Vacationing with Purpose

Who thinks of the poor hog breeder torn between love of his work and a yen for European travel? Who cares about the speleologist yearning to visit foreign lands but loath to mix with ordinary tourists who never plumbed a cave? Travel agents, that's who. What's more, they're doing something about it. This year Academy Travel Ltd. will assemble an exclusive and hardy band of spelunkers in London, collect $195 a head, and lead them off on a somewhat sunless 15-day crawl through the caves of Rumania. In New York, Lindblad Travel Inc. has plans afoot for a special breeders' browse through European hogdom's foremost farms -- a follow-up to earlier, highly successful cattle and hog breeders' tours.

The wave of what the travel agents call "special interest trips" is cresting. Come summer, the world will be swarming with traveling gangs of golfers or gourmets, of art or bird watchers, of chess players, music maniacs and film fans. All winter, liners have been steaming out of the U.S. with boatloads of bridge buffs -- two of them featuring Charles Goren as supercargo.

Sadists' Special. Art lovers are perhaps the most assiduous special trippers; one of the most deluxe of their caravans is run by the Archives of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Art, which will show 100 travelers the art of the Far East this October for $2,050 each, $500 of which is a contribution to the institute. Pre-Columbian relics in Central and South America will draw no fewer than four special tours between July and September.

But there are different kinds of truth and beauty. A 21-day, $895 International Dance Tour of European cities, leaving New York Aug. 2, has nothing to do with Nureyev. Social dancing is what it's all about, and the trip will give light-footed vacationers "instruction under the most world-famous teachers" as well as "new and lasting friendships in foreign countries." Dancing partners, for those traveling solo, are guaranteed each and every evening. Those who like their friendships more violent may join the Judo Friendship Tour of Japan (about $1,395 for 14 arm-twisting days). Included is a course of instruction at the Mecca of the judo world, Tokyo's Kodokan.

Another way to keep in shape is to take a two-week Slimcruise from London, which promises that travelers will return 10 Ibs. lighter after daily sessions with dietitian and masseur. In a way, the trip is also a sadists' special; friends and spouses of the slimmers can go along for the ride, do not have to join in the calorie counting--and pay $42 less than the suffering slimmers.

Ancient Civilization? This year Swan Tours of London will send some 2,000 tourists on seven group trips through Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. Going along to lecture and explain are such authorities as Oxford Greek Expert Sir Maurice Bowra, Archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Philosopher Sir John Wolfenden and Classicist Anthony Chenevix-Trench, headmaster of Eton. For bird watchers, travel agents have hatched a clutch of ornithological adventures: 15-day pursuits of the rock partridge on Yugoslavia's Neretva River or the glossy ibis on Lake Prespa in Macedonia. Even the south of France takes on new interest, with purple and night herons, marsh harriers and spectacled warblers on the delta of the Rhone. Cook's has an Alpine Flower Tour--15 days of scrambling up the Dolomites, sniffing all the way.

For marine biologists there is a vacation study trip on the Black Sea. The Bible-minded can choose from a wide variety of pilgrimages; a British outfit called Inter-Church Travel Ltd. is promoting a three-week "Voyage of a Lifetime" under joint guidance of Anglican, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox prelates, which will include an audience with the Pope and a reception on St. John's Day by the abbot of Patmos, the island where St. John wrote the Book of Revelation.

There are, of course, numberless African safaris, which have been getting more and more comfortable and civilized. For those who really want to rough it, the latest is a "Golddiggers' Tour" that involves three weeks of bush-plane jungle hopping around mining camps, among the armadillos, alligators and boa constrictors of the Amazon. The tourist may recoup the cost of the trip in panned gold dust and nuggets and then again he may not.

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