Photographic Journeys, Vol. 3

By Scot Walker

Photographic Journeys are photos and diary entries form the author's fifty years of travels. This volume continues with the Taj Mahal; the author's climb up the US Capitol Dome as he stood just below the Statue of Freedom; the remains of Herculaneum and Pompey; London; Paris; Barcelona; Ushuaia; the Panama Canal; Hong Kong and San Francisco.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scot Walker
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463558843

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 3

© 2020 by Scot Walker

A Smashwords Production

This book is dedicated to all my Wheaton High School (MD) friends.

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 paid 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; 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; 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—he has collections of short stories, novels and non-fiction works there. Buy something for goodness sakes! 

Table of Contents:

Chapter Nineteen: The Taj Mahal

Chapter Twenty: Climbing the U.S. Capitol Dome

Chapter Twenty-One: Herculaneum and Pompey

Chapter Twenty-Two: London

Chapter Twenty-Three: Paris

Chapter Twenty-Four: Barcelona

Chapter Twenty-Five: Ushuaia

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Panama Canal

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Hong Kong

Chapter Twenty-Eight: San Francisco

About the Author

Selected Awards

Publications

Produced Plays

Selected Awards

Poetry

Other Smashwords books

Sample of The Only Good Bug is a Good Bug

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE TAJ MAHAL

I visited in 2008.

The Taj Mahal is the only tomb built for love and how many of us have had romantic dreams visiting it? We’ve all seen photographs but, like the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids, and so many other pictures we’ve seen, we can only use them for inspiration to drive us to book a tour and visit. That’s the purpose of this book. . . to inspire to travel and fulfil to those hidden dreams.

September 4: I book this trip across India to see the Taj Mahal. All the other places were fillers—things I hadn’t really thought much about, but encountering them made this trip totally marvelous because site after site on our journey to the Taj was more and more extraordinary, but the Taj Mahal, of course, was the dessert—the place we had dreamed of, the garland around Ganesha’s neck.

And then the moment came, after a long bus ride, we walked up the path to the Taj Mahal. Just outside, out of sight, our guide gave us a brief history. I was all ants. . . with no desire to learn more—all I wanted was to be here, to see the Taj Mahal, to walk up those stairs to the tomb, but no, our guide, like most, rambled some, almost as much as I do now, telling us the history.

Mostly, I turned him out, but moments before we moved forward, around the stone walls, into the regal park that contains it, he told us that when the British controlled India, a contractor had offered to buy it because he wanted to sell the marble. He planned to pull the mausoleum to the ground, cut it into pieces and sell them bit by bit just like the fierce Turks had done to the frieze around the Parthenon. I was aghast. I pictured the marble I had bought for my fireplace mantle and was nearly sick. Where had that come from? Some other shrine, perhaps? O some other beautiful place? I grew more and more anxious to enter the gates and see what was left, had this entrepreneur hacked off pieces? Did all those photographs I had seen contain nothing more than the front? No, our guide said as I breathed a sigh of relief. Our guide continued, the entrepreneur failed to find a buyer for the marble stones and the cost of dismantling it would have bankrupted the contractor so he walked away from the deal. I thought, yes, there are gods, at least here in India, who have watched over their people.

And I entered the sanctuary, the park, the place of the Taj Mahal, an expanse that appeared as large as the Mall in my hometown, Washington, D. C.

This is the site’s entrance. Imagine how much glorious the Taj Mahal is!