The Image (14 page)

When travel is no longer made to order but is an assembly-line, store-boughten commodity, we have less to say about what goes into it. And we know less and less about what we
are buying. We buy so many days of vacation pleasure without even knowing what is in the package. Recently on a lecture tour I flew into Hyderabad, a city in central India, of which I had not even heard a year before. Seated beside me on the plane were a tired, elderly American and his wife. He was a real estate broker from Brooklyn. I asked him what was interesting about Hyderabad. He had not the slightest notion. He and his wife were going there because the place was “in the package.” Their tour agent had guaranteed to include only places that were “world famous,” and so it must be.

A well-packaged tour must include insurance against risks. In this sense the dangers of travel have become obsolete; we buy safety and peace of mind right in the package. Somebody else covers all the risks. In 1954 the suspense-thriller movie
The High and the Mighty
depicted the troubled flight of a luxury air liner from San Francisco to Honolulu. The assorted vacationers aboard were flying to the mid-Pacific for a week or two of relaxation. As the engines failed, the nerves of the passengers began to fray. Finally, in order to keep the plane in the air, the captain ordered the baggage jettisoned. I saw this movie in a suburban theatre outside of Chicago. Beside me sat a mother and her young son. He seemed relatively unperturbed at the mortal risks of the passengers, but when the plane’s purser began tossing into the ocean the elegant vacation paraphernalia—fancy suitcases, hatboxes, portable typewriters, golf clubs, tennis rackets—the boy became agitated. “What will they do?” the boy exclaimed. “Don’t worry,” comforted the mother. “It’s all insured.”

When the traveler’s risks are insurable he has become a tourist.

T
HE TRAVELER
used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this
encounter. They are always devising efficient new ways of insulating the tourist from the travel world.

In the old traveler’s accounts, the colorful native innkeeper, full of sage advice and local lore, was a familiar figure. Now he is obsolete. Today on Main Street in your home town you can arrange transportation, food, lodging, and entertainment for Rome, Sydney, Singapore, or Tokyo.

No more chaffering. A well-planned tour saves the tourist from negotiating with the natives when he gets there. One reason why returning tourists nowadays talk so much about and are so irritated by tipping practices is that these are almost their only direct contact with the people. Even this may soon be eliminated. The Travel Plant Commission of the International Union of Official Travel Organizations in 1958 was studying ways of standardizing tipping practices so that eventually all gratuities could be included in the tour package. Shopping, like tipping, is one of the few activities remaining for the tourist. It is a chink in that wall of prearrangements which separates him from the country he visits. No wonder he finds it exciting. When he shops he actually encounters natives, negotiates in their strange language, and discovers their local business etiquette. In a word, he tastes the thrill and “travail” which the old-time traveler once experienced all along the way—with every purchase of transportation, with every night’s lodging, with every meal.

A planned excursion insulates the tourist in still another way. From its first invention by Thomas Cook in the early nineteenth century, the fully prearranged group tour promised good-fellowship with one’s countrymen in addition to the exotic pleasure of foreign sights. The luxury ocean liner and the all-expense “cruise” (the word in this sense is very recent and is possibly an American invention; originally it meant “to sail from place to place, as for pleasure,
without
a set destination”) have made this kind of travel amount to residence in a floating resort hotel.

Shipmates now replace the natives as a source of adventure. Unadvertised risks from pickpockets and bandits are
replaced by over-advertised risks of shipboard romance. The sights which disappoint the bachelor or spinster on a cruise are not the Vatican, the Louvre, or the Acropolis but the shipmates. Except for tipping and shopping adventures, returning cruisers have little to report about encounters with the natives, but they have a great deal to say about their countrymen on tour with them. The authorized centennial history of American Express recounts the tribulations of a cruise director on a round-the-world cruise. He was obliged, among other things, “to rescue a susceptible young playboy from the wiles of a cruising adventuress; play cupid to a British baronet and an American actress; guard the widow of an Australian pearl magnate who carried tin cans full of matched pearls loose in her baggage; quietly settle an attempted murder in Calcutta; protect his charges during the pitched battle with which Hindus and Mohammedans celebrated the Harvest Festival in Agra; reason with a passenger who demanded a refund because he lost a day when the ship crossed the international date line; and hold the hand of a lonely old lady as she lay dying in a hotel in Rome.” In the old days, an excursion director was called a “guide”; now he is a “social director.”

Of course the voyager, even on a planned excursion, is likely to be less insulated on land than on sea, and he is least insulated if he goes alone. But the notion of packaged touring has so prevailed that when a person goes by himself the American Express travel department gives his package a special name, “F.I.T.” or “D.I.T.”—for “Foreign (or Domestic) Independent Travel.” If you want to buy a vacation tour package all for yourself (that is, voyage alone and at will), this is actually offered as a “special feature.” It is described as an attractive new departure from the routine group arrangements, much as only a half century ago the group excursion was offered as something special. The individualized package, the American Express chronicler explains, “is for individuals who prefer to travel alone rather than in a conducted group. A tour is planned to meet the particular specifications
of the client. The exact cost is reckoned and, on payment of this amount, the traveler is given the familiar American Express package containing tickets and coupons to cover his entire trip.”

Today more than ever before the traveler is isolated from the landscape he traverses. The newest and most popular means of passenger transportation to foreign parts is the most insulating known to man. By 1958 about four times as many international travelers from the United States went by air as by sea. Recently I boarded a plane at Idlewild Airport in New York at 6:30 one evening. The next morning at 11:30 I was in Amsterdam. The flight was routine, at an altitude of about 23,000 feet, far above the clouds, too high to observe landmark or seamark. Nothing to see but the weather; since we had no weather, nothing to see at all. I had flown not through space but through time. My only personal sign that we had gone so far was the discovery on arrival in Amsterdam that I had lost six hours. My only problem en route was to pass the time. My passage through space was unnoticeable and effortless. The airplane robbed me of the landscape.

The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone. For him it is all the same: going to one place or to another. Today it is only by going short distances, which we still traverse on land, that we can have the experience of going any place. When I have driven from Chicago to a summer resort in nearby Indiana or Wisconsin, or when I used to commute from a suburb to the University by train or by car, I have had more variety of sensations, have observed more varied scenes, and have met more varied people, than I did when I went from New York to Amsterdam.

For ages the sensations of going there were inseparable from the experience of being there. Nowadays, “Getting there is half the fun.” “Rome,” announces the British Overseas Airways Corporation, is “A Fun Stop.” And there is nothing more homogeneous than fun, wherever it is found. Now we can have plenty en route. United States Lines advertises:

In an accompanying photograph we see how “Mrs. Leonard Kleckner shows off her dogs to Chief Officer Ridington. This great modern ocean liner has dog kennels with a veterinarian and a dog-walking area.” Shipboard swimming pools, cocktail lounges, and the latest movies! “One of the World’s great Restaurants sails for Europe” whenever a Holland-America liner pushes off from New York. The experience of going there has been erased. For it we have substituted all the pleasures of de luxe relaxation. Even better than at home.

If we go by air, then too we are encompassed in music, and enjoy our cocktail in a lounge with the décor of the best resort hotel. In 1961, TWA began showing first-run movies on a special wide screen in the First Class section of its Super Jet flights. A full-page color advertisement for Lufthansa, German Airlines, portrays the attractive Miss Dietland von Schönfeldt—a typical Lufthansa stewardess, of “gracious background, poise and charm, intelligence and education” who, of course, speaks fluent English. She “Invites You to an Unusual Supper Party.… Every flight is a charming, informal Continental supper party, eight jet-smooth miles over the Atlantic.”

The airline stewardess, a breed first developed in the United States and now found on all major international airlines, is a new subspecies of womankind. With her standardized impersonal charm she offers us, anywhere in the world, the same kind of pillow for our head and the latest issue of
Look
or
The Reader’s Digest
. She is the Madonna of the Airways, a pretty symbol of the new homogenized blandness
of the tourist’s world. The first airline stewardesses were the eight girls hired by United Airlines on May 15, 1930; their union was organized in 1946. By 1958 there were 8,200 of them employed by American-owned airlines. They were being trained in a program which lasted about six weeks. The general requirements, as a careful reporter summarized them, were that the young lady be twenty-one to twenty-six years old, “unmarried, reasonably pretty and slender, especially around the hips, which will be at eye level for the passengers. She should have been to high school, be poised and tactful, have a good disposition and a pleasant speaking voice.” Stewardesses with similar qualifications were later trained for service on trains and long-distance buses.

Cabral’s company, which went from Portugal to India in 1500, did not, of course, have the advantage of slender-hipped, smooth-voiced stewardesses. They spent over six months at sea. They could not help knowing they had really gone somewhere. In the days before refrigeration or canning the passenger cuisine was not for gourmets. Fresh water was rationed, and fresh fruits and vegetables were not to be had. Scurvy was the plague of seafarers. Typhoid, typhus, and malaria were rife.

The
Mayflower
passengers were at sea for nearly two months, from mid-September to early November, 1620. On arrival William Bradford reported, “They fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on the firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.… Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles.” Knowledge that they had come so far stayed with them even into the second generation. Increase Mather gave over the first chapter of his catalogue of divine providences to “remarkable sea-deliverances.” These were as important in the American experience as were the forests or the Indians.

For Americans moving westward in the nineteenth century, their ways of living together en route shaped their lives
on arrival, just as the proverbial forty years during which Moses led the children of Israel from Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land shaped them into a nation. As westering Americans organized against the perils of the trip they framed constitutions and by-laws which prepared them to organize new communities at their destinations.

Now, when one risks so little and experiences so little on the voyage, the experience of being there somehow becomes emptier and more trivial. When getting there was more troublesome, being there was more vivid. When getting there is “fun,” arriving there somehow seems not to be arriving any place.

The tourist who arrives at his destination, where tourist facilities have been “improved,” remains almost as insulated as he was en route. Today the ideal tourist hotel abroad is as much as possible like the best accommodations back home. Beds, lighting facilities, ventilation, air conditioning, central heating, plumbing are all American style, although a shrewd hotel management will, of course, have made a special effort to retain some “local atmosphere.”

Stirred by air travel, international hotel chains have grown phenomenally since World War II. In 1942 Conrad Hilton took over his first hotel outside the United States, the Chihuahua Hilton, just over the border in northern Mexico. “I felt,” he later recalled “that by organizing week-end bus excursions with guides, large-scale entertainment at the hotel, an all-expenses-paid holiday, we could make a very good thing of it—which we did.” At the end of the war Hilton Hotels International, Inc., was founded. “What used to be a month-long vacation trip,” Hilton explained, “is now almost a week-end possibility.… The airplane is here to stay. Americans not only can but want to travel farther, see more, do more, in less time.… Father Junipero Serra set his California missions a day’s journey apart. Today you can fly over the whole string in a few hours. If we were to set our hotels a day’s journey apart, we’d be around the world in no time. So perfectly sound business is in line with national idealism.”

Hilton changed his slogan from “Across the Nation” to “Around the World.” The Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, opened in 1947, the Castellana Hilton in Madrid in 1953, the Istanbul Hilton in 1955—and these were only a beginning. By 1961 Hilton Hotels were also operating in Mexico City and Acapulco, Panama City, Montreal, Cairo, West Berlin, St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), Santiago, and Honolulu. There were associated hotels in Sydney, Melbourne, and Queensland. Hotels were under construction in Port-of-Spain (Trinidad), Athens, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, London, Teheran, and Rome, and projected in Paris, Mayaguez (Puerto Rico), Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Bogotá, Dorval (Quebec), and Tunis.