At heart I am a novelist. I’ve written a terrorist thriller called “Nine Lives Too Many” and a suspenseful modern paranormal story called “The Demon in Our Dreams.” A new novel about the queens of rice will be out soon. Most of my fictional efforts are reported on my website: http://www.senneffhouse.com. Every now and then I like to go back to my beginnings as a travel writer. I especially like to write trips with mixed humor. My novel “The Demon in Our Dreams” is essentially a travel novel inhabited by many tour guides.
Have you heard good tour guides lately?
On a tour of Alaska, our female guide said, “We have a saying here in Alaska. There are nine men for every woman. The odds are good, but the products are strange.”
But the male guides defend themselves in this battle of the sexes. One man said he made himself a T-shirt with the inscription: “Girls, remember that when you return to the lower forty-eight, you will be ugly again.”
Another Alaskan male guide the next day, “Here in Alaska men are men and women too.”
Every time I arrive in a new city on a land trip or a new port on a cruise ship, I take an orientation tour with a guide. They are called cultural orientations when they stop at a museum rather than a handicraft market where the relative work of the tour guide.
Guides can tell jokes, advertise, scapegoat, recite poetry, and tell jokes. They have a captive audience for a few hours, a day, or in some cases a week or more. For whatever reason, Alaska tour guides are the best. Here are some illustrations of the breed from all over:
On Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island, our guide Ben said:
“This is the church where members of a certain denomination worship. They come to my door two or three times a week with brochures. Please give me their address so I can give it to them and they can visit your home instead of mine.”
Alaska guides are full of stories of bald eagles and bears. A guide told us about the black bear that entered the airport and the arrival area. He got on the baggage carousel and began to ride it. They thought they would get rid of him by turning off the carousel. He growled and acted threatening, so they had to let him continue his journey until the rangers caught him and took him away.
A guide told this story:
“Two bears, a male and a female, attack and eat two men who were walking through the forest. One man was Polish and the other Czech. The two bears were killed by hunters. Autopsies were carried out. The Pole was found in the female so they would know that the Czech was in the male. “
On a Princess ship in Alaska, while we were having martinis in the observation room, the captain was coming on the pa “This is Captain Glug from the bridge. On the port side of the tallest tree, there are two bald eagles. About fifteen minutes. later he would announce: “In the middle tree, again to port, you will see two more bald eagles.”
Our waitress said, “I think the captain has a picture of two eagles taped to his glasses. When he looks out of the corner of his eye, he sees them in the trees.”
The ship’s comedian imitated the captain: “On the starboard side there are three leaping killer whales, seven leaping porpoises and three sea otters with young floating on icebergs. On the port side, two brown bears are washing salmon by the water, and there are two eagles. bald spots that Princess Lines pays to follow the ship to Seward. “
Guides can offer very different versions of the same thing. On Bora Bora, French Polynesia, a huge abandoned Hyatt hotel with just the foundations sits by the sea. A local guide said the reason the hotel had been abandoned was because of the greed of the builders and the costs of mismanagement, bribery and corruption.
Raiatea anthropologist Bill Kolans gave a different version. Polynesians never really give up their land. Relatives are often buried in the backyard, which helps ensure that the land remains in the family. After Hyatt builders assembled land for their hotel, hundreds of Bora Borans came forward with land claims. Buying them all would have been tremendously expensive, so the project was abandoned.
On tours of French Polynesia, resentment against Chinese merchants would surface. “There is such and such a supermarket. It is owned by Chinese, and groceries are expensive there.” The Chinese who were originally brought to Tahiti to work in the sugar fields, stayed after the work in the fields ceased. They gradually became the merchant class and now own many banks and businesses.
A Tahitian guide said: “The French bake our bread, the Chinese deliver and sell it, and the Tahitians pay for it.”
In Bora Bora, a tour guide was outraged when a tourist asked him if they ever ate dogs. Paul Theroux in his book on Oceania found that some islanders in some archipelagos did eat dog. He thought that was the reason why island dogs often seemed so grumpy because they knew what to expect. Our guide said, “Of course we wouldn’t eat dogs. They are our pets, family members. What do you think we are, savages?”
Then his whole mood abruptly changed and he said mischievously, “Now Americans, that’s a different story. They are really tasty, especially the fingers. We call it finger food.”
Captain Cook, hundreds of years ago, detailed cannibalism in the South Seas.
In Alaska, tour guides specialize in end-of-tour poetry recitations. His favorite is Robert Service, the Kipling of the Yukon, and on many bus tours just before tipping, you’ll hear “The Dan McGrew Shooting,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” or “The Yukon Spell.” “They are recited from memory and somehow the lines seem more immediate as you travel through a gold rush border town like Skagway.
We took a steam-powered train ride in vintage railroad cars that followed the gold rush trail from Skagway over the mountains to Dawson’s takeoff point. In 1898, thousands of gold prospectors braved dire conditions and thousands of pack animals were killed. Over the train loudspeaker, a tour guide read a story by Jack London that poignantly described how these animals fell or were thrown down steep mountain paths.
At Skagwag, our guide took us to the old cemetery where Soapy Smith and Frank Reid are buried. Soapy Smith was the leader of a gang that terrorized the city in the days of the gold rush. Reid shot Soapy and on his grave is an inscription that says he gave his life for Skagway’s honor. Nearby is the grave of a woman of pleasure. On her headstone it says, “She gave her honor for Skagway’s life.”
In Hamburg, Germany, a tour guide touts patriotic ecology in action. One block from the notorious red light district on the Reeperbahn, he pointed out some women he said were prostitutes. “Good for them. They are saving precious energy. They are walking to work.”
I have met many good tour guides over the years, I have laughed and learned from most of them.