With Apologies
To Steinbeck's Charlie . . .

Though Steinbeck's adventures with Charlie inspire me,
I mostly travel alone or with my spouse (also a writer),
never with my Great Dane, Malibu.
(She's very large and would require an adult ticket. (-: )  
Sometimes I write travel articles (scroll down for a sample of one)
but mostly my travel inspires poetry.

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"Travel is not a vacation.
It is touching. Spirit to spirit. Culture to culture."
~Carolyn Howard-Johnson

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die z

you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English z

and don’t even want to.”
~ Mrs. Gibbs from Our Town  by Thornton Wilder

For resources on tolerance, one of Carolyn's favorite themes.

For a spooky story based on a legend I picked up when I was studying in Prague, go to Kevin McNamee's blog for children's authors.

Cruising a Quarter Distance of the World
Singapore to Rome via the Suez Canal on the Ocean Princess, 2012

Malacca Strait (c)

evening turns mauve as the sun sinks,
watercolor sky. Van Gogh brushed sea
marked with freighters,
twinkling
smudges, parentheses afar,
looming presences up close. floating
R2D2s trail the giants’ cool wakes,
tooting.
oil fields to refineries in Singapore,
beyond to the world.
danger in their bellies.

Osama Bin Laden’s Death (c)

Scholarship lecture series aboard the Ocean
Princess. Garbled speaker, captain, equipment.
Obama. Osama. Even after we understand,
only vibration from giant
turbines that make the ship go. 
The lecturer returns to cultural influences
in Southeast Asia. Still no one leaves,
no one whispers. I later heard the world
celebrated.

Snapshots from Ocean Princess’ Maiden Suez Voyage (c)

May, season of Suez crabs, great egg-drop along the banks. Egyptians drop nets, voices high on still-white air, their canoes once-painted, now faded like bleached stones, security coiled like cobras at the bow. Beneath plank slats, crab claws grasp, cling, reach for water, roil and reek of brine and death. Reeds sopped with salt, grey-green like oregano.

Port Said far to the east, a spired Oz mid emerald fields of sugarcane, papyrus, beans. Oleander, bougainvillea, white, pink, fuchsia specks on shore, unused fishing boats tucked between their trunks.

Saying goodbye. Asia on our right, tribal states. Africa on our left. Black flags. Black for oil, black for volcanic rock. One hundred six from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in the sun.

Copper Canyon, Mexico
Via Holland America Cruise Line, 2011

Carolyn with Tarahumara Indian woman and her daughter. Notice the dolls
they carved from small branches. They are also known for their baskets.

Link to learn more about the Tarahumara:
http://www.mexonline.com/raramuri.htm

Mexico's Copper Canyon, the Cinderellla sister to the Grand Canyon.
Sootier shades but possibly a bigger heart.

Carolyn and Eve's Writers' Retreats

Travel and Writing Go Together!

Eve LaSalle Caram and I sponsored the most amazing writers'
retreat in Rome at this villa. Learn more about it and follow the link for future plans for creative writing adventures. Highly recommended for rentals in Italy, www.theparkercompany.com. Tell Mario we sent you. (-:

For those specifically interested in travel in Italy,
check out my friend Mario's blog: http://www.accessitaly.com/

The Famous Alexandria Library
Alexandria, Egypt, November 2010
Princess Cruise

                                            

The Alexandria Library: A miracle and testament to humankind's
perseverance, love of learning, and creative souls.

The photo on the left shows characters from every language used as symbols on the facade.

Serendipity: My Own Found Poem (C)

Carolyn Howard-Johnson

"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. "   Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881),

Inspiration, a fissure in an eggshell,
promise of a chick.

I search for an article,
lost,
find
instead
fragments.

Coffee beans fragrant,
useless without a mill.

Ballpoint ink acrid compared to
fullon lampblack,
the look weak next to paint whisked on silk.

Burned meter, poetry-flare brighter than fire.

Which better, pristine notebooks
or half-scribbled and never read again?

Alexandria's library full of what was once
only papyrus pulp
and rice-pressed mush.

 Waiting too long, paper yellows, crinkles
to dust.

Who was this Egyptian scribe seated,
scribbling in stone?

That shining place, the Parthenon.

A dyslexic, brilliant, hears music in his head.

Pampas plumes in early light,
the color of blood in milk.

Here I am at the Roman theater in Alexandria.

Have You Ever Had a
A Truncated Vacation?

I was headed to Nepal to realize a lifetime dream of seeing Mt. Everest in its ever-so snowy and rocky and thin-aired real-life person. And this  trip was going to be better than I imagined! A National Geographic tour offered just such a trip with Peter Hillary as its leader. He--not only an expert on the Himalayas but also a fellow author--lead the trip. After a grueling 24 hour flight from Los Angeles to Beijing I was on my way. We would fly to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, spend four days there touring and acclimating ourselves to the 12,000 foot altitude, then climb into four-wheel drives to travel the back roads of Tibet to Everest's base camp. I was in ecstasy.

Now, here's the thing about travel. You know to expect the unexpected. You know anything could happen to you. I knew it could happen to me. Heck, I spent a night in an Italian airport because of an earthquake once. Missed seeing Iceland because of bad weather. Missed Turkey (once!) because of a terrorist attack. Watched a terrorist (I think it was about 1978) drive a hijacked bus up and down the tarmac at JFK rather than spend that time flying first class to Rome.  I have a string of adventures I could tell you about. But they belong in another story. On this trip I got evacuated to a hospital in Beijing  because of ill health. 

Though I teared up at the news that I would have to go, it wasn't all that bad. The four days I spent in a hospital room with a lovely (male!) guide and escort from Tibet was both life affirming and a good lesson in preconceived notions about the ways of other countries.  And those four days in Lhasa? That wasn't what I went for, but it was an amazing experience I shall never forget!

So here is a picture and a series of Haikus to commemorate that trip:

From the amazing to the sublime: Carolyn with
artful stacks of yak dung in the countryside near Tibet, left.
Right, monks chanting for the Tibetan earthquake victims (May 2010)
at a Lhasa monastery. The candles burn in a tub of yak butter.

Tibet Haiku Medley
Copyright 2010

Far, Far East

Board plane for Bangkok
Chase dark shadows, West to East
One sunrise mislaid.

 Tibet’s True National Flag

Sun-faded, wind-frayed,
blue, green red, white, yellow-earth,
each a quiet prayer.

 Drepung’s Unseasonal Storm

Barren brown hills coax
icy nuggets from the sky.
Gentle persuasion.

Hail big as poplar
blossoms, covers barren hills.
High mountain magic.

Falling snow-pellets,
pretty beads for coats and hair,
melt on thirsty hills.

Mediterranean, East and West
Norwegian Jade, 2010

Carolyn at Giza, back-to-back cruises on the Norwegian Jade.
Pure bliss. Spain, Italy (Etruscans), Greece (Poseidon's Temple), Turkey (Ephesus), Alexandria (The New Library), Cairo (Giza), Morocco  (a visit to a Berber village near an oasis), and Cairo (the tallest and most gorgeous minaret in the world), the Canary Islands, the Madeira's (before their big flood--just before!),  Granada and the Alhambra and beautiful, beautiful Barcelona.  February 2010. Oh, yeah! Malta. No one ever tells us how beautiful it is!

Sample Travel Article
The article below is available to reprint with permission of the author.
Please credit as shown or e-mail Carolyn for permission to make changes.

Making the Princess Fit:

Or How a Girl Who Loves Museums and Archaeology
Can Find Happiness On a Cruise

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of This is the Place and
Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered and several chapbooks of poetry

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins says—with perfect diction that emphasizes his delight, “By George, I think she’s got it!”

He isn’t, of course, referring to Eliza Doolittle’s finally learning how to fit the conventions of a cruise into her travel preferences but, nevertheless, it was an “Aha!” moment similar to what I felt this year when I finally figured out how a girl—well, OK, a woman—who loves to spend hours in museums and isn’t much on cutting her feet on coral or wrangling with jellyfish, could live with the cruises her husband likes to take.

I admit to taking three cruises with my husband in six months. Maybe this is the kind of intensity required for me to learn how to make this kind of travel work for me, provide me with just such a moment of elucidation.

Because my husband and I like to travel differently, we have taken separate vacations for years. He loves first class (He says he got enough roughing it in the Army.) I on the other hand, never tire of extended hanging about in foreign corners—out of the way spots if only the basement rooms of museums—by myself. I am not much on shopping, and hate to pay for the luxury of gold-plated faucets when I’m too tired to notice them. Still, we thought it was time for us to share some good times together. He—this new traveling partner of mine to whom I’d been married 45 years at the time—has always said, “Even lab rats learn to run a maze after a few tries.” I guess that applies to me. I’m a slow learner. But at least as capable as a white rat.

Here are my secrets for adapting a cruise to my preferences:

1. For psychological reasons, choose a cruise with ports that are inaccessible excepting by water (the Greek Isles are an example.). This sets one’s synapses—if they are arranged at all like mine—into a pattern that makes it impossible to say to oneself, “If I had been traveling by train I would have spent two extra days in St. Petersburg at the Russian Museum gazing at Repin’s ‘Barge Haulers on the Volga.’” You see? No trains available. No choices. Happy camper.
2. Choose a boat—er, ship,--that’s small enough so that disembarking at ports of call does not resemble a cattle call for Spartacus.
3. This onerous task of getting on and off the ship is minimized if you resist the temptation to save $10 by purchasing your tour from someone who hangs around the pier hawking his wares. To save those extra few dollars, you will probably disembark with hundreds of others who want to shop or hang out on the beaches. Instead, choose a tour from the many offered by the cruise lines. Most organize these tours so the crowds on and off are staggered. Not as frugal, certainly, but worth the price.
4. To extend suggestion #3 one more step, select more expensive tours (Over $80). I am known for my. . . er, thrifty tendencies (I'm sometimes known as The Frugal Book Promoter)  but I have found that the more costly tours are the best values if only because they tend to attract fewer travelers. That improves the quality in general but also makes egress easier.
5. Any tour will become more enjoyable for travelers who share my preferences if they avoid shopping during the time allotted for that. The time is too short, you don’t want to miss the bus. Turn those moments into something relaxing instead. (Save shopping for your return to the port city.) Instead you might:

• Talk to a local.

• Practice your Spanish with someone sitting on a park bench.

• Play with children in the plaza.

• And if you must buy something, nose around the shops that might be used by natives like the pharmacies or grocery stores. If you can’t resist a souvenir, buy from a local vendor and get a snapshot of yourself with her.

6. Choose tours that interest you, of course. For me that means selecting ones that take me to the sites I’d visit if I were backpacking or going on a dig with university students. Fewer fellow cruisers take these tours—perhaps because they are more arduous. I talked my husband into one from the port of Acapulco to Taxco—four and ½ hours on the road each way. There were only five other people with us including the ship’s tour master. That gave us a chance to relate to our fellow tourists. We saw amazing terrain on the way including a kind of Saguaro cactus called Candelaria that had dozens of elegant arms. I bought pescanovios (finger catchers), at 35 cents each!, for the children at home from a vendor who sold from her home on a side street. On a similar tour, from the port of Manzanillo to Colima, we sampled coconuts (Scroll down for the combination  recipe and poem about that experience) at a potty stop. I didn’t once wish I had more time to explore because every minute of both of these tours was fascinating.
7. Now for the most important tip. Take a journal and use it. A few years ago, my daughter and I were given a cruise to the Caribbean. It was a business perk from one of our suppliers during my retail days. I hardly remember which islands we visited. They all blended together excepting for Cancun (that one stood out because of the Mayan site, Tulum). If you see five ports in 6 days with only one of those days at sea and they are all kind of well, Caribbeany in character, you may not have time to assimilate details. My journal works well as a memory booster.
8. Take a moment when you’re at sea to assemble the pictures, notes and treasures into your journal. This can be as much fun as reading a forgettable mystery from the ship’s library. Of course, you’ll want to prepare for this activity. Take with you:

• a tiny bottle of glue

• double-sided cellophane tape

• blunt-nosed scissors that air security won’t confiscate

• a couple of marking pens and plenty of pencils and ballpoints

• maybe even a hole punch, miniature stapler and travel themed stickers

Note: The ship you are traveling on may offer scrapbooking sessions or a class on journaling. They're fun!

9. Do something creative with your journal. Pick up a streamer or some confetti shot into the audience at a dinner show and tape it to a page. I write poetry—very rough, of course, but some have turned into publishable material when I returned home and rewrote them.
10. Here, for an example, is what I did in Antigua instead of playing on a beach:

• I learned Antigua is pronounce An-tee-guh, because the British, (I imagined a Rex Harrison kind of Englishman in 16^th Century garb)—mispronounced it. I also learned the country recently became a fully independent state.

• I discussed the recent election on the island with my tour guide and how “the lovely green stone” used in construction there was really limestone.

• We encircled the entire island and I learned about their NASA tracking station from some locals at lunch.

• And I wrote this poem, in spite of poor roads and a bouncy bus when it struck me that Antigua, in spite of a thriving tourist business, was indeed enduring economic woes often experienced by newly emerging nations:

Antigua’s Hope

                                Sweet Potato Man sits
on the tailgate of his battered
pick-up, parked near the road
that tracks Antigua’s shore.
Like a flower drawn to the sun,
                           Sweet Potato Man turns
his face toward traffic. Crumpled,
brown as a prune it is. Languid
he is. Waiting. Waiting for someone
to pay for his crop. Nearly black-baked
by the Carib heat as he, sweet
potatoes like twists of dark yarn
lie on a blanket.
                        Sweet Potato Man’s legs
dangle from his perch, limp,
puppet limbs. His shoulders hunch,
sweat glints on his cheeks, his eyes
white buttons. I sense he wants
me to stop,
                       Sweet Potato Man knows
I will pass him by.                          

All in all, my last cruises couldn’t have been better if I’d been trekking overland by train or zipping by rented car because . . . well, I finally learned that when I cruise I can combine the best of both worlds. I even came to appreciate the enforced days of relaxation at sea. They are very fine additions, indeed.

---------------

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s first novel, This is the Place, has won eight awards. Her creative nonfiction stories in  Harkening won three, and her poetry and short stories are frequently seen in review journals. She is an instructor for UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and her practical and detailed series of HowToDoItFrugally series of books--one for writers and one for retailers--are multi award winners.

Sidebar for the above article: One of Carolyn's series of recipe poems

Colima’s Coconut Treat

A recipe within a poem.
Dedicated to Roberto, a former schoolteacher
turned tour guide in Manzanillo, Mexico

                                        Roberto used a machete. (Substitute
a sharp carving knife in your kitchen
at home.) With one swift stroke
he scalps a coconut pod, instructs 
us that the head must be green. The juice
sweet water then, no deadly cholesterol 
he assures us Americanos.. When in Mexico
do as the Mexicans do, they say:

We drink the fruit’s gift, retain liquid
at the bottom of our new chalice,
slice chunks from the hat Roberto
just removed from the fruit, place
them in the bowl we made, 
sprinkle with a pinch (no need to measure)

                                                of chili powder. Roberto says La via
de Mexico, sure he and his countrymen
are genetically programmed
to appreciate its bite. Now you have,
red and white, two-thirds
of Mexico’s national bandera.
Green.
We still need green, to complete
 our patriotic salute, the sap from limones  
de Mexico. Sweeter. Juicier than limes
at home. We, Diego Revieras at work,
perch twists of color on the summit
of our coconut bowls, sprinkle rock salt
to intensify the flavor. Margaritas.
Tongue to salted edge of
the glass, bests tequila itself.

We eat with our fingers, mimic
our host. Dip the last coconut shards
into the juice left at the bottom
hand-feed our lovers who suck
the flavor from our fingers—one piece 
at a time. Even Mescal could not improve
the flavor. An easy morsel, eaten
at a stand by the side of a dusty Mexican
road. Memory’s favorite souvenir.

                 Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the
                 award-winning chapbook of poetry, Tracings (c)

Caribbean Cruise, 2007

 Ellie, Carolyn, and Gracie with a friendly stingray in Carib waters, Nassau, Bahamas. 2007

Vegetarian

I've eaten animals
disguised by deceitful
words.
Beef not cow,
pork not pig,
mutton not sheep,
calamari not octopus.
Octopuses blush
before, during
and after they make
love.

A pretty name
or breading will never
again be masquerade enough
for me to dip their
curls into hot sauce.

I fed a stingray today,
held it in my arms,
it's skin silky
as a soft, wet kiss.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
author of the multi award-winning 
chapbooks of poetry, including Tracings

West Caribbean Cruise
Royal Caribbean Freedom of the Seas (July 2008)

Moises,our shaman and tour guide for Temazcal sweat baths near Cozumel.
Find Moises' tours at www.TemazcalCozumel.com.

The Temazcal Sweat Lodge

Here in this place of ancient miracles
Moises pours a brew of wild basil, rosemary,
lemongrass and orange onto coals,
the womb-shaped lodge black as the orb
of the universe with no stars, dark
as our beginnings, lifetimes measured
in minddays, No shaman
Moises claims, but he knows I am Moonday One,
Year of the Red Spectral, Day Eight of the Red
Electric Dragon, tone of Service, guided by
Lifeforce. Afterward, my body weightless, I float
alone in a cenote, water like liquid gold,
tannen-stained. Cool, quiet. A mosquito
hovers but does not land.

                                                                                                                                               
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning chapbook of poetry, Tracings

Transatlantic Copenhagen,
Dover, Dublin, Belfast, Greenland and Iceland
Crown Princess (September 2008)

Note: We missed Iceland because of bad weather!

My husband's  idea of a joke. The plane was so cold, my nose is red!

Canterbury Cathedral at Canterbury, of course.
The cathedral famed for its blue windows and Chaucer's tales.

Mini Cruise
San Diego, Catalina, and Mazatlan, 2007

Carolyn sails the Stars and Stripes of America Cup fame.
Well, she got to help hoist a sail and stand at the helm. (-:  (Above, 2007)

Above: The beautiful Stars and Strips
where it is docked in the San Diego harbor.

Above:  My husband Lance with, for want of a better description
the huge jeep sized Mercedes four-wheeler we toured Catalina in.
Great fun putting our backs out!

Mexican Riviera
Mariner of the Seas, 2009

Puerta Vallarta.
I love animals, even lizards this big.
Here's a poem I wrote, inspired by a lizard, though this one obviously isn't the same beast as the one in the picture...

The Dangerous Lizard from Gabon

(This poem was originally published in the Journal of the Image Warehouse.)

One coke-cork eye scrutinizes me
from page four of the Smithsonian
Magazine. He doesn’t twitch,
this lizard from Gabon. Corn nub
scales march, marching
margarine-colored blisters.

If he senses my heat, spots
my fear with that one still eye,
he will drop his jaw,
lash his tongue and swallow.

Corn-row alleys, our family’s
contoured jungle, ingest
a child. Their phallic husks
disguise burrowing larvae.
She cannot understand
how dark trails shield
her from raspberry thorns,
tomato worms with horns
but also from orchards
wild flowers beyond.

I grab down first prize
for best costume, “Begin the Beguine,”
a hand-me-down from my
sister’s performance,
skirt too big, bugle beads
the colors of Brazil’s flag,
like up-ended sequins
stitched across a serpent’s
hide. Flounces held
at the waist with a safety pin,
earrings made from canning
rings. Sweet’s Chocolate
Sticks, made in a factory
just across the tracks,
jelly-filled, Utah’s heritage.
An award in a box
for masquerading
as someone else.

My mother calls long
distance. Wear the St. John
I sent, the yellow
with platelets that shimmer.
I can fool my audience,
she thinks,
with a garb like that.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning chapbook of poetry, Tracings

 "Careers that are not fed die as readily
as any living organism given no sustenance." 
~ Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Studio photography by Uriah Carr

Logo by Lloyd King

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