Photographic Journeys

By Scot Walker

Scot Walker is a world traveler. This book contains 60 of his favorite places with photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scot Walker
• Release date: Jun 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463601211

Scot Walker

Mr. Walker has won a Flannery O'Connor Award for A Slow Bus Ride to a Shallow Grave; a Thomas Wolfe Short Story Contest award for Earsounds;a New Century Writer Ray Bradbury Fellowship award for Watched; a Kernodle New Play award for Kenu Hear the Wild Birds Sing?; A McLaren Memorial Comedy Play Writing award for, Screeches from the Zoo; an L. Ron Hubbard award for The Ruler of the Elves, and he has twice won awards in the Writer's Digest Competitions, once in the Stage Play Category for Abide with Me, and again in short story competition for La Mer. He's a member of the Dramatists Guild and his plays have been performed throughout the USA and Europe. You can email him at [e-mail] or search the internet. Be sure to go to Smashwords—and look for his latest publication: Amazing Stories, which includes 80 of his award winning and published best.

Book preview

Photographic Journeys, Volume 1

© 2020 by Scot Walker

A Smashwords publication.

This book is dedicated to my Wheaton High School friend, Margy Sadler with special thanks to Linh P. Pham for designing the covers of all my play programs and my Smashword book covers.

Foreword

Scot Walker, who is too poor to afford the second T and drinks a lot of coffee to compensate, is celebrating his 66th year as a professional author. He began as a 10-year old when Santa gave him a small printing press and Scot composed, printed and sold twenty copies of his newspapers for a penny apiece. Subsequently he has seen over 300 of his poems, short stories, novels, non-fiction works, letters, plays, essays, and reviews published. Mr. Walker has won a Flannery O’Connor Award for A Slow Bus Ride to a Shallow Grave; a Thomas Wolfe Short Story Contest award for Earsounds; was a finalist in the New Century Writer Ray Bradbury Fellowship award for Watched; won a Kernodle New Play award for Kenu Hear the Wild Birds Sing?; won A McLaren Memorial Comedy Play Writing award for, Screeches from the Zoo; and has twice won awards in Writer's Digest Competitions, once in the Stage Play Category for Abide with Me, and again in short story competition for La Mer. He’s a member of the Dramatists Guild and his plays have been performed throughout the USA and Europe. You can email him at [e-mail] or search the internet. Be sure to go to Smashwords—he has collections of short stories which include his prize winning stories, novels and non-fiction works there. Buy something for goodness sakes! 

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Machu Picchu

Chapter Two: Iguassu Falls

Chapter Three: Delphi

Chapter Four: The Pyramids and the Sphinx

Chapter Five: Tikal

Chapter Six: Masada

Chapter Seven: The Chengdu Pandas

Chapter Eight: Petra

Chapter Nine: Rio

Other works

Published books by Scot Walker

Corked-chapter 1

Corked-chapter 2

Chapter One:

Machu Picchu

Christmas 1977.

Cuzco was freezing, freezing me to the marrow of my bones. My soul, however, was on fire. Tomorrow I would visit Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas.

My journey had begun thirty-three years earlier when as a ten-year old I read Richard Halliburton’s New Worlds to Conquer. Halliburton was an explorer, adventurer and reporter who chronicled his daily adventures in newspapers and books, and from the moment I discovered him, he owned me! I lived through each of his illustrated easy-to-read publications, devouring Halliburton’s knowledge of history and his adventures as I imbued my soul with his passion and ultimately planned to walk in his very footsteps! Now, with that as background and the fact that I was teaching junior high school history, I set off on this marvelous journey, deciding to spend my entire 1977 Christmas vacation in the land of the Incas.

Here are my diary entries from 1977:

"December 23, 1977. I had booked a stay in Cuzco at a small hotel for $1.65 a night and was surprised when the owner’s two sons, Paulo and Alejandro, met me at the airport. I told them my bag didn’t come through and they told me it was probably in Lima and would come up on the next flight, and not to worry. I still couldn’t grasp why my bag had gone from DC to Atlanta to Lima so easily—I saw it at the airport in Lima before I boarded my plane to Cuzco and assumed it would be picked up and sent on. My travel agent assured me it was checked straight through but I realized things were going to be a lot slower here south of the equator, so I unpacked my small carry-on bag, familiarized myself with the hotel and walked downtown slowly, because I had read about Sirocco, the mountain sickness.

As a boy who grew up with chronic bronchitis and suffered from asthma I knew that breathing on sea level was hard enough but here 11,100 feet high up the Andes, it could