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Think Naked
Open Secrets in the Great Outdoors

By Tom Byrnes

Maui, Pt. I | Maui, Pt II | Maui, Pt III | Baja, Pt I | Baja, Pt II


	Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau

C'mon, admit it. If you reflect on some of your most exhilarating moments in the wild, you'll almost certainly come up with at least one bracing skinny-dip or triumphant strip on a summit—moments that left you feeling more alive for facing nature the way you came into the world. The places where you bared it all are also precious, hidden gems you share carefully. Even if most of us never adopt the lifestyle of a true naturist (keep your Speedo on if you like), thinking like one can lead you to some of the few Edenic places left. In what follows, our brazen correspondents put this theory to the test on Maui, in Baja California, and ten other places where you can let it all hang out.

Extreme Nudity

Find the best places to bear it all—hiking, showshoeing, fly-fishing, snorkeling, body-surfing, and bird-watch in the buff.

Full Monty Maui
SQUINTING IN THE low light of the jungle to recheck our coordinates, I was having doubts. The writing on the back of the envelope was clear, but the directions were sketchy. "Follow main highway past town. Look for black mailbox. Climb through the big gate across the street. Watch out for cows. Follow trail to the Portuguese oven. Go right. It's dead ahead." Assuming that the pile of concrete and ashes we had walked past a few minutes before was the oven, we were on the right track. But the dense brush made it hard to tell if we were lost or on the edge of the promised Eden: the mystical "Venus Pool."

Pushing ahead through the moist leaves and the sweet stench of rotting mangoes, I stumbled into a bright patch of afternoon sun and then out onto a cliff. Below me lay a dark, bottomless pool framed by soaring rock walls lined with vines. At the inland end of the pool lay a massive hardened lava flow that snaked out of the overgrowth and into the still water; at the other was a thin ribbon of black-sand beach that separated the pool from the ocean. The only sound: surf pounding the shore. Then a middle-aged woman popped out of one of the crevices in the lava and waved. Pink sunglasses aside, she was buck nekkid. Waving back, I turned to my wife and said, "Well, this must be the place."

While we hadn't come to Maui with the express aim of taking our clothes off, it didn't take long to realize that nudists seem to have cornered the market on what was left of the island's unspoiled places. Since hanging out au naturel remains just outlaw enough to require some privacy, these folks have established a small circuit of remote and sparsely attended spots like the Venus Pool—one of our last finds, on Maui's eastern shore. Directions were available only through the "coconut wireless"—a word-of-mouth network—but plugging into it was easy enough. All it took was a stop at Mana Natural Foods in Paia, the north shore's best health-food store, where a surfer was more than happy to connect us.

Next Page: Maui, Part II

Maui, Pt. I | Maui, Pt II | Maui, Pt III | Baja, Pt I | Baja, Pt II

Tom Byrnes wrote about windsurfing Alaska's Turnagain Arm in the June 2000 issue of Outside.