Your Crocodile has Arrived: More True Stories from a Curious Traveler by Laurie McAndish King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Totally Non-Apologetic Creativity -- After domestic terrorism shooting sprees at Gilroy Garlic Festival, El Paso and Dayton; it was SPECTACULARLY refreshing to attend Women Travel Writers “Sharing Their Secrets” Monday August 5th at Book Passage Left Coast Writers in Corte Madera.
Cool, funny, smart, well-read, powerful and highly competent women telling their stories about getting PAID to travel worldwide for wildlife, ecotourism, historical, athletic gear, news journalism, cultural or food research writing and photography! Hooray! Whoopee! Yahoo! You go girl, just like the U.S. Women’s Soccer team!
I couldn’t help but praise all the panelists for giving me a bounteous, healing evening full of “totally non-apologetic creativity.” Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Joanna Biggar, Laurie McAndish King, Mary Jo McConahay, Jill K. Robinson with 25 people in the audience hanging on their every word. We were alive and inspired!
Laurie McAndish King works at Berkeley’s Wilderness Travel, and also writes articles and collections of travel stories like Your Crocodile has Arrived: More True Stories from a Curious Traveler and Lost, Kidnapped and Eaten Alive! Her compact, catchy style is just great. Every first paragraph has a “hook” in it, promising a weird, fun, surprising, seductive or mysterious tale leading on into the future, like Scheherazade.
Definitely curiosity seems to be her number one motivating trait, and she goes about it with scientific detachment that’s always ready to widen out to love beauty and/or empathize with somebody having fun.
“Why?” She seems to ask, and “How?”
Why are these animals/ insects/ humans/ religious relics/ smugglers/ parrots/ whiskies/ gypsies/ moas/ dumplings/ snakes/ elephants/ worms/ flying saucers/ camels/ groups/ taxicabs or gondolas LIKE THIS, anyway, and how do they work / together/ not together/ OR NOT?
Everyone on the panel had some kind of Berkeley connection. They were writers, whether they were saving their postcards and letters and making a book out of them, or getting assignments to cover Latin America or Antarctica for The Washington Post, Sierra Club, Food & Wine or National Geographic Magazine.
Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar edited Wandering in Cuba: Revolution and Beyond (2018). They both have pieces in it, as does McAndish King, who provided the cover and other photographs.
The variety in Wandering gives me a sense that I’ve actually been there in a way that few “travel journals” can.
Many of these stories hark back to the pre-Revolutionary Havana days, its haven of nightclubs, prostitution, political and financial corruption, its drastic haves and have-nots scenarios. Most show the grassroots reforms and ideals of Jose Marti, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as having a deeply beneficial influence on the people of Cuba as far as universal free education, health, subsistence food and government supports persisting through the Soviet pullout and the U.S. embargo was concerned; but at a cost of many goods and conveniences of modern culture as well as “a certain conformity.”
When Obama loosened the limits on travel, the “kaleidoscope of art, culture, politics, and ideas…(caused) changes…where entrepreneurial spirit was ignited and creativity in full force.” The past several decades have been up and down.
There are no homeless people, but many live in colonial or some Soviet-style buildings in great need of repair, and among the young there are many highly educated working at semi-menial jobs, with not a lot of hope for improvement, either. They don’t want to leave, though, because they’re a family, cultural and political island like no other. There’s no place like it to go to. Even a full education as a MD is free, and artists and musicians get free studios, food, cheap housing and stipends like everybody else.
I remember a story an organic farming “slow food” couple from Minnesota told after spending an exchange month touring around in Cuba about a decade ago. Everyone came back home in the evening around the central square plaza in a village’s neighborhood and had a kind of walking stroll, sitting on front stoops, talking and intergenerational visiting with kids playing around like Southern European cultures do.
The Cubans didn’t have many consumer goods, books or TVs, however, and culturally were used to entertaining each other socially with talk, music and stories. Due to the Russian pullout and U.S. embargo, there were few cars, and there was only one bicycle on the square.
Kids lined up casually and played hopscotch, sang and hung out with other kids or elders while waiting for their turn on the bike. Each kid, no fighting or arguing, would happily take their turn, ride slowly or quickly all around the outside of the square and back to the beginning, and give the treasured bicycle to the next child waiting patiently in line.
Can you imagine what would happen in an American town, urban or suburban neighborhood if there were maybe 200 kids and only one bike? Blood on the Reeboks, man. Get down.
Reading all the stories in Crocodile and Wandering in Cuba will definitely give you a different world, a different “point of view.”


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