The Adventurers

A strange caravan stopped in Beirut last week to refresh itself after eight long months on the road. On July 11, a party of 101 Americans had moved out of Cape Town in a wagon train of 41 aluminum trailers and 41 pastel-colored trucks. They had zigzagged over desert, through jungle and swamp, and it was obvious that where-ever they went, the natives--the black miners of the South, the willowy Watutsis, the squat Pygmies, the haughty Moslems of the North--had never seen anything quite like them. The adults among the travelers were all retired, and their ages, even after 22 children were figured in, averaged 62. By last week, when it stopped, the caravan had covered 14,800 miles and gone the length of a continent.

The man who led it is a crusty, 64-year-old trailer manufacturer from Los Angeles named Wally Byam. Wally has organized 27 such "Wally Byam's Caravans" before, and his customers have almost all been elderly men and women who would rather risk as much as $25,000 on an adventure than sit out their retirement on a back porch. For the trailer business, it has proved good publicity, but Wally likes to think that his caravans have a kind of mission. These, says he of his companions, are no ordinary big-talking, big-spending tourists. They are "a group of upper-middle-class Americans who can enjoy their leisure and be good-will ambassadors at the same time."

Organization Man. There are times when Ambassador Wally tries to show a bit too much good will to varied hosts. In segregated South Africa, the Natal Daily News gleefully quoted his observation that "Americans are not critical of your color policies." And last week, when informed that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would issue visas to the caravan only if no Jews were along, Wally airily replied: "We have it in black and white that there is not a single one in the whole group."

Wally's talent is not so much for diplomacy as organization. He demands discipline: a brash trailer owner who disputed him got left behind in Ethiopia. He also delegates the work. The head of the crucial Gas and Fuel Committee is a vigorous former banker from Texas named George Ezell, 62. Louis Mousely, who once grew apples in upstate New York, is the wagon boss who herds the trailers into frontier circle formation at night, and carries a special piece of string about as a measure to see that each is the proper distance from the other. Retired Contractor Guy Hawks, 56, of Louisville, is morale officer, who must find a missionary to hold church services each Sunday. The "postmaster" is Gene Ritchie, 61, once Kaiser Aluminum's chief engineer. "I wanted to meet people," says Ritchie, whose wife died before the trip, "and within 48 hours I knew everyone by his first name."

Drive One, Work Two. The trailers, fitted with kitchen, shower, radio, window screens, flush toilet, are as comfortable as Miami bungalows. But the life is not. On the very first day out of Cape Town, one trailer landed in a ditch, and seven dropped out later. Along one rugged wasteland in southern Ethiopia the caravan lost 22 truck axles, and the passengers had to clear the trails themselves. ("Drive a mile," said one lady's diary, "work two hours on the road . . . Everyone very tired.")

In the Belgian Congo, natives greeted the Americans effusively, mistaking them for the vanguard of an army that they thought had been sent to liberate them. The Emperor of Ethiopia turned his imperial race track into a parking lot for the caravan, assigned a special guard to see it through parts of his realm that are so remote that he holds only token sovereignty. At Aswan there were drinks at the winter residence of the Begum Aga Khan. And there, too, the caravan was stoned--apparently for the benefit of the Soviet Union, which is financing the Aswan High Dam. But last week, chirpy as ever, Wally Byam was convinced that one thing had been proved: "The old folks can achieve just as much as young ones on a trip like this--only it takes them longer."

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