At heart I am a novelist. I’ve written a terror thriller called “Nine Lives Too Many” and a modern, suspenseful paranormal story called “The Daemon in Our Dreams.” I have a new novel coming out soon that is about the rice queens. Most of my fictional endeavors are recorded on my website: http://www.senneffhouse.com. From time to time I like to go back to my beginnings as a travel writer. I especially like to write about travel with humor interspersed. My novel “The Demon of Our Dreams” is essentially a travel novel populated by many tour guides.

Have you heard of good tour guides lately?

On a tour of Alaska, our guide said, “We have a saying here in Alaska. There are nine men to every woman. Odds are good, but goods are rare.”

But the male guides fight back in this battle of the sexes. One man said that he had a T-shirt made 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 are 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. Cultural orientations are called when you stop at a museum instead of a craft market where the tour guide’s family member works.

Guides can tell jokes, propagandize, be the scapegoat, recite poetry, and tell lies. They hold a captive audience for a few hours, a day, or in some cases a week or more. For some reason, tour guides in Alaska are the best. Here are some illustrations of the breed from everywhere:

In 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 your address so I can give it to them so they can visit your house instead of mine.” .”

Alaska guide books are full of stories of bald eagles and bears. A guide told us about the black bear that roamed the airport and arrival area. He got on the baggage carousel and started riding it. They thought they would get rid of it by turning off the carousel. He growled and acted threatening so they had to let him continue on his journey until the rangers caught up with 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 in the woods. One man was Polish and the other Czech. The hunters shot the two bears. Autopsies were carried out. The Pole was found in the female so that they would know that the Czech was in the male”.

On a Princess ship in Alaska, while we were sipping martinis in the observation room, the captain would come on the pa “This is Captain Glug from the bridge. On the port side in the tallest tree, there are two bald eagles. About fifteen minutes he would later announce, “In the middle tree, back to port, you’ll see two more bald eagles.”

Our waitress said, “I think the captain has a picture of two eagles glued to his glasses. When he looks out of the corner of his eye, he sees them in the trees.”

The ship’s comedian would mimic the captain: “To starboard are three leaping killer whales, seven leaping porpoises, and three sea otters with pups floating on an iceberg. To port, two grizzly bears are washing salmon by the water, and there are two bald eagles that Princess Lines pays to follow the ship to Seward.”

Guides can give very different versions of the same thing. In Bora Bora, French Polynesia, a huge abandoned Hyatt hotel with only its foundations stands by the sea. A local guide said that the reason the hotel had been abandoned was because of the builders’ greed and the costs of mismanagement, bribery and corruption.

Anthropologist Bill Kolans on Raiatea gave a different version. Polynesians never really leave their land. Relatives are often buried in the backyard, which helps ensure the land stays in the family. After Hyatt builders assembled the land for their hotel, hundreds of Bora Borans came forward with claims to the land. Buying them all would have been terribly expensive, so the project was abandoned.

On tours of French Polynesia, resentment against Chinese traders surfaced. “There’s such and such a supermarket. It’s owned by Chinese, and groceries are expensive there.” The Chinese who were originally brought to Tahiti to work in the sugar fields, stayed after work in the fields ceased. They gradually became the merchant class and now own many banks and businesses.

One 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 if they had ever eaten dogs. Paul Theroux in his book on Oceania discovered that some islanders in some archipelagos did eat dogs. He thought that was why the dogs on the island often seemed so grumpy because they knew what was in store for them. 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’re very tasty, especially the fingers. We call it finger food.”

Captain Cook hundreds of years ago detailed the cannibalism of the South Seas.

In Alaska, tour guides specialize in poetry recitations at the end of the tour. His favorite is Robert Service, the Kipling of the Yukon, and on many bus tours, just before you tip, you’ll hear “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” or “The Spell of the Yukon.” “They’re recited from memory, and somehow the lines seem more immediate when you’re traveling through a gold rush frontier town like Skagway.

We took a steam train ride in vintage carriages that followed the gold rush trail from Skagway over the mountains to Dawson’s take off point. In 1898 thousands of gold prospectors braved the dire conditions and thousands of pack animals perished. Over the train’s loudspeaker, a tour guide read an account by Jack London that poignantly described how these animals fell or were thrown down steep mountain trails.

In 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 town in the days of the gold rush. Reid shot Soapy and on his grave there is an inscription that says he gave his life for the honor of Skagway. Nearby is the grave of a woman of pleasure. On her tombstone it says, “She gave her honor for Skagway’s life.”

In Hamburg, Germany, a tour guide was touting patriotic ecology at work. A block from the notorious red-light district on the Reeperbahn, he pointed out some women he said were prostitutes. “Good for them. They’re saving precious energy. They’re walking to work.”

I have posted many good tour guides over the years, and have laughed and learned from most of them.