“We swear you’ll thank us for this,” is what Lonely Planet said. The travel book described it, quite simply, as one of Bali’s most sacred Hindu temples, and it turned out to be, quite simply, the opposite. Pura Lempuyang sits high on a mountain overlooking the Bali Sea and the active volcano Mount Agung. The challenge is climbing 1700 slippery, stone steps to reach the “don’t miss” temple “where gods and humans meet.” Azar, my travel partner, and I were up for the challenge. If Lonely Planet “swears,” then we’re committed.

The challenge is climbing 1700 slippery, stone steps to reach the “don’t miss” temple “where gods and humans meet.”

At the base, we paid a fee and were instructed to wear a sarong throughout the journey. A guide, who wouldn’t be going with us, estimated it would take two hours to reach the temple and warned us that there would be occasional aggressive monkeys looking for food.

“How aggressive are these monkeys?” I asked.

“Oh you’ll be fine, of course. Just don’t feed them,” he replied.

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Around noon, an aging sedan rolled up. A skinny, baby-eyed, girl-woman got out, stepped up to the courtyard gate, and gave me a puzzled smile through the bars. She had long, metallic-red hair, mod side-bangs, and fluffy white ankle boots.

“Sara?” I asked.

She widened her eyes, as if shocked at the very thought. “Anita.”

“Un momento.” I rushed toward the house to find someone to unlock the gate.

Anita is Sara’s daughter, a twenty-year-old student at the University of Ciudad Juárez. She had arrived to take her aunt Patricia, grandmother Carmela, and me to her mom’s house, a forty-minute drive through the gauntlet of Juárez.

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I woke to the safe sounds of a gas burner igniting, a pan shifting, an egg sizzling. It was only then that a rooster started crowing somewhere in Colonia del Carmen. Perhaps he sets his clock by Carmela. I lingered in bed, until I heard Carmela and her daughter Carmela muttering in Spanish and figured it must be time to come out of hiding. I had no clear idea of the hour. My cell phone is my usual watch and I hadn’t brought it, unwilling to pay roaming charges in Mexico, or risk having it stolen on the desperate streets of Juárez.

When I emerged it was 7:30, and Carmela was hanging laundry in the chilly morning shadows of the courtyard. Every day she washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Diego’s hairdressing shop. She then made us a delicious herbal tea from canela (cinnamon) and flor de azahar (orange blossom).

“Good for calming the nerves,” she said, “para la tranquilidad.”

“I need that,” I teased. “I have an energetic personality.”

She smiled and offered her sincere hope that her tea would help.

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As Patricia and David had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After David drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into ’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked gate to pull into the courtyard. The gate had been there before Mexico’s drug war. Juárez has long known big-city, border-town dangers.

The inside looked bigger than the outside suggested. In the new addition, an old-fashioned wood stove warmed and cheered the room.

The house wasn’t small, though it might seem poor by American standards: a graying, peeling sprawl of cinderblock, brick, and adobe. “It’s too bad they can’t fix up the outside, isn’t it?” Patricia said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

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This Thursday, I’m traveling to a place that should have yellow caution tape around it. According to the news, according to family and friends, according to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez. When I told my grandfather I was going to Mexico to do research for my historical novel, he shouted a bit, then insisted, “OK, next subject.” But hey, sometimes Grampa shouts when he and Dad are deciding where to grab breakfast on Sunday, so I didn’t take it personally.

According to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez.

I’ll only be in Juárez for a day and a half of my five-day round-trip from El Paso to Casas Grandes. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m more scared about the twelve hours I’ll be on a Mexican highway. I plan to hide a couple hundred bucks in my shoe, in case I need to pay off highway robbers. Remember when our parents used to say, “That’s highway robbery!” and we thought it was just an expression?

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Being open when we travel is like standing atop a cliff, enlivening but risky. One year ago tonight, friends and I celebrated my memoir with a release party. To mark that anniversary, I’m sharing with you a story that never made it into They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away…

THE LOWER 48
35 years old – near Rialto Beach, Washington

As I climbed the final steps to the promontory at Cape Flattery, the most northwest point in the Lower 48, a pair of hazel eyes looked into mine. The way he said “hi,” it was as if he’d been expecting me. “Hi!” I replied, smiling. We stared down at the noisy waves washing in and out of blue grottoes hundreds of feet below, and gazed out at the immeasurable expanse of water bearing down on the cape. The Pacific faced no obstacles from the horizon to this point, and its accumulated power was eating away at the green-draped cliffs atop which we stood.

We stared down at the noisy waves washing in and out of blue grottoes hundreds of feet below. (Dreamstime stock photo by Fallsview)

As comfortably as if we’d known each other for years, the stranger and I talked animatedly about the travels that brought us here. When I said I’d taken a swing-dancing lesson in Seattle, he said, “You’re kidding! You swing dance?” He grabbed my hand and swung me around atop the cliff, and my laughter entered the wind and waves. I felt the rock beneath us shuddering under the onslaught of surf.

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Whenever I write or read about travel, I focus on adventure, learning, beauty, maybe even making a difference. But whenever I talk about travel, whether with global trekkers or homebodies, at some point we end up giggling and gasping over the same subject: bathrooms. So, here’s the straight poop on three of my overseas toilet tales, which didn’t make the final cut of my travel memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands. Please excuse the potty humor. It comes with the territory.

I wasn’t about to let a little killer diarrhea stop me from seeing the Taj Mahal.

IN THE TRENCHES
Kunming, China

For the night, I’ve checked into a large hostel, a dim, dank, dismal place that’s not enticing at all. When I grabbed my backpacking towel and walked down the hall to the showers, I took one look and decided not to perform any ablutions until I arrive in Lijiang tomorrow. The stench from the trench toilet was foul, and the showers were parked right next to it, with suspicious pools of yellowish-brown water on the floor. Unfortunately, my bowels could not wait.

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I recently answered a question on the Soul Pancake blog that hit at the heart of a subject I ponder often. The question was, “What question do you hate the most?”

“What are you?” I’ve answered this question a lot throughout my life.

In part, my answer was: “What are you?” I both love and hate this question. It often depends on the tone and the context. I have an ethnically-mixed background, and I’ve answered this question a lot throughout my life…

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DRESS REHEARSALS

Adventures are like dress rehearsals for the real thing. I have spent my life careening from one adventure to the next - always looking for the next big trip to tick off my list. Whether climbing Kilimanjaro, trekking through Bhutan or scuba diving with sharks, I told myself that by taking great risk, I was learning to handle crisis. Of course, I never imagined the kind of crisis I might have to face.

Climbing Kilimanjaro, I told myself that by taking great risk, I was learning to handle crisis.

I told myself that perhaps if I kept moving, kept adventuring, those bad things would never find me. If I filled my life with chosen risks, then there’d be no room for the unwanted ones, as if each life had a danger quota. For years I convinced myself that by taking calculated risks I was actually forestalling calamity.

But that’s not how it worked.

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When Indian activist Rita Banerji asked me to post an excerpt from my memoir on her blog, Gender Equal, I didn’t just feel humbled - I almost felt ashamed. Gender Equal seeks to raise awareness of global gender inequities. The blog is an initiative of the 50 Million Missing campaign, which is fighting female genocide in India. What could my book, about a Western woman professional empowering herself through a solo trek around the world, add to her mission? Then it occurred to me, it might offer hope: I enjoy a kind of freedom many women long for. It also occurred to me that I didn’t start out a fully-realized independent woman. At the start of my book, I was a victim of domestic violence. If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to read the opening excerpt from They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away. Then please read about India’s 50 Million Missing. If we want to empower other women, knowledge is a start.