Call of the World

Come spring, and the Call of the World sounds across the land. Never before have the multitudes been quite so willing--or so able--to respond.

More than 15 million Americans went abroad in 1966, and this year that figure may go up by as much as another 2,000,000. Why now? Says Travel Guide Temple Fielding: "The big story this season is the enormous increase in mass--v. class--tourism." Adds San Francisco Travel Agent Boyan Ribnikar: "With those group air fares, how can you afford to stay home?"

Indeed, the main reasons for the big summer exodus from America this year are that the new low-fare airline deals for groups (as little as $230 round trip to London) and the go-cheap package tours ($398 for 15 days visiting London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Nuernberg, Innsbruck, Venice, Florence, Rome, Lucerne and Paris). Such prices are within the range of almost everyone--from $90-a-week secretaries to $7,500-a-year family men. And already the big international airlines--TWA, Pan Am, BOAC --are booked solid for their 21-day trips throughout July and early August.

Still, pick a spot--any spot--and the chances are good that there is a way to get there. Most popular are the traditional stopovers--London, Paris, Rome--though many of the bargain spots of yesteryear are now hopelessly overcrowded. Out this season, says Fielding, are Torremolinos on Spain's Costa del Sol ("It has been overrun by the beats and the ye-yes; there are five different sexes there at least"), the French Riviera ("fading fast"), Italy's Adriatic coast below Venice ("absolutely overrun with Germans"), the islands of Ibiza and Majorca ("This stabs me in my left ventricle and in the right one too; we make our home there"), and Lucerne ("It's a madhouse; more than 30,000 people visit the city daily").

For 5,500,000 Americans, the summer's travel will be a relatively short-range junket to Canada's Expo 67, the greatest show on earth this year. But for the millions more who want to wander farther afield, there is encouraging news that abroad better basic accommodations, more imaginative frills and a warmer welcome await them.

IRELAND is celebrating the 300th anniversary of Jonathan Swift's birth and offers a $100, eight-day "literature" tour that goes to Dublin's Trinity College, Celbridge Abbey and Kilkenny City. The old sod expects a record year, including visits from Jacqueline Kennedy and 31 members of Chicago's Grandmothers' Club. Awaiting them will be everything from a $95-a-week "floatel" on the River Shannon to an army of newly popular pub balladeers and manorial dinners which will be served in medieval castles.

ENGLAND, accustomed to the annual American demand to see Windsor Castle and the Shakespeare country, will spice up the trip with a bit of 18th century sophistication. For $150, travelers can take a three-day tour in a 17-seater coach-and-four; the package includes meals and rooms at medieval inns along the way. Scotland beckons with the Edinburgh Festival. Newly popular: such far-north Highland hideouts as Aviemor, 30 miles from Inverness.

SCANDINAVIA has opened its salmon-fishing preserves to the public, and sportsmen can buy rights to fish for rates ranging from $35 to $3,000 a week, depending on the richness of the rivers. A placid but entertaining attraction is the "dollar train" from Stockholm to Lapland, a seven-day, $425 railroad cruise through the magnificence of the fiords and mountain country.

FRANCE still offers Paris as its main (and very expensive) attraction. This year, to add some zing to the traditional cathedral and chateau trips, there is an association called Relais de Campagne to plan gourmet tours of 76 superb country inns in the provinces. Up for rediscovery this season: Perigord, a dreamy river-filled region of south-central France long famed for its truffles, which offers splendid, inexpensive food, as well as a growing number of excellent hotels.

ITALY yearly improves the Autostrada linking up the main tourist cities north and south of Rome. The big question mark has been Florence, and the news is good: Florence is going to be more fascinating than ever. Of 31,555 art shops in the city, nearly 8,000 were ruined by last fall's floods; yet all but 150 will be back in business this summer. The city has not only recovered but has actually turned the flood damage into a high-powered attraction. Visitors can now take a guided tour of the Boboli Gardens, central "hospital" for damaged paintings and manuscripts, and watch craftsmen doing the delicate job of restoring the damaged masterpieces in a limonaia (a one-time hothouse for growing lemons).

PORTUGAL has the Algarve, along the southern coast, now easily reachable by car from Lisbon over the recently opened Salazar Bridge. The chic people have begun to flock into two new ocean-view luxury hotels in Praia da Rocha and Portim`ao. The beaches and water are superb, the prices are reasonable, and there is a new 18-hole golf course, which will host this year's European Ladies championship. Another "find" this year will be the island of Madeira, 535 miles southwest of Lisbon; it has always had splendid accommodations, but its new airport opened 18 months ago, and the new accessibility guarantees new popularity. Portugal's biggest draw of the season will be the tiny village of Fatima, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Virgin Mary's appearance to three shepherd's children. Tens of thousands of pilgrims are expected in Fatima, but getting satisfactory accommodations is going to be almost as miraculous as the event the pilgrims have come to celebrate: the town has a scant 5,000 beds for guests--mostly in places that have neither running water nor indoor toilets.

SPAIN is still a bargain, overcrowded along the Costa Brava and jam-packed in Madrid ("Its season used to be winter," reports Fielding. "Now it is difficult to get hotel accommodations any time. Madrid is going crazy"). Favored this year by the rich and beautiful people: Sotogrande del Guadiaro on the Costa del Sol, a region that boasts 3,200 acres overlooking the Rock of Gibraltar, several fine hotels, two golf courses and fine swimming. Equally In: nearby Marbella (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor will be there).

GREECE is expecting to top the 1,000,000 mark in tourists for the first time, and a big attraction, as usual, will be Athens and the islands in the Aegean Sea. For the first time, tourists will have an alternative to bumping from site to site by bus. Instead, ruin viewers can sail the wine-dark sea in comfort on a scenic three-day cruise (for from $75 to $160) aboard the Meltemi, which stops at ports near Delphi, Epidaurus and Corinth.

EASTERN EUROPE is at last beginning to grab its share of the tourist business. Budapest's reputation as a swinging capital has penetrated the Iron Curtain. Czechoslovakia offers a Mozart festival, and of late has become downright comradely toward tourists. Says Harvard Square Travel Agent Vladimir Kazan, a Czech-born American citizen who was once jailed in Prague: "From my cellmates, I understand the country is cultivating good restaurants, picturesque cities and reasonably good hotels. I hear they're really catering to Americans." Despite his own unhappy experience, Kazan heartily recommends a visit. Soviet Russia, this year celebrating the 50th anniversary of its revolution, expects 2,000,000 visitors (about 40,000 of them Americans), and is laying on 140 special trains and extra Aeroflot flights.

YUGOSLAVIA today is the best bargain in Europe. For the past six years, tourism has been increasing at the staggering rate of 25% a year: 15 million visited there last year, and in 1967 there will be even more, largely because Yugoslavia has flung open its borders with a no-visa-required policy for everyone. Excellent hotels have sprung up along the Dalmatian coast, especially at Split and Dubrovnik. Rates remain low ($14 a day, including meals), and additional private-enterprise restaurants are being encouraged. To speed tourists in and out, there are direct flights from Rome and a new, two-lane asphalt highway. Only drawback: in rushing the new road to completion, no guard rails were installed along nearly 400 miles of highway that winds hundreds of feet above the Adriatic.

AFRICA looms big, beautiful and relatively inexpensive for voyagers who hanker for some spoon-fed adventure. In Nairobi, a visitor can step off an airplane and, within ten minutes by car, be in the wilds of the Dark Continent, watching an entire Bronx Zoo on the loose. Tourists can travel 8,500 ft. up Mount Kenya to the bamboo-jungle-surrounded Secret Valley Game Lodge, a two-story building set on tree-trunk stilts, rent a room for $15 a day (including meals) and gaze in perfect safety at leopards that slink out of the night to feed on baited venison beneath a battery of floodlights. In the "other Africa"--to the north--the scenes and the accommodations are considerably different. Algeria has fallen far behind in tourist facilities. But in Morocco, there are hundreds of miles of beaches in the Blue Country, where the Sahara Desert touches the Atlantic and the sun shines at least 300 days a year. The capital city of Rabat now has a luxurious new Hilton Hotel (up to $18 a day), a swinging night life, and a high-powered crowd of jet-set visitors, who include Princess Lee Radziwill, Mick Jagger and Paul Getty Jr. (who recently bought a Marrakesh palace).

INDIA too is expecting an enormous turnout of tourists this year. And if they ever get beyond haggling with the marketplace throngs of Delhi and Calcutta, visitors can luxuriate in the Shangri-lalike valleys of Kashmir, where they can rent a houseboat for as little as $49 a week and drift about the placid, clear mountain lakes. For the more rugged visitor, Nepal has the Tigertops Hotel, which offers its guests an elephant-back excursion through the jungles. For the athletic, there is a $300-a-week hiking trip through tiny Buddhist villages, across flower-carpeted Himalayan meadows and on up to the level of mountain climbers' base camps (16,000 ft.) on Mount Everest.

If all that is not far enough out, there is still the excitement of hunting whales in a wooden boat off the Azores (for $35 a day), or sitting on a deck chair aboard a "boatel" on Brazil's Araguaia River munching roasted piranhas ($1,600 for three weeks), or a six-week explorer's trip through Mongolia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the diet includes sheep's eyeballs and cooked lamb's head ($3,650). As for the $5,000, five-week trip to Antarctica, the boat does not leave from the tip of Chile until January 1968--summertime at the South Pole.

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