Beyond the Horizon
(See Cover)
On the Fiji island of Kandavu, Melanesian maidens are clustered atop a cliff, chanting a haunting air. Hearing the song, giant turtles rise from the sea below and one by one pop their heads above the surface to listen.
In the lazy mountain village of Chiangmai, Thailand, not far from the embattled borders of Laos, pedicabs wheel slowly through the shaded streets to the hive of fruit stalls, artisans and peddlers in the marketplace; and in the jungles, past the brooding Buddhist temples, the eucalypti and wild orchids frame the mute beauty of the valley.
On Lake Manyara, off in Tanganyika, an echoing gunshot stirs a huge, pink sea of flamingos into an undulating wave of flutter as they rise and settle once again. Down the corrugated road in a rumbling Land Rover come the white hunters, and once again the pink wings billow brightly in the sun. And then impatient stillness falls once more and muffles the lake.
Fiji is a $509.51 ticket from Pueblo, Colo., and 6,700 air miles away; Tanganyika and Atlanta are separated by 9,400 miles and $745.98 in air fare; Thailand and Passaic, N.J., by 10,500 miles and $694.46. Hard to get to, all those distant places--and expensive. Yet, in Pueblo, Atlanta and Passaic, and points between. Americans were feeling the irrepressible lure of exotic regions as they pored over maps and travel folders beckoning them to new horizons.
Having succeeded the British as the world's most relentless travelers, Americans are becoming increasingly jaded with the major tourist encampments, feeling, in the words of one inveterate tourist, "that you are never first or never alone at the classic or historic spots." The plaintive traveler was Henry James, writing in 1873. He had no idea of what was to follow.
After both world wars, hordes of Americans discovered England and France, and when too many of their compatriots swept in to join them, they leaped into Italy. On the Isle of Capri they met each other coming and going. They sneaked over to Portofino, but the word got out, and now it's finito. Then they established a beachhead in Spain--Majorca, the Costa Brava --but soon that old Henry James feeling set in again. They switched surreptitiously to Jamaica and the Virgin Islands, and got overrun before they could unpack. And now--?
Travel agents, steamship companies and airlines are reaching way out to bring in the faraway answers. A safari with Baffin Island Eskimos. A climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Shooting expeditions in Nepal. Eat roast monkey with the Yagua Indians of the Amazon, and watch them shoot poisoned darts. Fly over Victoria Falls. A traveler can subscribe to a sort of Island-of-the-Month Club, called Islands in the Sun, that briefs its members on the latest and the best. Bachelor Party Tours, clipper voyages to the Seven Seas, motor caravans from Singapore to Istanbul, Tramp Trips on freighters where the passenger can rough it for no less money than the cost of a sports-shirt cruise--all have their takers. Says one weary travel agent: "I don't know whether I should be pushing Alaska or selling South Africa.'' The answer obviously is: both.
The majority of the 1,750,000 Americans who will travel abroad this year will stick to the safe, recognizable places, but the majority will be smaller than ever before. Growing numbers will stream for the distant scenes and thus will rediscover some of the old-fashioned sense of adventure that used to go with traveling--as in the days when Baedeker advised the tourist to carry his revolver, or when Americans never ventured into postwar Europe without their own soap. Even though Greek hotels are putting in bathrooms, and Africa is practically air conditioned, today's tourists to the out-of-the-way places will still need to carry along plenty of their own hardware (not guns, though, as most countries require permits) and a special awareness of local etiquette. Bush jackets are a must on a Tanganyika safari, and special tackle had better be brought along to most fishing regions. Bombay is drier than a camel after a hard month on the desert; so visitors have to get a special whisky permit. Instant coffee is handy in Greece; cosmetics, sunglasses and flashlights anywhere. And just about everywhere tourists will maintain a healthy skepticism about drinking local water.*
Apart from seeking new horizons merely because they are there, U.S. travelers seem to be searching for some fresh identity with the elemental life and with the far past. They search for remnants of ancient civilizations, for the humbling majesty of raw, rugged nature, and for the mystique of island living--a symbolic as well as a genuine detachment from the rest of the world. Somewhere among a friend's notebooks, writes Author Lawrence Durrell. he found a list of diseases "as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of the spirit. There are people who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born 'islomanes' are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns."
Tahiti Popa'a in Paradise
Among the most appealing modern versions of Atlantis now available to American islomanes is Tahiti, the supreme symbol of escape ever since Gauguin's celebrated sojourns there. This month a new trail opened up to the Society Islands, one that Gauguin never dreamed of: on Papeete's brand-new runway, the first jetliner landed, opening regular weekly jet service (tourist-class round trip via TAI: from Honolulu, DC-8, $514.80; from Los Angeles, DC-8. $754.20). Aboard the plane, no doubt, were a few men--the greatest islomanes of all--who have long dreamed of Tahiti as a paradise unspoiled by the pressures of civilization. That dream will draw an estimated 15,000 tourists this year, probably causing the most momentous interruption in the island's history since Captain Cook landed there in 1769. To the French, who have controlled the island for 118 years, and who reluctantly decided that Tahiti needed an economic shot in the arm, tourism is "un mal necessaire."
This dismay is understandable. The main island and nearby Moorea--James Michener's Bali Ha'i--comprise the classical setting of the unspoiled Polynesian dream: dazzling beaches, translucent water, rich landscapes with green-yellow vanilla patches. Living up to legend, the people are warm, easygoing, unobsessed with the failures of yesterday or the portents of tomorrow. (Though the women are shapely, they are not all beautiful; and most wear conventional clothing--more or less.)
There are other attractions in Tahiti. Tourist companies run two-night excursions to Moorea ($88) that include native dances and feasts that are more enjoyable than Hawaii's. In the valleys are deep, clear pools where a swimmer can splash beneath waterfalls; along the reefs are mahoa, pink-shelled snails that can be gathered and eaten raw or fried in butter; in the lagoons are fish easily speared; near by are bananas, papayas and limes for the plucking.
At night comes frenzy. Quinn's Tahitian Hut swarms with people eager for entertainment after a hard day at the beach. The favorite dances, the otea and the tamure, are frankly erotic, but with all the hip quaking and knee knocking, much more innocent and enjoyable to watch than Elvis Presley. When Quinn's closes, the natives and travelers move on with their guitars and their cases of Hinano (the local beer) to other places--often in the middle of the road--to continue their happy partying. After that, there is always the possibility that everybody will want to go swimming before calling it a night.
Such pleasures serve to ease Tahiti's few discomforts. There are only 275 rooms for tourists on the island, though promoters are doing their best to put up 200 more before the big tide washes in this summer. Most popular place is the Hotel Tahiti (18 suites with bath, $20 a day, without meals), and it is plainly not yet the Tahiti Hilton. Most hotels feature an awesome variety of roaches, flies and hairy spiders.
The invasion of the popa'a (white man), even in the pre-jet phase, has already caused changes. M-G-M has been shooting a movie in Tahiti for months (TIME, Feb. 10); and while in native lingo Hollywood is still the term for jail, it is also beginning to mean cash. The influx of money has created the desire for more, and youngsters who were once content with innocent native life are looking around for new ways to earn more money. The pull for tips is growing. Even the dancing and feasting sometimes lose their improvised quality and become mere attractions on a package-tour agenda.
But Tahiti conservatives believe that for quite a while their paradise will remain relatively intact, and they secretly hope that the cost of jet fares will discourage a lot of people from taking advantage of all that Tahiti has to offer.
Greece Haunted Harmony
Half a world away in space and an immeasurable distance away in time, lies another, very different, islomane's paradise, stark rather than idyllic, with a beauty that stems from a civilization's past rather than from the primitive's eternal present. Its gnarled hand stretching into the sea as if to grasp the scattered islands beyond, Greece is considerably more than a tumble of pagan ruins from which a hardy people peels a sparse existence. There are only a few first-rate hotels and restaurants in all of the country; the food often ranges from the dull to the frightening; the night life is virtually nonexistent. Yet the country flows with a haunting harmony of landscape and sea bathed in limpid light, creating a profile of savage beauty that somehow makes cuisine and hot running water secondary matters.
Best way to see northern Greece and the Peloponnesus below is by private auto or touring bus, or barring that, a chauffeur-driven car. Greek drivers are very expensive, though, and they have a way of plummeting down sheer-faced mountain roads in neutral, unless passengers first exact an ironclad promise that the car will remain in low. From Athens, the package tours or road maps lead to the standard, must-see show places on both the hand and the palm of Greece. Beyond Delphi and Mount Olympus, beyond Corinth, there are the great mountain fastnesses where shepherds play plaintive airs to their flocks on hand-carved pipes, and the villages of proud peasants and white huts that still hold the touch of the centuries. Still, the real keys to the kingdom are its islands.
From Piraeus, excursion boats ply daily among the offshore islands of Aegina, Poros, Hydra and Spetsai (first-class round trip to Spetsai: $4.80), and passengers can stop off at any of them for a few days, pick up the boat later. Rocky Hydra is fine for painters, writers and swimmers, as well as for dawdlers. The spotless Xenia Hotel has eight rooms with running water, no heat in summer, no ready hot water at any time (double room without meals: $2.25; hot shower: 25-c-); another, larger hotel is abuilding. As in most places in Greece, the small, informal ta--vernas provide the most pleasant eating. Guests are expected to mosey about in the kitchen, examine the icebox, peer into pots and pans before ordering their food --which is invariably served half-cold unless the diners give instructions to the contrary.
Drinking wine with the Greeks is a fulltime vacation in itself. In the tavernas, where the wine flows endlessly, the bouzouki (mandolin) showers its bright needles of tone while the men bawl impromptu folk songs. Most popular wine is retsina, which is flavored with resin and should be tried cautiously from the barrel. Hydra gets its wine in the fall, when boats deliver the casks of unfermented grape juice. Taverna keepers fill their goatskins at the dock, tote them uphill by donkey, and empty them into barrels. Forty days later, on St. Dimitrios' Day (Oct. 26), the kegs are tapped, and out comes the fully fermented raw wine. The Greeks then busy themselves with an endless variety of glass clinking and toast-making rituals. Example: the kalogeristika, or drinking monk's fashion, in which the men palm their glasses and touch each other's knuckles to muffle the sound (so that the abbot will not hear).
Relying on the interisland liners, charter yachts, or smaller, 30-ft. caiques that sleep two or three (for $40 a day), travelers can move on southeast to the Cyclades: Santorin, with its unearthly landscape; Paros, from which the masters quarried their famous marble; and Mykonos, which has lately become a kind of Grecian Capri. For 50-c-, travelers can make the round-trip caique ride to nearby Delos, Apollo's birthplace, which the Greek government maintains as an uncommercialized museum. There, in an eerie, glaring white silence, are the remarkable ruins of houses, theaters and temples--a ghost town from which no traveler returns without having sensed uneasily the presence of men and events of another age.
Eleven dollars will buy a one-way air ticket from Athens to Crete, and still another unseen aspect of the Greek way: Candia's fragrant food bazaar, the Minoan ruins near Knossos, and the high Lasethi plateau, crammed with hundreds of white-sailed windmills. In any of the little plateau villages, a traveler can buy his lunch merely by hailing, say, the butcher, who will put a table outside and provide wine, bread and cheese, while curious, good-natured Greeks in baggy trousers, sashes, boots, brocaded vests and fierce mustaches gather round and ask the stranger's name, occupation, origin and income.
Steppingstone to the Dodecanese Islands off Turkey is Rhodes, where, as one poet says, "the days drop as softly as fruit from trees." The old 14th century battlements, and the lush rhododendron and bazaars are worth savoring for a day or two (the Hotel Miramare is on a good beach, has private bungalows, charges $10 for a single room). Sailing up the chain, travelers experience even more the feel of how the Grecian islands are creatures of the sea, bound by myth and religion, commerce, a mystical aloneness: Kos, where Hippocrates was born; Patmos, where the monastery exhibits the St. Mark Gospel written in silver on 33 leaves of purple vellum (and where the hard-scrabbling islanders, says a visitor, "live on packages from relatives in New Jersey"); wooded Samos, divided from Turkey by a spectacular channel; Chios, one of Homer's many birthplaces; Lesbos, where Sappho wrote her molten poems.
Toward the mainland, north of Athens, are the Northern Sporades and the delightful island of Skiathos. Its beach, Koukounaries, is one of the finest in the Aegean, and the sand, laced with mica, glitters like silver. Skiathos is a playground for the sturdy loner who is happy with rucksack and sleeping bag. Although the islanders are conservative enough to be repelled by the sight of women in shorts or slacks, they are also warm and carefree. One night recently, two American women who had bedded down in sleeping bags in a park, woke suddenly to find the young men of the village singing gaily and dancing around them in a circle. After a few laughs, they wandered away to let the visitors finish their sleep.
Caribbean & Indian Ocean from Flying Fish to Araby
For the island hunter in 1961, there are still other highly promising domains, close to the U.S. as well as at a tantalizing distance. The Caribbean, though much of it is almost as well traveled as Florida, retains a great many surprises. It still has the most arresting sunsets, the softest nights, and the most magical sea in the Western Hemisphere. Antigua, Trinidad and Barbados are rapidly being overrun; Martinique, with its magnificent French cuisine, cockfights and occasional battles between a mongoose and a fer-de-lance, has been discovered, and the prices are a little high. But there are pinhead islands hidden on the maps where the weary can find cool contentment. Saint-Barthelemy, for instance, a rugged little volcanic island, has handsome beaches, good fishing and snorkeling. and the old-world attraction of dry-rock fences and brightly painted cottages. For $10, a local taxi mistress, who speaks French only, will Jeep visitors around the islands, where old, gaunt-faced women, peering out from under their white, cowl-shaped bonnets, look like reproductions of Millet paintings.
The island of Nevis, just a $50 charter flight from Antigua, has an exotic West Indian flavor and a wild coiffure of bougainvillaea and hibiscus. Granada, a lively mountainous island made livelier by native dancing and steel bands, has flying fish, and an ice-cold lake for the valiant.
Barbuda is a flat oval that was made for sportsmen--tarpon, bonefish, guinea fowl, blue-winged teal--and the Coco Point Lodge offers a complete package deal that is a sure lure: room, meals, liquor, use of small fishing boats, water skiing, snorkel equipment, guides, hunting and fishing licenses, ammunition, and all air and land transportation from Antigua and return --all for $90 a day (double), reduced after the third day to $70. Best swimming is off the pink sand of the leeward side of the island; the windward end, choppy and reef-ridden, is treacherous, but skindivers and beachcombers like it that way.
For those who get no tingle from a snorkel, the Indian Ocean islands that nestle off Africa provide the sounds and smells of unexpected revelation. Madagascar, now called the Malagasy Republic, was once the property of France, but the colonials had the decency to leave behind their fine Parisian chefs, who know their escargots. Best restaurants in the hilly capital city of Tananarive: La Taverne at the Palais Colbert. Cafe de Paris, Relais Normand (minimum meals are under $3 for lunch or dinner, but the sky's the limit a la carte). Rates at the Colbert for a two-room suite, full board, and tips: $16 per person. The night life and beach life on the island are equally French: Parisian dancers for one, Band-Aid-sized bikinis for the other. Says one very Frenchman: "We observe the barest of conventions here."
Zanzibar, to the north, is like neither Madagascar nor Tanganyika. Once the major headquarters for Arab slavers, it is a lady island, pungent with the odor of cloves and the glamour of Araby. Tourists can ride the streets in dilapidated rickshas, visit the old Arab waterfront fort and the harbor, where old wooden dhows with odd-looking lateen sails load up for trips to the mainland. They can buy French perfumes, Indian craft jewelry, or copies of the famed, huge oaken "elephant doors," which are covered with spikes to keep elephants from leaning on them. They are an unusual curio, since Zanzibar does not have elephants and never did.
And so, on each island, there always seems to be still another island beyond the horizon. But islands are not the only areas to exert a strange drawing power. In tourism as in geopolitics, the great land masses have a vast strategic pull. If there is a mystique of the island, there is also a mystique of the continent. While some travelers are magnetically attracted by the Demote speck on the map and by the isolation of surrounding ocean, others are drawn by the large, solid patches and the isolation of the landlocked interior. To them, Africa is perhaps the most challenging tourist domain of all.
Africa A Certain Exhilaration
"When you meet an elephant on the road," says the helpful Uganda government in its hints to travelers, "do not blow your horn. This may annoy him." Merely stop some distance away and rev your engine, and he will step aside. If, on the other hand, the traveler has no engine to rev, there should be no disputing the right of way--the visitor would do well to rev his feet and get out in a hurry.
In Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya, the key attraction is the elephant and all the rest of the wild, wondrous fish and game, as well as what Author Alan Moorehead calls "a certain exhilaration . . . The simple and perhaps childish pleasure of knowing that no one probably had passed this way before, and that no other human eyes had seen these particular animals roaming across the plain ... It was the sort of thing that skiers feel when they break new snow in the mountains, or sailors in a small boat in a remote sea."
In Uganda, where the Nile swirls through the game preserves of Murchison National Park to Lake Albert, fishermen go for Nile perch, a predator that weighs as much as 160 Ibs. in the river and 300 lbs. in the lake. Three-day excursions can be booked with East African Airways from Entebbe to Queen Elizabeth Park (cost: $78) or Murchison Park ($86), and there is an assortment of river, rail and car trips that provide closeup views of the animals. At Murchison travelers can take the "Royal" cottages (where Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth stayed two years/ago) for $7.25; overflow guests use tents ($4.50) set up under papyrus-thatch shelters. All have to be alert for the elephants that sometimes back up against bedroom windows and vent their disapproval on all the occupants.
First headquarters for Kenya--and East Africa, for that matter--is Nairobi, (about $1,000, jet economy class from New York). The New Stanley Hotel is in the center of the city, has 200 rooms all with private bath (11 and up for a double, with breakfast); half a mile away is the older, quieter Norfolk, from whose veranda the early settlers used to pot marauding lions ($10 double). Whether at the Norfolk or the New Stanley, in a tented camp or an inn, guests are awakened each morning at 6:30 by the inescapable old British Empire custom: tea, delivered whether it is wanted or not, to the bedside.
Five-day package tours (from $140 per person) and all-out game safaris (from $1,000 for 30 days, including white hunter) can be booked in Nairobi; or travelers can head on their own for the Mount Kenya Safari Club (built by Actor William Holden's syndicate, now linked with American Express), where the living, hunting, dining and golf are expansive and expensive (front suite. $84 per person). And no matter which way they drive, tourists will inevitably meet up with animals. Motoring out of Nairobi in a hired car recently, two U.S. schoolmarms spied a lion sprawled at the roadside, got out to cut off his claws for souvenirs. Just in time, the beast awoke, blasted an indignant roar at his company, and ambled off. The gibbering women were revived with brandy provided by a sympathetic passerby.
Provided with the expert advice of the East Africa Tourist Travel Association and the help of a good guide, travelers cannot go far wrong in the region. At the lodge near the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanganyika are rooms ranging from double cabins (sharing outside kitchen and bath) from $8 a night, to a party cabin with four double bedrooms and a single, two private baths, kitchen, sitting room and dining room ($70 a night); food, bought at a local store, comes with the free service of a cook-houseboy. linen, cutlery, crockery. Hunters can also outfit themselves in Tanganyika with a safari the likes of which Tarzan never saw: all manner of bearers and boys, Land Rovers, guns, white hunters, impeccable service--right down to fine English china, antique silver, iced martinis and nine-course meals (lobster remoulade, filet mignon. etc., etc.). Cordon Rouge '49, and a snifter of brandy. As in all East Africa, travelers can quickly pick up enough Swahili to get along on the hunt, e.g., Memsahib nakwisha piga nyati; tia chini ya kitanda ("My wife has shot a buffalo; put it under the bed"), or Hapana taka piga simba leo. Tengeneza chandarua ya mbu na tafadhali ngoja kidogo nge ("I do not want to shoot a lion today. Fix the mosquito net and please leave the room").
Perhaps the greatest single sight in Africa is the incredible Victoria Falls on the border of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (reachable from Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia). It is worth stopping en route just to marvel at a 350-ft.-high (and more than a mile wide) mountain of flood water shedding itself endlessly at the rate of 75 million gallons a minute. Moving on to the Union of South Africa, most travelers find it well worth stopping at Kruger National Park, 8,000 sq. mi. of game preserves and roads, where animals roam as freely as children in a playground. Bustling Johannesburg is uninspiring except for a glimpse at the gold mines and a look at the Sunday morning native dances at the mines (tourists rarely get a closeup feel of apartheid that is any different from life in the U.S. South). But Cape Town's Table Mountain, with its hovering, clothlike clouds, is an unforgettable sight. The best last look at the continent: a cableway ride up Table Mountain, from which visitors can see the sprawl of the city, its gleaming bracelet of beaches and the ink-blue Atlantic.
Asia & Beyond Landscape of Gods
In the unlikely event that one indestructible tourist had managed to survive the festivity of Tahiti, the retsina of Greece, the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and the elephants of Africa, he would still have half a world left to explore. First of all, there would be Asia, beset by war and the threat of war, but continuously fascinating to Americans with its landscapes of serene stone gods and scurrying humanity, of temples and hovels. There would be the neon-lit anthill of Tokyo and the quiet blessing bestowed by Fuji; and there would be the rustic Japanese provinces--the inns where travelers sleep on mats on clean floors, the hot sand beaches of Beppu where people by the hundreds bury themselves to the head, the mass geisha parade in Noboribetsu.
There would be India, its poverty dressed in the brightest of saris, with squalor and color, dirt and grandeur existing side by side. Along the famous "tourist triangle," made up of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, the traveler could see that greatest but most rewarding of all tourist cliches, the Taj Mahal, and the intricately erotic sculptures on the temple walls of Khajraho, traveling, if he wishes, in taxis that carry iceboxes filled with Coke.
Not far away is the Himalayan-shrouded land of Nepal and the Valley of Katmandu, glorified in Kipling's "the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu." There, at the Buddhist shrine of Boddhnath, travelers can sip Tibetan tea (flavored with yak butter and salt), and sometimes see the local lama, who wears a silk, saffron-colored Eisenhower jacket. Local taboo: treading on stones in the street that are smeared with yellow or red powder or paste (they are humble objects of worship).
There would be the ancient settlements of the Middle East: Baalbek, in the mountain ranges of Lebanon, where the 65-ft. columns of the Temple to Jupiter still stand; Jordan's Petra, "the rose-red city half as old as time," where travelers can sleep in the cave tombs of the Nabatean Kings; and Iran's Tabriz, with its 15th century blue mosaic mosque.
The landscape of gods and idols could be found again 7,500 miles away, amid the Mayan ruins of Yucatan in Central America: Chichen Itza's city of temples is unforgettable, as is the trip from Uxmal in a bouncing Jeep to look at the incredible breadth of Mayan art. There would be Chichicastenango in Guatemala, where worshipers slowly climb the tiered steps to their church, censers swinging in their hands, and kneel beside rows of thousands of burning candles embedded in pine needles and flowers. Not a mile away would be an unabashed pagan ceremony before the carved stone idol of Pascual Abaj. Since the religious fervor is closely associated with heavy drinking, it is not long before the participants turn the ceremony into a real swinging scene.
Even in Western Europe, so familiar to Americans now that it is nearly home, the tourist determined to seek the unknown can still find it. Northern Portugal's Minho province, for example, scarcely touched by the 20th century, is a tapestry of medieval simplicity, where the wines are commendable, the folkways innocent, and even the bullfights gentle (the bulls are led away to fight again another day).
And if Minho should get too crowded with faces vaguely reminiscent of the folks in Capri or Majorca, Tahiti, Tanganyika or St. Louis, the resourceful pioneer will know where to go to get away from them: Paris.
But that's another story.
*Sample medical kit for the prudent longdistance traveler: thermometer, aspirin, meclizine or a similar drug (for motion sickness), an antihistamine, bismuth salts or similar preparation (for simple diarrhea), tetracycline (a good overall antibiotic), insecticide, soap, tissue, telephone number of home physician. All Americans going abroad should have inoculations against smallpox (required), typhoid, typhus and tetanus (recommended). For parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, they also need shots against yellow fever and, in Asia, against cholera. The Africa-bound also would be wise to take along malaria pills and to get an inoculation (pentamidine isethionate) against sleeping sickness.
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