Pocketa-Pocketa Package Tours

"We can 't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg, " said the Commander. "Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The crew looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another.

--James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Walter Mitty, that henpecked dreamer of great adventures, has been upstaged. His secret life has been researched, developed, costed and packaged for marketing to the tourist trade. Time was when the affluent American was content with touring the capitals of

Europe. No longer. He now seeks escape and adventure, and tour operators, quick to realize the potential of the market, have been replacing their pocket guides with pocketa-pocketa packages. "There's absolutely an amazing number and variety of adventure tours on the market," says Jim Transue, an editor of Travel Weekly. "It may be the fastest-growing part of the business."

Ghosts and Gods. More than 100 adventure tour packagers are now operating in the U.S., competing for a clientele that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. They offer mountain-climbing tours of the Himalayas, canoe expeditions down the Amazon, hang-gliding excursions in the U.S. Southwest, ghost-hunting trips through haunted English castles, and archeological tours from the Dead Sea to Easter Island.

For UFOlogists, Erich von Daeniken Tours, of Hollywood, Fla., offers a "Chariots of the Gods" expedition. For amateur astronomers, there are two separate tours to Australia, both led by experts, to see an eclipse in early October. For the mystic-minded, a Meditation tour--80 true believers led by Cleveland-born Guru Alice Christiansen--took off last week for Srinagar in Kashmir, there to spend five weeks aboard houseboats on polluted Dal Lake. Mike Kong of New York City is selling an unwrapped package for nudists titled "Vacations in the Buff" (in the Caribbean), which, according to his office, has been designed to attract "the more sophisticated traveler, anxious to try a new experience, something more casual." The variety is unending. New York City's American Museum of Natural History sponsors scientific tours of the Nile, the Black Sea and African game parks. Nature Enthusiast Hanns Ebensten leads a springtime voyage to the arctic ice floes to watch seals giving birth. The Center for Short-Lived Phenomena, of Cambridge, Mass., mounts crash expeditions to disasters like the volcanic explosion of Heimaey Island off Iceland.

In a pamphlet for her Capers 400 Club of Los Angeles, Former Fashion Model Mary Lou Miner asks: "What is that dream? What is it you've always wanted to do? Maybe it's riding a yak to the foot of Mount Everest, or panning for gold in the Andes of Peru, or riding an elephant in the jungles of Ceylon." Whatever it is, she can arrange it. Her specialty is the Himalaya society circuit--tenting excursions to have cocktails with Prince Aurengzeb of Swat, dinner with the Maharajah of Kotah, afternoon tea with the Rajah of Punial--all for roughly $4,000. Mary Lou is very much up to date on the Himalayas. "Nepal is old hat there," she says. "I try to stay off the beaten track."

Another off-the-track tour packager is Trek Adventures, which puts tourists aboard refurbished British army trucks and dispatches them from London all the way to Khatmandu (in 80 days for $993) or Nairobi (in three months for $1,323), tenting out most of the time.

No one, however, goes farther out than Lars-Eric Lindblad, 49, a silver-haired Swede who, other travel agents concede, is the father of the adventure market. Now based in New York City, Lindblad has been in business since 1958, employs 500 people, caters to some 50,000 adventure-minded tourists a year--and reported sales of $15 million in 1975. Says he: "Our business is based on making it possible for people to do things they wanted to do but couldn't." His fleet of ten ships includes a 125-ft. schooner in the Seychelles and houseboats that ply the jungle rivers of Brazil and New Guinea. It is best known, though, for the Lindblad Explorer--an 86-passenger, 2,500-ton luxury liner with reinforced hull that cruises the Arctic in the summer, lands at Antarctica to visit the penguins in the winter, and sails the tropical seas in between. Price for an Antarctic tour: from $3,285 to $6,625, air fare not included.

Sharks and Whales. Next on Lindblad's drawing boards, for introduction in 1980, is what he calls "an upside-down cruise ship"--an ocean-going liner with all cabins above deck and an "observation hull" of reinforced glass through which tourists will get a close-up view of sharks, whales and dolphins attracted by sonic lures.

There is no visible limit to the adventure frontier. Want to go to the Gobi Desert? At least two major operators (Lindblad and General Tours) will put up a yurt (Mongolian tent) for you. Want to fight a bull in Spain? Ask any travel agent. Want to capture a gorilla, or join a guerrilla band? That, too, can probably be arranged. Mary Lou Miner is even fancifully mapping out a voyage to Mars, although, she admits, "the spaceship is still wait-listed."

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