Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (3 page)

On Saturday, June 8, 1867, the steamship Quaker City left New
York harbor. On board was a group of Americans making the
world's first package tour. Also on board was Mark Twain making
the world's first fun of package tourism.

In its day The Innocents Abroad itinerary was considered
exhaustive. It included Paris, Marseilles, the Rock of Gibraltar,
Lake Como, some Alps, the Czar, the pyramids and the Holy Land
plus the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome and the
pile of volcanic ash that was Pompeii.

When these prototypical tourists went home they could count
themselves traveled. They had shivered with thoughts of lions in
the Colosseum, "done" the Louvre, ogled Mont Blanc, stumbled
through the ruins of the Parthenon by moonlight and pondered that
eternal riddle-where'd its nose go?-of the Sphinx. They had
seen the world.

But what if Mark Twain had to come back from the dead and
escort 1980's tourists on a 1980's tour? Would it be the same? No. I'm afraid Mr. Twain would find there are worse things than innocents abroad in the world today.

In 1988 every country with a middle class to export has gotten
into the traveling act. We Yanks, with our hula shirts and funny
Kodaks, are no longer in the fore. The earth's travel destinations
are jam-full of littering Venezuelans, peevish Swiss, smelly Norwegian backpackers yodeling in restaurant booths, Saudi Arabian
businessmen getting their dresses caught in revolving doors and
Bengali remittance men in their twenty-fifth year of graduate school
pestering fat blonde Belgian au pair girls.

At least we American tourists understand English when it's
spoken loudly and clearly enough. Australians don't. Once you've
been on a plane full of drunken Australians doing wallaby imitations up and down the aisles, you'll never make fun of Americans
visiting the Wailing Wall in short shorts again.

The Japanese don't wear short shorts (a good thing, considering their legs), but they do wear three-piece suits in the full range
of tenement-hall paint colors, with fit to match. The trouser cuffs
drag like bridal trains; the jacket collars have an ox yoke drape;
and the vests leave six inches of polyester shirt snapping in the
breeze. If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they'd better quit using the same tailor as variety-show
chimps.

The Japanese also travel in nacks at a jog trot and get up at six
A.M. and sing their company song under your hotel window. They
are extraordinary shoplifters. They eschew the usual clothes and
trinkets, but automobile plants, steel mills and electronics factories seem to be missing from everywhere they go. And Japs take
snapshots of everything, not just everything famous but everything.
Back in Tokyo there must be a billion color slides of street corners,
turnpike off-ramps, pedestrian crosswalks, phone booths, fire
hydrants, manhole covers and overhead electrical wires. What are
the Japanese doing with these pictures? It's probably a question we
should have asked before Pearl Harbor.

Worse than the Japanese, at least worse looking, are the
Germans, especially at pool-side. The larger the German body, the
smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice
issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as "the land where Israelis learned their manners."

And Germans in a pool cabana (or even Israelis at a discotheque) are nothing compared with French on a tropical shore. A
middle-aged, heterosexual, college-educated male wearing a
Mickey Mouse T-shirt and a string-bikini bottom and carrying a
purse-what else could it be but a vacationing Frenchman? No
tropical shore is too stupid for the French. They turn up on the
coasts of Angola, Eritrea, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. For one day
they glory in l'atmosphere tres primitive then spend two weeks in an
ear-splitting snit because the natives won't make a steak frite out of
the family water buffalo.

Also present in Angola, Eritrea and God-Knows-Where are
the new breed of yuppie "experience travelers." You'll be pinned
down by mortar fire in the middle of a genocide atrocity in the
Sudan, and right through it all come six law partners and their
wives, in Banana Republic bush jackets, taking an inflatable raft
trip down the White Nile and having an "experience."

Mortar fire is to be preferred, of course, to British sports fans.
Has anyone checked the passenger list on The Spirit of Free
Enterprise? Were there any Liverpool United supporters on board?
That channel ferry may have been tipped over for fun. (Fortunately
the Brits have to be back at their place of unemployment on
Monday so they never get further than Spain.)

Then there are the involuntary tourists. Back in 1867, what
with the suppression of the slave trade and all, they probably
thought they'd conquered the involuntary tourism problem. Alas,
no. Witness the African exchange students-miserable, cold, shivering, grumpy and selling cheap wrist watches from the top of
cardboard boxes worldwide. (Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University has a particularly disgruntled bunch.) And the Pakistani
family with twelve children who've been camped out in every
airport on the globe since 1970-will somebody please do something for these people? Their toddler has got my copy of the Asian
Wall Street Journal, and I won't be responsible if he tries to stuff it
down the barrel of the El Al security guard's Uzi again.

Where will Mr. Clemens take these folks? What is the 1980's
equivalent of the Grand Tour? What are the travel "musts' of today?

All the famous old monuments are still there, of course, but
they're surrounded by scaffolds and green nets and signs saying,
"Il pardonne la restoration bitte please." I don't know two people
who've ever seen the same famous old monument. I've seen Big
Ben. A friend of mine has seen half of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
No one has seen Notre Dame Cathedral for years. It's probably
been sold to a shopping mall developer in Phoenix.

We've all, however, seen Dr. Meuller's Sex Shop in the Frankfurt airport. Dr. Meuller's has cozy booths where, for one deutsche
mark a minute, we modern tourists can watch things hardly thought
of in 1867. And there's nothing on the outside of the booths to
indicate whether you're in there viewing basically healthy Swedish
nude volleyball films or videos of naked Dobermans cavorting in
food. Dr. Meuller's is also a reliable way to meet your boss, old
Sunday School teacher or ex-wife's new husband, one of whom is
always walking by when you emerge.

Dr. Meuller's is definitely a "must" of modern travel, as is the
Frankfurt airport itself. If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to
change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time
spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.

What else? There are "local points of interest" available until
the real monuments are restored. These are small piles of stones
about which someone will tell you extravagant lies for five dollars.
("And here, please, the Tomb of the Infant Jesus.") And there are
the great mini-bars of Europe-three paper cartons of aniseflavored soda pop, two bottles of beer with suspended vegetable
matter, a triangular candy bar made of chocolate-covered edelweiss
and a pack of Marlboros manufactured locally under license.
(NB.: Open that split of Mumm's'/2-star in there, and $200 goes on
your hotel bill faster than you can say "service non compris.")

In place of celebrated palaces, our era has celebrated parking
spots, most of them in Rome. Romans will back a Fiat into the
middle of your linguine al pesto if you're sitting too close to the
restaurant window.

Instead of cathedrals, mosques and ancient temples, we have
duty-free shops-at their best in Kuwait. I never knew there was so
much stuff I didn't want. I assumed I wanted most stuff. But that
was before I saw a $110,000 crepe de chine Givenchy chador and a solid-gold camel saddle with twelve Rolex watches embedded in
the seat.

The "sermons in stone" these days are all sung with cement.
Cement is the granite, the marble, the porphyry of our time.
Someday, no doubt, there will be "Elgin Cements" in the British
Museum. Meanwhile, we tour the Warsaw Pact countries-cement
everywhere, including, at the official level, quite a bit of cement in
their heads.

Every modern tourist has seen Mannix dubbed in forty languages and the amazing watch adjustments of Newfoundland, Malaysia and Nepal (where time zones are, yes, half an hour off), and
France in August when you can travel through the entire country
without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered
with anything that's open for business-though, somehow, the fresh
dog crap is still a foot deep on the streets of Paris.

Astonishing toilets for humans are also a staple of up-to-date
foreign adventure. Anyone who thinks international culture has
become bland and uniform hasn't been to the bathroom, especially
not in Yugoslavia where it's a hole in the floor with a scary old lady
with a mop standing next to it. And, for astonishing toilet paper,
there's India where there isn't any.

No present-day traveler, even an extra-odoriferous Central
European one, can say he's done it all if he hasn't been on a smell
tour of Asia. Maybe what seems pungent to the locals only becomes
alarming when sniffed through a giant Western proboscis, but there
are some odors in China that make a visit to Bhopal seem like a
picnic downwind from the Arpege factory. Hark to the cry of the
tourist in the East: "Is it dead or is it dinner?"

Nothing beats the Orient for grand vistas, however, particularly of go-go girls. True, they can't Boogaloo and have no
interest in learning. But Thai exotic dancers are the one people left
who prefer American-made to Japanese. And they come and sit on
your lap between sets, something the girls at the Crazy Horse never
do. Now, where'd my wallet go?

Many contemporary tourist attractions are not located in one
special place the way tourist attractions used to be. Now they pop
up everywhere-that villainous cab driver with the all-consonant
last name, for instance. He's waiting outside hotels from Sun City to the Seward Peninsula. He can't speak five languages and can't
understand another ten. Hey! Hey! Hey, you! This isn't the way to
the Frankfurt airport! Nein! Non! Nyet! Ixnay!

American embassies, too, are all over the map and always
breathtaking. In the middle of London, on beautiful Grosvenor
Square, there's one that looks like a bronzed Oldsmobile
dashboard. And rising from the slums of Manila is another that
resembles the Margarine of the Future Pavilion at the 1959
Brussels World Fair. I assume this is all the work of one architect,
and I assume he's on drugs. Each American embassy comes with
two permanent features-a giant anti-American demonstration and
a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half
their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green
cards.

Other ubiquitous spectacles of our time include various panics-AIDS, PLO terror and owning U. S. dollars predominate at the
moment-and postcards of the Pope kissing the ground. There's
little ground left unkissed by this pontiff, though he might think
twice about kissing anything in some of the places he visits. (Stay
away from Haiti, San Francisco and Mykonos, J.P., please.)

Then there's the squalor. This hasn't changed since 1867, but
tourists once tried to avoid it. Now they seek it out. Modern tourists
have to see the squalor so they can tell everyone back home how it
changed their perspective on life. Describing squalor, if done with
sufficient indignation, makes friends and relatives morally obligated to listen to your boring vacation stories. (Squalor is conveniently available, at reasonable prices, in Latin America.)

No, the Grand Tour is no longer a stately procession of likeminded individuals through half a dozen of the world's major
principalities. And it's probably just as well if Mark Twain doesn't
come back from the dead. He'd have to lead a huge slew of
multinational lunatics through hundreds of horrible countries with
disgusting border formalities. And 1980's customs agents are the
only thing worse than 1980's tourists. Damn it, give that back! You
know perfectly well that it's legal to bring clean socks into Tanzania. Ow! Ouch! Where are you taking me!?

Of course you don't have to go to Africa to get that kind of
treatment. You can have your possessions stolen right on the Piccadilly Line if you want. In fact, in 1987, you can experience
most of the indignities and discomforts of travel in your own
hometown, wherever you live. Americans flock in seething masses
to any dim-wit local attraction-tall ships making a landing, short
actors making a move, Andrew Wyeth making a nude Helga
fracas-just as if they were actually going somewhere. The briefest
commuter flight is filled with businessmen dragging mountainous
garment bags and whole computers on board. They are worst pests
than mainland Chinese taking Frigidaires home on the plane. And
no modern business gal goes to lunch without a steamer trunk-size
tote full of shoe changes, Sony Walkman tapes and tennis rackets.
When she makes her way down a restaurant aisle, she'll crack the
back of your head with this exactly the same way a Mexican will
with a crate of chickens on a Yucatan bus ride.