A Woman’s Tour Leads Far Off the Beaten Path

When Martha Marino shipped her youngest son off to college in 1984, she didn’t struggle with empty-nest syndrome: The foreign-language teacher simply rented out her house in Laguna Beach and joined the Peace Corps.

Marino’s yearlong stint teaching English at a university in a fishing village in Thailand for the Peace Corps--and another year and a half on her own teaching English at a government institute in a small town in China--are the subjects of her self-published book “Asian Adventure: Amusing Tales From Thailand and China” (Marino Press; $14.95).

Hers are not the stuff of high drama but of the little, everyday things that can happen to a middle-aged woman far off the beaten tourist path:

* Coping with a tropical climate: nail polish hardened as soon as it was applied, ice cubes melted instantly in an evening drink. Marino once ran a fever for three days without even realizing it: “I simply thought the weather had turned extra sultry!”

* Dealing with an unwanted nightly visitor--a rat the size of a cat--in her apartment in Thailand.

* Running out of money from her meager Peace Corps salary two days before payday and being forced to cash in 75 cents worth of postage stamps--enough to buy three eggs and some bananas. While on her way to the campus post office with her stamps, however, she was unexpectedly invited out to dinner by a teacher friend “whose big salary and comfortable furniture were the envy of everyone, especially me.”

Then there were the trials and tribulations of being a long-distance mother to two sons enrolled at Cal State Chico--an experience, Marino writes, that “made me as frustrated as the Dalai Lama must feel running Tibet from across the border.”

To eliminate the problem of mail from the United States taking at least four weeks to reach her in Thailand, Marino advised her two sons to wire her if anything went wrong. It did:

“Had car accident. Unhurt, but friend’s car totaled.”

“Tenant moved out of our house. Rent unpaid. Please take care of this.”

“Your check didn’t arrive. Being evicted Monday.”

“Forgot to pay parking tickets. Need $100 for bail, immediately.”

“Received bill from our last landlord. Suing us for $1,000 in damages. Mom, you signed the lease.”

Marino can laugh about the telegrams today.

“It’s crazy, but they’re all true,” she says.

That Marino, now 68, joined the Peace Corps was not out of character. She had already traveled the South China Sea by freighter, bicycled alone across France and survived the outbreak of civil war in Sudan.

As Marino says: “I always liked to travel.”

Since graduating from UC Berkeley in 1949 with a BA in psychology and moving to Germany shortly thereafter to work as a recreational director for the U.S. Army, the Compton-born Marino has done little but travel--and, in the process, add to her repertoire of foreign languages.

While living in Germany, where she ran a service club for soldiers for two years, she studied German at the University of Heidelberg. She took a year off to study French at the University of Grenoble and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Then she moved to Japan, where she worked again as a recreational director for the U.S. Army and later taught English at a university in Kyoto.

From Japan, she booked passage on a freighter on which, she says, “I traveled all over the area”: Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali, Burma and, finally, India, where she wrote a few articles for an Indian newspaper and, living off her savings, did more traveling.

After two years in India, she taught English in Sudan. It was there she met and, in 1960, married an Italian engineer.

Eventually, Marino earned a master’s degree in education from the University of Iowa and settled in Laguna Beach in 1965.

She taught in the Anaheim Union High School District for 16 years--with breaks for travel and foreign assignments. She taught English in a German high school for a year and later taught German in a French high school.

“I came out with a crazy accent, I’ll tell you,” she says.

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By the time sons Claudio and Kelvin entered college, Marino was divorced and ready to once again hit the road.

Although she doesn’t like to admit it, she says, it wasn’t a desire to help people that motivated her to join the Peace Corps: “I joined because I really like living in foreign countries and I like learning languages--and I love adventure.”

After living in Thailand and China, Marino took another two years before returning home: She took the Trans-Siberian railroad from Beijing to Moscow, then toured Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And after spending four months in France with friends, she got a job in Peru teaching English in a university in Lima for five months.

“The world is my home, as you can see,” she says.

After a brief pleasure trip to Australia, she spent three months in Costa Rica and then decided to see the rest of South America. It was only after getting sick--while traveling up the Amazon, no less--that she returned to Laguna Beach in 1988.

The local Coastline News later printed a number of the humorous stories she had written about her personal experiences in Thailand and China. At the urging of a writing teacher, the late Diane Azbell of Irvine, she decided to “polish them up and put them in a book.”

“Asian Adventure,” which Marino is distributing herself, is available in Laguna Beach at Upchurch-Brown, the Different Drummer and Latitude 33. It’s also available at Borders Books in Mission Viejo, Book Site in Dana Point, Martha’s Bookstore on Balboa Island and Barnes & Noble in Fashion Island, Newport Beach, where she’ll do a signing at 2 p.m. today.

These days, Marino works part time as a substitute teacher for the Capistrano Unified School District. But nearly 50 years after she first set off to see the world, Marino has lost none of her wanderlust.

Every summer she rents out her house and once again hits the road. She has spent four recent summers touring Europe on a bicycle, riding through Ireland, England, France, Switzerland, Holland and Italy.

Last summer, however, she decided to forgo her annual bike trip. She went to Vietnam instead.

And next summer?

“I want to go back to Europe and ride some more,” she says.

She says that although she travels alone, she has never encountered any trouble.

“I have a great time,” she says. “I like doing it alone. It’s really hard to be compatible with somebody traveling, and I’ve done it by myself so much I guess I like it that way.”

Besides, she says, “I can never find anyone who wants to do this with me. Most people don’t have the time, and most people my age bracket don’t want to do that at all.”

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