwealth members of Stuart Cove's staff. You'll soon feel at home. This is the Bahamas, not America.
     You will see sharks on nearly every dive, because they feed them every day. If you want to see sharks close-up - which means in your face - you'll need to go on a shark dive.
     There's something special about being close to a swirling mass of sharks as they get fed in an orderly manner by the feeder, with his helmet and chainmail gloves. You'll mainly see Caribbean reef sharks here, but the occasional nurse shark will try to suck all the fish-bait out of the feeder's box if he doesn't stop it.
     Thousands of customers have passed safely through Stuart Cove's hands, and it all goes on in 11m of water, with little or no current and almost in sight of the dock. If this isn't exciting enough, get them to take you on a 40-minute boat-ride to Shark Wall, where the really big sharks hang out.
     Wherever you dive around the South Ocean part of New Providence, you get so used to seeing sharks cruise by that you stop looking at them. That's when you start to notice how many different sorts of grouper there are.
     There are other dive centres on New Providence, such as Nassau Scuba Centre, but let's just say that Stuart Cove's is a hard act to follow.
     If this is all too frenetic, and your idea of a good time between dives is to slump in a hammock with a good book, you could always take a brief flight across the Tongue of the Ocean to the island of Andros, and Small Hope Bay Lodge.
     Andros is the largest and least developed of the Bahamian islands and it is fringed by a barrier reef that forms part of the third largest barrier reef in the world. Small Hope Bay Lodge was built along the water's edge by the Canadian father of the man who still runs it, Jeff Birch. It's a get-away-from-it-all sort of place. The bungalows are basic but nice. The food is buffet-style, much as you might get on a liveaboard. When you're not diving, you make your own entertainment or read a book. There are no phones or TVs.
     Small Hope Bay organises the occasional shark dive, too, using the chumsicle method. A pre-frozen bucket of dead fish scraps is suspended from a buoy by a tethered wire in the water and, while the fish defrosts, the sharks circle around, biting off parts. You can choose either to watch from the seabed or swim around with the sharks.
     The other attraction of Andros is its big blue holes. These are caused by the collapsed ceilings of submerged caves making darker patches of deep water in the otherwise pale turquoise of the surrounding sea.
     During previous Ice Ages, sea levels were lower and the Bahamas were high and dry. Caves were formed in the carbonate substrate by rainwater that trickled through them. Later on, sea levels rose to their present levels, flooding the caves.
     Andros is riddled with these caves and, although cave-diving is a serious undertaking, you can dive around the entrances to blue holes where they are found in the ocean. You'll find twisting canyons, crevices and tunnels.
     We enjoyed a brief visit to one as big as a cathedral, but you'd need a week to get the best out of it.
     There are ocean blue holes, coral caverns and inland blue holes. I'm told that nine different blue-hole dives are offered out of the 59 known about around Andros. That includes Conch Sound Blue Hole, where Martyn Farr once set a world record for the greatest distance covered in a sea cave, and StarGate, made famous by cave-diver Rob Palmer when it was a site for the 1989 International Blue Holes Project.
     If this all sound too rufty-tufty, and you want pampering, go to the Abacos and Green Turtle Cay. Here you'll find the Bluff House hotel, with its hot tubs, heated pools, adventurous dining and a tiny island with white sand beaches, where the main form of transport is the rented golf-cart.
     Brendal runs the diving here, though he'd much rather take you out sailing in his sloop or take you over to a nearby uninhabited cay for a beach barbecue, where you can hand-feed the sting rays in the shallows.
     Green Turtle Cay is rather bijou, and so is Brendal's favourite dive site, Coral Caverns. It's a very pretty part of the reef, with masses of fish and sponges and soft corals, all in very shallow water.
     Brendal hand-feeds Nassau grouper that have become tamed here. You might see a solitary reef shark, and a group of big, mean-mouthed silvery tarpon habitually loiter under overhangs in the rock.
     It's a particularly easy dive but with plenty to see. And then it's a matter of getting down with a few glasses of Goombay-Smash and on with the partying - the main activity on Green Turtle Cay.
     On the other hand, if, like me, you are a diving bore who probably travels alone and just wants to dive all day, every day, you can't beat the liveaboard life.
     Aqua Cat takes on passengers at Paradise Island to tour the remoter areas such as the Exuma marine park and Exuma Cays. They will do a chumsicle shark feed during the week, but you'll also get a chance to dive around ocean blue holes, wall-dive and reef-dive, and inbetween visit cays where the only inhabitants are hungry iguanas.
     AquaCat is a big, luxurious catamaran with a spacious dive deck and 11 double cabins with en-suite facilities and good food. If you prefer something a bit more intimate, the same company runs a smaller sailing catamaran, with the accent less on diving and more on visits to remote cays.
     If you like variety and just want to dive, dive, dive, a liveaboard such as AquaCat is the best option. If you're on your honeymoon, I'd recommend Green Turtle Cay, with some diving thrown in.
     If you're a budding petrologist, or interested in geomorphology, it's Andros for you. If you want razzmatazz in the evening and intense diving in the day, New Providence can provide it.