As with many pilots I love flying. I just hate air travel so to finally arrive at Caliente, one of the premier nudist resorts on the planet, at 3am after 28 hours of flights, delays and missed connections my wife, Kim, and I were more than ready to get our gear off and sleep. Once we woke up later that day and started to look around a bit it was becoming obvious that all the messing around in airports was going to be well worth while.

First thing on the agenda was a tour of the place and not just the resort area. While Caliente may be thought of as a luxury resort with a clothing optional policy it is more it contains a gated residential community with a range of options from “Casitas” which are a very nice relocatable home to “Condominiums” similar to our apartments and full size blocks of land for houses. I should add that if you are looking for a house here you’d better be ready to part with about $1.2 million. The really odd thing about Caliente is that it was purpose built from the ground up by a guy who’s not a nudist, just a business man.

After the tour it was time for some serious recuperating by the pools with a drink or two and some lunch. Food and beverages are very easy to come by at Caliente. Lunch for example can be ordered from any of the bars open during the day or from one of the bar staff as they go wandering around the pool taking orders. This is really neat, food and drinks without getting up or dressed.

As well as Caliente’s own store on the weekends the “Under The Sun Boutique” is also on site with a huge range of clothes and accessories targeted towards nudists, which was only the first of many hits taken by the credit cards. I was left wondering how you would start such a business. I can just hear the bank manger saying “Let me get this straight. You want a loan to open a shop to sell clothes to nudists”.

As with other resorts the evening starts with dinner! Ah the simple pleasure of going to a good restaurant without needing to “dress for dinner” cannot be over rated. I have to say that the food was very good and the service was a little less American than it as at a number of other places we ate at during our stay which just improved the experience. By this I mean no disrespect whatsoever to our hosts it’s just that we could eat in peace without being asked “Is everything OK?” every 5 minutes which was the case in a lot of the places we ate at.

After dinner you have to decide what’s next? Night club, pool bar, piano bar or a soak in a hot tub, life’s just one difficult decision after another even when you’re on holidays. One of the things you notice of an evening at Caliente is that when you’re in an environment where you are not constrained by the requirement to wear anything and while there was no “fetish” wear what people do wear when they choose to dress up for the evening can make for interesting viewing to say the least.

Next day, after a natural breakfast, it was time for one of Kim’s favourite activities, which when I think about it is not very active at all, it was off to the Spa for a couples massage. This was a very relaxing way to spend some time with dimly lit room, scented candles, soft music and two masseurs one for Kim and one for me. On second thoughts this could easily become one of my favourite pastimes as well.

After five days of this luxury it was time to head on south to Naples and Key West to have a look at some gators, ride an air boat and take a convertible, well we’ve never driven one so why not, for a spin through the Florida Keys before heading to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with some friends from Texas and then get ourselves to the Costa Mediterranea for 2006 Bare Necessities cruise of the Caribbean.

The first thing that you notice about this ship, and the many others berthed at the cruise terminal complex, is that they are huge. 85,000 tons is just a number but when one of these ships arrives they dwarf the place they are visiting. Once on board the amount of money spent fitting one of these out becomes very apparent. Kim has been on a couple of textile cruises out of Sydney on the Fair Princes and Pacific Sun and compared to these this ship was a real eye opener. As for myself I have been on a number of ships but as they were all painted grey, all though to be fair they did use two shades of grey, I was left speechless by this thing.

The ship itself was left as it would be for a textile cruise with the only noticeable changes being that clean towels were placed around the ship so you’d always have something to sit on and the Saunas and Steam Rooms had temporary “Co-Ed” signs placed on them. Apart from these changes the shops, bars, night clubs, lounges, disco, theatre, video arcade, internet café, gym, hairdresser, waterslide well you get the picture all operated normally they just had naked patrons. On this note we spoke to a number of the people who worked in the various areas of the ship and none of them said were bothered by the nudity. Most said it was a bit of an eye opener at first but got used to it very quickly. One of the hairdressers commented that “we were just like normal people” to which I could only reply “we’re just more comfortable”.

Our cabin, according to Kim, was spacious compared to previous cruises it was more like a hotel room than a cruise ship cabin and as we had booked on the stern of the ship we also had a balcony with the ultimate ocean view. Kim had suffered on previous cruises from the dreaded motion sickness and as we headed out that evening into somewhat threatening skies was warning me that as the cruise was my idea any resulting illness would therefore be my fault. However I suspect that as a combination of design and really big stabilizers these ships are fitted with we survived the first days less than perfect seas without issue or even a missed meal and the retractable roof over one of the pool areas meant that we could still lay by the pool in comfort.

I guess that some of you maybe wondering “Just how nude are these cruises?” Well very. You need to be dressed when the ship is in port and for the main dinning room however other than these times the ship is entirely clothing optional with the bulk of the passengers choosing to be optional except in some areas of the ship which were a little on the cool side. If the thought of having dress for dinner in the main dinning room doesn’t exactly excite you then you have the option of eating au natural in the buffet which a few of the passengers seemed to do as there was a couple of empty tables each night when we went to dinner.

The Costa Mediterranea has just about everything imaginable on it including “Ray” who is billed as a shopping consultant. Now Ray seems like a nice guy. In fact he even went to the trouble of arranging a nude shopping event on the island of St Maartin which ended somewhat prematurely when the local authorities found out,maybe we should have landed on the French side. However since meeting this man Kim has started to collect diamonds, guys you have been warned, all though to his credit he was able to suggest a number of places to be avoided on the various islands, even the island which was owned by the cruise line.

Bare Necessities arranged nude shore excursions in each of the ports which ranged from cruises to snorkelling and visits to the local nudist resort with our favourite being the nude snorkelling on Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic. We travelled from our ship to the area where we would be snorkelling on two catamarans which gave us the chance to get a little sun under sail I also think we added to some of the islands other tourists memories when their quiet snorkelling location was overrun by our two vessels carrying about 150 nudists. We had a number of requests from them to “join our tour” and I guess the rest had something else to talk about when they got home. The only down side was that I just don’t think the water in the Caribbean is as clear or the reefs as colourful as they are here in Oz though I could be more than a little biased on this point.

One thing that I did notice on this trip, and I put it down to our proximity to the “Bermuda Triangle” is that the 8 days seemed to go much faster on the ship than they normally would I guess that there may be something to all of the stories about it messing with time and space. We woke on Sunday to find ourselves alongside in Fort Lauderdale which meant our nude cruise was well and truly over.

After dropping our friends at the airport for their flight back to Texas we headed to Orlando for a few days of doing the “tourist thing” at the areas attractions like Universal Studios, Disney World and the Kennedy Space Centre. For those readers old enough to remember where they were on the day in 1969 when one small step was taken the Kennedy Space Centre is a must see. As the Apollo program was ended early there is a lot of the original hardware to look at and get up close to, Having now walked around a Saturn-5 I now know just how big those rockets were and how small the space where the astronauts travelled was.

Next stop after Orlando was Palm Springs and a few days at Desert Shadows where we ran into an unexpected cold snap. With temperatures expected to be in the high twenties to mid thirties it was curious to see snow on the ground as we drove down from Las Vegas. However once we reached Palm Springs we found the weather quite mild though to be sunning ourselves around a pool taking in a view of palm trees and snow capped mountains is a unique experience to say the least. As Palm Springs is in a desert environment, though from the gardens and grounds at Desert Shadows you’d never know it, it can get very cool of an evening so you’ll need to be quick getting from the Hot Tub to your room or the bar.

Like Caliente Desert Shadows is a full service resort. While it is smaller, though I think I’d say more intimate, it has a bar, restaurant, shop, pools and spas. It is also located right in the middle of town which is a little different to what we are used to here in Australia. A recent increase in it’s size has meant that it now spans two blocks so a nude bridge, it was later asked to put clothes on, was constructed to enable people to cross the road without the need to cover up. Kim and I can now claim to have crossed a four lane city street in peak hour naked and nobody cared. If your looking for a place to stay to unwind after a few weeks of travelling before the flights back to Australia or to get over any jetlag on arrival then we can fully recommend Desert Shadows.

For those of you that are wondering what this costs, well that will depend on a number of things. All of the basic costs such as the cruise, accommodation and airfares can be found on the respective organisations webpage, just remember the prices for all of the foreign components of this trip will normally be in their local currency. In this case US dollars. On top of this Kim and I went through about another $2100 on the cruise in shore excursions, drinks, SPA / Hairdressing and shopping, though this did contain a couple of watches and other jewellery items. As to Caliente and Desert Shadows we spent around an additional $1,000 for food, drinks, SPA and shopping.

Finally if I may a bit of advice from the geek in me, if you are planning a trip like this take with you a laptop computer with wireless, lets face it you’ll have the space as you won’t have to pack that many clothes. We took one and it was genuinely worth the weight. All of the places we stayed provided complementary broadband internet usually via wireless as did all of the airports we went to. This meant that we could not only check email but with a headset and associated software make calls back home at our Australian rates, basically free, rather than the international rates charged by the hotels. Also, you can copy your digital photos off of your camera and into the laptop freeing up space on the camera and creating a backup. In our case we also sent them back home so others could watch our journey (I’d be happy to answer questions on this via email: vk2us This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

So was this the trip of a lifetime? Well it’s up there with the best we’ve done but we’re still planning more, maybe Europe next or somewhere in the Whitsunday Islands, so we’ll have to wait a few more years to see. If you want to have a look at some the photos from this trip feel free to head to:

http://images.vk2us.id.au/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=12931