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Exploring Southern India: Land of Amazing Contrasts

When you say Agra to most Western tourists, they think Taj Mahal, but when you say Southern India nothing jumps to their minds. After the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, this relatively neglected site has become even more so, but a visit can be the trip of a lifetime, combining exotic sightseeing in an ancient culture and natural beauty with days of relaxation.

My wife, Marcia Jacobson, and I had whetted our appetite for India on a tour in Dec. 2000-Jan 2001 that included Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Khajuraho, Varanasi (Benares)—an area known as the Golden Triangle, much of which is in the state of Rajasthan, although New Delhi is in the state of Delhi-- before ending up as, our tour did, in Katmandu, Nepal. In 2000-2001 most trips organized in the US either took a very few days in Southern India or finished, as our trip did, in Katmandu, Nepal. The goal of our return to India, the world’s largest democracy with the world’s second largest population of 1.17 billion, was to explore southern India.

With the help of iExplore, a Chicago company that plans private tours, we developed our three-week itinerary, leaving on Feb. 5, 2009 and returning Feb. 26. We had our own drivers and guides and a small air-conditioned Toyota Innova —chosen from a small list of possibilities of varying cost—as our car throughout. As happens on international trips, iExplore outsourced us to Travelite in Delhi who outsourced to Marvel travel who outsourced us to local managers in each city.

After an exhausting 27 hour trip from our NYC hotel to our India hotel—featuring a direct Air India thirteen hour plus flight to Delhi, a three and half hour layover which become four and half due to a flight delay, and a 2 ½ hour flight to Chennai (formerly Madras) —we arrived past midnight India time at our Chennai hotel, the splendid Trident which was close to the airport, a plus after an epic journey. Air India should be known as the screaming airline because most Indians do not believe in pacifiers or baby aspirin or a spoonful of Dimetapp to quiet their children and help them endure the painful change in ear pressure and the mostly India passengers accept this as the norm. On both flights I sat in the second row (families with children get most of the first row) and that was a major error.

In part because of its massive population but also because of its amazing cultural and economic variety, one is struck continually by India’s vivid contrasts: Between, on one hand, ancient temples within driving distance of Chennai as well as all over the state of Tamil Nadu and, indeed, throughout Southern India and, on the other modern Bangalore; between beautiful Goa beaches and sandy debris filled areas bordering the streets where one expects sidewalks; between prosperity and desperate poverty—specifically, between people hawking cheap baubles on the streets or working in menial jobs, and, on the other, $2000 a foot apartments inhabited by government officials and Bollywood film stars in Mumbai; between ancient erotic sculptures and Hindu moral police who frown upon unmarried men and women consorting together; between huts and hovels and luxury hotels where tourists and international business people stay; between ambitious hard-working young adults holding responsible positions in a country willing to confer leadership positions on its rising generation and a caste system which still confines some people to a life of misery, including ten years old girls begging while holding babies in scenes right out of the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire; between traditional dress, especially the beautiful saris on the women, and western dress, most notably in Bangalore and even more so in Mumbai and Goa; between ostentatious sexism and capable women in management positions such as the General Manager of the Bangalore Oberoi; between the lush green natural beauty of Kerala with rolling topography and its fertile lush green rice, tea, and sugarcane fields and teaming noisy sprawling cities like much of Chennai and Mumbai; between occasional highways and but more often terrible roads, sometime barely more than potholed sandy paths; between quiet Hindu temples (and far more clamorous temples which seem to be part of a religious industry) and mosques and churches and even a rare synagogue.

Because of its population density and extremes, India is the difference that nullifies all difference. Or as a colleague hyperbolically remarked to me before I went the first time, “After India, the rest of the world looks like South Florida.”

In the state of Tamil Nadu, the center of the Ancient Dravidian civilization, the teeming, electric city of Chennai (formerly Madras) is India’s fourth largest city whose street life would recall the even larger Delhi and Mumbai were it not for about eight miles of wonderful seashore known as Marina Beach. The great sites in Southern India are Hindu temples and to enjoy them it is best to read a little beforehand about Hinduism and in particular the most important Gods: Shiva, Parvati, Brahma, Vishnu, Krishna, Ganesha, Ram and company. Basic information can be found on line. The temples are an energetic even chaotic potpourri of spirituality, piety, pilgrims, worshippers, weddings, beggars, shops and, alas public urinals. Priests occupying sanctuaries—some forbidden to non-Hindus—pray as intervening figures to the various gods. Within the temples, the intermingling of spirituality and everyday life is different from other religions.

A highlight of our learning about Hindu temples was our trip to Mahabalipuram, 37 miles south of Chennai, which has three wonderful sites from the Pallava dynasty: the shore temple, a cave temple with wonderful rock-cut relief sculptures and five temples called rathas, also rock cut; rathas are facsimiles of temples that are carried through the streets in holiday procession. The next day we drove two hours to Kanchipurim and saw three of the five major the eighth century temples: Kailasanatha, Sri Ekambaranathar—both devoted to Shiva and Vaikunta Perumal—devoted to Vishnu.

In Chennai, we saw the wonderful ancient bronzes collection with its focus on depictions of Shiva dancing and his wife Parvati in the National Museum as well as Chennai’s most active Hindu temple, Kapaleeshwarar, dedicated to Shiva and the Catholic Basilica of San Thome, in honor of Doubting Thomas the Apostle who was supposedly martyred here. In Trichy, we saw India’s largest Hindu temple, the imposing and elegant Sri Ranganathaswamy dedicated to Vishnu with a sanctum surrounded by seven walls. In Tanjore, the great site is Brihadishwara, a Word Heritage Site that is one of the great architectural triumphs of the Chola Dynasty which peaked between 850 and 1270 and whose capital was Tanjore. Here we had the thrill of being blessed by the temple’s residing elephant, which occurs when you give the elephant’s trainer an offering, and the elephant touches your head gently. In Tanjore we also visited the former Royal Palace and the Sarawati Mahal library with its wonderful palm leaf manuscript collection.

A four hour drive from Tanjore, Madurai, a city whose roots are more than 2000 years old, features bustling and noisy Meenakshi Temple which has 10,000 visitors each day, virtually all Hindus. We preferred the more contemplative temples to this chaotic venue but understood that that it was a holy venue not only for locals but pilgrims. The Madurai Gandhi museum gives a good lesson in the predatory colonial history of Britain’s years in India, but is stiflingly hot and maybe even a tad too polemical.

The next phase of our tour focused on nature. After a four hours drive from Madurai highlighted by some stunningly beautiful views as we journeyed through the Western Ghats, we entered the state of Kerala for a two day visit at and near the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, where we took two boat rides in the hopes of seeing elephants and tigers but settled for bison, wild boar, antelopes, monkeys and various birds. We stayed at the rather pricey Spice Village in Kumily which featured an Indian dance concert and locally grown foods. Spice Village is an environmental friendly resort on beautiful grounds; our accommodation was a small one-roomed cottage thatched with elephant grass. In the immediate area, we had a wonderful elephant ride—no matter how serious the trip, one should not neglect the child within-- and we took a tour of a spice plantation with our knowledgeable guide.

We then went to Kumarakom Lake Resort in the Kerala district of Kottayam. The Resort is a luxury property overlooking a lake where many of the rooms are individual cottages with carved teak ceilings and their own small swimming pools and every effort is made to cater to the tourists’ every wish and desire. The hotel offers complimentary sunset cruises and has a beautiful infinity pool. Many hotel clients choose an all night houseboat cruise on elaborately furnished houseboats the hotel owns, but we settled for a half day house boat cruise on the lake; we had our own small, extremely modest boat staffed by three, but while relaxing and enjoyable we found it a tad slow until the scenery improved in the last two hours when we entered small canals in the backwaters and could see houses and rich green rice fields. Our spa massage—with special “ayurmedic” oils-- was most enjoyable and my morning swims in the infinity pool was a highlight of our two nights at the Lake Resort.

We thought our stay there would have a strong focus on birding, but the Resort focuses more on comfort and provided a nice respite. Our trip to the nearby bird sanctuary was a fiasco, not only because there were few birds at noon, but also because our so-called guide knew no English, and nothing about birds, and didn’t even bring binoculars to supplement ours.

We drove a few hours to Cochin. One highlight of our Kochi (formerly Cochin) visit was the Kathakali ritual dance-drama show with ancient techniques dating back to the 2nd century AD. Other important sights were the Pardesi synagogue dating back to the 16th century—only a few Jews remain of a once flourishing community-- and the Hindu murals in the Mattancherry Palace as well as the Cochin fish market and the centuries old method of catching fish by means of nets lowered and raised by wooden pulleys.

After flying to Bangalore in the state of Karnataka, we drove three and half hours to Mysore, an attractive city often missed by tourists except for those who visit the nearby national preserve for a short Safari, something we should have done but didn’t. We had been told the likelihood of seeing tigers was remote, but we met a few people who saw them. Along the way to Mysore stopped at the palace of Tipu Sultan who along with his father allied with the French and defeated the British before later succumbing; we also visited a wonderful ancient Hindu temple. At Mysore we saw the sumptuous year round palace of the same former king who decorated the summer palace but whose taste took a much finer turn when he built this at the turn of the twentieth century. At Mysore we stayed at a former palace, the Lalitha Mahal, where the faded elegance of our rooms and fastidiousness made us feel that we were experiencing the last breaths of colonial elegance.

Our abortive quest to see wild tigers in Periyar took us to the Mysore zoo that seems to be slowly—very slowly—transforming itself from a zoo with caged animals to one with natural habitats. The zoo has more tigers and leopards than most zoos, and is worth a visit. We also enjoyed the Devaraja flower and vegetable market and a night visit to the stunning illuminated fountains at Brindavan Garden 25 kilometers away.

In this part of our trip, Nandi, the bull Shiva uses to transport himself played a role. In Mysore we visited the beautiful Sri Chamundeswari temple dedicated to Shiva and close by, the second largest Nandi, carved from a single stone, in all of India. The very next day in Bangalore we saw a rare Bull Temple actually dedicated to Nandi, the third largest Nandi in India that is carved from a single stone. We also visited Lalbagh Botanical Gardens as well as Karnataka Chitkarala Parishat, an art museum that featured leather puppets and marionettes, but which like most Indian museums, lacks air conditioning and sufficient labeling. We also visited the summer palace of the former India king of the area, one whose taste in paintings tends toward tasteless eroticism if not soft porn.

At the Bangalore Oberoi, we had a sumptuous thali--a presentation of diverse dishes in small portions-- cooked by Executive chef Rakesh Uphadhyay and his staff. Indian meals at their most sophisticated depend on a symphony of flavors and textures.

Our next stop was Goa where we stayed three nights at the Intercontinental—also known as the Lalit Goa Resort--in Canacona in South Goa. Within the resort compound, we had the use of a luxury villa with a private swimming pool, thanks to an Indian friend whose family owns the villa. We spent some time reveling in magnificent sunrises and sunsets on the resort’s beautiful beach, a beach among the most spectacular I have seen in a lifetime of collecting beaches. We also saw some of the highlights of Old Goa, especially the cathedral and Basilica from the Portuguese era. India invaded and reclaimed Goa in 1961 from the Portuguese and the island still has more of a European flavor than the rest of India.

After three glorious days in Goa we flew to Mumbai (Bombay), our final stop before our 16 hour direct flight back to New York. Our elegant hotel, the JW Marriott, overlooked the Arabian Sea where we once again enjoyed a terrific sunset. Growing up in the metropolitan New York region and visiting Los Angeles, I have seen traffic jams, but nothing can equal rush hours at Mumbai and those hours extend for 3 hours in both the morning and evening.

Not to be missed in Mumbai are the Elephanta Island caves reached by a pleasant hour boat ride. They date to between the fifth and eighth century and are carved in basalt rock. The main cave is a temple to Shiva featuring a beautifully imposing six-foot statue of Shiva. I highly recommend the Gandhi museum on the site of the house where he stayed when visiting Mumbai; the museum offers a fine historical presentation of Gandhi’s role in achieving India’s independence in 1948. We enjoyed the Keneseth Eliyahoo synagogue, built by a congregation of mostly by Iraqi Jews and featuring Eastern decorative motifs. In Mumbai we also saw the sites of the 11/26 terrorist attack, including the Taj Hotel and Victoria station, as well as the port of entry for the terrorists.

Conclusion: For experienced travelers, Southern India is one of the trips of a lifetime and less expensive than one might think. Even before the terrorism in Mumbai last November, it was a neglected venue that is serviced by few American tours companies. Once a year, Elderhostel offers 13 day or so group tours to southern India and several companies now combine the Golden Triangle and samples of Southern India. Security at airports and hotels was comparable if not greater than any I have ever seen, even in Israel at times of high alert.

Dinner for two (excluding alcohol) rarely cost over $40 at the best hotels and often are close to $25. Gradually, roads and regional airports are being built to make travel easier. Yes, you will see grinding poverty, hovels and huts, troubling caste and class distinctions amidst luxury and wealth, poor roads, dust, garbage strewn about. But you will encounter warm and generous people, you may be invited to share meals at very modest weddings in temples, you will see natural beauty, learn about an ancient civilization and be moved by the spirituality of still active temples dating back more than a millennium. Even during the international economic crisis, India is making economic progress and bringing more and more people into the middle class, notwithstanding the kind of grinding poverty and day-to-day struggle for survival that is shown in the aforementioned Slumdog Millionaire.

To be sure there are minor difficulties. With many places lacking airports, and many roads that are narrow and hardly maintained, it takes a long time to move about. Indian English is not American English and sometimes it is difficult to understand local guides who have not traveled or had much contact with Americans. Many members of the hotel staff speak either no English or a kind of Pidgin English, but overall the hotels are more polished than other essentials of tourism.

The tourist infrastructure in South India is inconsistent, and, while our drivers were excellent-- for ten days from Trichy to Cochin, we had a wonderful driver with a fine sense of humor named Senthil—our local guides and local representatives varied greatly. At times I was not sure whether we had a wonderful trip because or in spite of Marvel tours which managed our tour until we flew to Bangalore. As one moves away from major capitals, the local guides and local managers do not speak English well and are difficult to understand, and some of them are not professionally trained although they want to please and are apologetic when they make a mistake or don’t understand you. Although we had a few wonderful guides—enthusiastic, informed, generous with their time--be aware that groups often get the best guides because the larger the group the better the tips. But once we made known our displeasure with incompetent guides, Travelite coaxed most of the local managers to provide at least competent guides. Still, were the guides better trained, large scale tourism would have a better chance of flourishing. Nevertheless, we had one of the best trips of our lives, and readers of these pages know we do get around.

Return to Russia after Forty-Six Years: Exploring Moscow, St. Petersburg, and cruising Russian Waterways

Moscow, June 7, 2008: After almost half a century, I am again in Red Square and gazing at the sumptuous exterior of St, Basil’s Cathedral, the elegant façade of the ornate three-story glass roofed shopping arcade known as GUM, and the outer walls of the Kremlin. These wondrous landmarks create a Proustian moment taking me back to memories of a long ago visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

First Visit: Looking Backward to the USSR under Communist Rule
In 1962, after my junior year abroad, I took a four week train tour to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Berlin. Khrushchev was in power and the Berlin Wall had been built in 1961. Russia then was the centerpiece of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), which formed in 1924 and broke up as of 1991 into 15 separate countries.

Russia was a drab place in terms of dress and food selection; many Russians were dressed in traditional garb rather than Western clothes. We were often approached with offers to buy the very clothing we were wearing.

Our student hotel called Sputnik was no exception to the grey tenor of Moscow daily life. Without private bathrooms, it was more like a dormitory than a hotel. Included meals revolved around cabbage soup, borscht—and cabbage and beets in other forms--and potatoes (mostly boiled).

A climate of fear and paranoia prevailed. People were convinced the KGB was everywhere. The nominal leader of the group warned us that our every move might be watched and that we should be careful not to talk politics in public.

We met somewhat feisty young people who wanted to learn about the West. We would meet in the parks, walking while we talked, or in a riverside café where they felt safe. When visiting our hotel rooms, where they felt safer than in their own apartment buildings, they took precautions because they were certain that the room contained listening devices. They unscrewed the speaker piping in music and announcements because they suspected that the speaker had the capacity to listen to those speaking in the room.

Hugger Mugger
Another American on the tour and I were approached in St. Petersburg by an attractive and unusually well-dressed young woman who wanted to leave Russia and who told us she was a daughter of an important nuclear physicist. Were we being entrapped? Upon our return to Moscow, we went to the American Embassy where, after being asked in a whisper by the first official person we met what we were there for, had us exchange messages in writing. We were taken to a room dug out below the basement. We were introduced to a senior embassy official who was a few years later, I learned from a first page story in the New York Times, expelled as a spy from the USSR. He took us to an unfinished room in the basement, which had been constructed, we were told, without the knowledge of the Soviet government.

While we spoke, he played tapes of Nikita Khrushchev’s speeches backwards so as to confuse any listeners. We were told if the person who wished to depart were the important nuclear physicist rather than his daughter, something could be done. We were not only admonished not to discuss this with anyone and that we were probably being followed and would surely be after we left. We were given a phone number to memorize in case we were picked up by the police.

Essentials of our 2008 Trip
My wife, Marcia Jacobson, and I purchased a 16 day tour to Russia from Grand Circle Tours, including air, for about $4000 a person; the tour included four nights in a serviceable Moscow hotel, 3 nights in a somewhat better St. Petersburg Hotel, and 7 nights on a Russian waterways cruise.

Selling “optionals’ is a version of disaggregation that enables Grand Circle and other companies to advertise a better price. Even if you buy them as pricey optionals, do not miss the stunning fountains of Peterhof, summer residence of Russian royalty; Catherine the First’s rococo luxurious palace (especially the Amber room) in the town named after Pushkin; and the splendid Russian circus in Moscow. We bought tickets for a touristy “Swan Lake” for $8.50 each that the tour sold with bus ride of less than ½ mile for $80 each. (For world class ballet, be sure to go to the Kirov Ballet, if is in season, at the Marinsky).

Moscow and St. Petersburg are accessible to American travelers in ways that were impossible before 1991 Glasnot and Perestroika. We did many things on our own. Subways are easy to negotiate. Take a map and ask; many younger people speak enough English to help.

The Russian waterways cruise, 829 miles from Moscow to St. Petersburg, begins on the Moscow Canal, then enters the Volga—largest river in Europe—for less than 100 miles, crosses the Rybinak Reservoir, enters the Sheskna river before crossing the two largest lakes in Europe, Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega, and then enters the Neva River where St. Petersburg is located. One of the trip highlights was the long days; on the cruise we were watching sunsets at 11pm. And as we approached June 21, the nights did not get fully dark.

On the M/S Rossia, carrying 200 passengers, our nice room had a good-sized window enabling us to enjoy scenery, TV (with CNN much of the time), air conditioning, and a functional bathroom including an enclosed shower. We were divided into six groups of 35, each group with its own tour guide. The food was reasonably good and nicely served.

Grand Circle provides a well-organized trip where the safety of their travelers is uppermost. Their core clients are well-traveled retirees, especially teachers, and I would guess the mean age was early 70s. If our cruise is any criteria, Grand Circle travelers are participants. They went to concerts, lectures, language classes, doll painting, vodka tasting and cooking classes.

Our Grand Circle trip was an excellent value. Our best cruise stop was the middle-size city of Yaroslav (population 600,000), which has some interesting churches. The town of Uglitch has some historical interest because one of Ivan the Terrible’s sons was killed there. We saw the wooden churches on Kizhi Island and walked about the remote village of Goritsky.

Moscow Highlights:
With its monumental Red square and equally imposing Kremlin, Moscow, the capital, is an imposing city--especially the center--with elegant Russian Orthodox churches and statuesque buildings dating back to Czarist days.

Built in the 1890s as a shopping arcade and a Government run department store in Communist times, GUM now contains small upscale shops such as Dior and Ferragamo. St. Basil’s Cathedral, built in the sixteenth century, is perhaps the most beautiful site in Red Square. Its iconostasis—a screen of icons--had been plastered over during the Soviet period.

What is immediately most strikingly different from my 1962 visit is the restoration of those Russian Orthodox churches that were not destroyed by the Communists. The major synagogues in Moscow and St. Petersburg—which we visited--are prospering, although the numbers of worshippers are tiny compared to those of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Within the walls of the Kremlin, the State Armory museum is the highlight. Jeweled crowns, swords, thrones, robes covered with emeralds and diamonds, and the legendary Faberge bejeweled eggs show how Tsarist luxury benefited from the immense labor of the many on behalf of the few.

The Pushkin Fine Art Museum is strong in Rembrandt and other 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters. Requiring separate admission, the adjacent Gallery features Impressionists and Post-Impressionists with a special focus on Matisse and Picasso. Do visit the Tretyakov State Gallery with its focus on Russian Art and the separate New Tretyakov, which focuses on 20th century Russian art featuring Malevich, Goncharova, Kandinksy, as well as social realists of the 1917-1991 Bolshevik period.

St. Petersburg Highlights
On the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea with more than 60 canals and bridges, St. Petersburg, “Venice of the North,” was founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century and was the capital from 1712 until 1918. Called Leningrad in Communist times, it is a beautiful city with spectacular views. We were there for the White Nights during the year’s longest days.

We spent most of two days in the Hermitage, which, along with the Met in Manhattan and the Louvre, is among the great museums in the world. Unlike my last visit when many rooms were closed, the entire Hermitage was open and most of the rooms have been refurbished; many paintings have been cleaned, although far from all. We reveled in the awe-inspiring masterpieces of Rembrandt, Leonardo, and Raphael to Matisse and Picasso.

Russia Today: Continuity and Difference:
Fostered by oil and natural gas, Russia has been booming economically and there is among the wealthy and even the rising upper middle class a strong taste for luxury goods. The Bolsheviks nationalized all private property, but now people are buying their own homes. In contrast to mostly drab dress in 1962, urban women (more than men) are not only chic and fashionable but even at times excessively made up and overdressed by western standards. During both my visits, I heard the recurring phrase “after the Revolution,” but the phrase has a different resonance after Perestroika and Glasnost, both terms implying greater openness and transparency, freedom of the press, and freedom to dissent. “The 1917 October revolution” is no longer perceived ideologically as a utopia but as the obsolete Bolshevik-Communist 1917-1991 period when financial opportunity was disrupted by nationalization of private property. Replacing Communist price control is rampant capitalism with often-exorbitant unregulated charges to tourists.

Lenin is still something of hero for opening the doors of opportunity in the wake of Tsarist rule. Stalin is credited with saving the country during the German Invasion of World War II, a war in which the former USSR lost by their count 27 million people—most of whom were Russians-- while we in the USA lost less than 500,000.

Russia in 2008 has many problems, including the world economic downturn:

1) Limits on freedom of expression in a country where government controls much of the media, especially television. Repression gave way to great openness in the 1990s but has been followed by some contraction in last few years.

2) Economic disparity: 40 per cent of the population lives below poverty line. We encountered many drunks and beggars; a handful of our fellow travelers fell prey to pickpockets in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

3) The tradition of violent and extreme behavior. Many Russians believe in the necessity of a strong leader and do not hold it against Putin that he was a KGB figure before the fall of the Communists.

4) The role of the Russian “mafia” in so-called legitimate business and the accompanying rampant corruption.


Exploring Peru and Chile: Summer in South American During Ithaca Winter

After visiting Argentina and Brazil last December, my wife and I wanted to continue our exploration of South America. While our primary goal as travelers is learning about history and culture, other incentives were South America’s warm summer weather and long hours of daylight during our dark glacial Ithaca winter.

When possible we try to avoid organized tours. Using some suggestions from tours brochures and friends, we booked our trip ourselves and made arrangements with hotels by email. LAN, the Chilean International airline, served us well throughout our trip. We arrived early Dec.17th in Lima, where, as we descended, I had my first sighting of the magnificent Andes. From beginning to ending, including flights, our trip last 18 days and included several domestic flights and a good deal of moving about.

Ten Reasons to visit Peru: 1) Machu Picchu, recently voted one of the Seven Wonders of the World; 2) beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world; 3) stunning views of the Andes; 4) warm weather (Although we were in Peru during the beginning of rainy season, we hardly had rain); 5) the hum and buzz of Lima; 6) hiking, climbing, and trekking; 7) Excellent food; 8) wonderful crafts and alpaca products; 9) strong dollar in relation to the Peso; 10) hospitable host population who want to please tourists.

Peru operates on two economies, one for the tourists and the wealthier classes, and one for the rest of the Peruvians. Within the local economy, meals are inexpensive and often excellent. Be forewarned that, while most Peruvians are tourist friendly, you will encounter, especially in cities, some poor people begging, selling junk, and not above trickery like selling prints as signed originals or agreeing to a price before changing their minds. One young man who agreed to shine my shoes tried to charge me extra before beginning the second shoe. And you need be aware of pickpockets.

With a third of Peru’s 27 million population, Lima is not the glamour city of the world, but it does have some splendid sites which can be seen in a few days. Essential sites: Plaza Mayer—the heart of Central Lima-- and, in addition to the main cathedral, three significant churches: the Franciscan Church and Catacombs, San Pedro, and Iglesia de la Merced. Somewhat off-putting was the Museum of the Inquisition, with models of tortures and torture victims. On the day I was there offered guided tours only in Spanish, although other languages are supposedly available.

The archeological collection in Museo Larco with its native Peruvian treasures, including a section devoted to sexuality, will give visitors an education in the many civilizations that preceded the Incas. With descriptions in Spanish, English, French, and Italian, it is beautifully organized and housed in an elegant 16th century colonial residence. A second fine museum is the Central Reserve Bank Museum of Peru. Most museums are free or have minimal admission charges.

The somewhat upscale area known as Miraflores is worth a visit, particularly the new area known as Larcomar—really a kind of upscale mall--on the cliffs of Miraflores, with stunning views of the Pacific Ocean. The area also contains an impressively large ancient pre-Inca storage site, Huaca Pullana, in the shape of a pyramid. In Miraflores, we had a wonderful simple fresh fish dinner at Café & Canela for 11 dollars for 2 (at 3 sol per dollar).

Another night we had a decent but unremarkable dinner in Chinatown for $5.30 for 2 at restaurant recommended in our guidebooks. For safety measures, at night, one needs to take a taxi to this section. A as part of an excellent meal at the main dining room of our excellent Sheraton hotel, we enjoyed ceviche, a citrus marinated raw fish dish that is a kind national dish of Peru. Peru also offers a number of exotic fruits not commercially available in North America.

Cusco, the Inca capitol, and its surroundings have many fine Inca sites. A half-day tour, including the Dominican monastery and the colonial Cathedral is recommended. We stayed at the exceptionally beautiful Hotel Libertador built on the site of Inca ruins; the hotel offers impeccable service and compares well with any hotel I have ever stayed in. At the Tunapa, a restaurant on the beautiful main square, we had a serviceable buffet along with a Peru folk culture night that included a band and dancers.

The highlight our entire trip was a visit to Machu Picchu, the famous Inca ruin in the Andes that is thought to have been built in the 15th century by Emperor Pachacuti. We took a 6 am train to the town of Machu Picchu Pueblo—formerly known as Aguas Calientes--and then a half hour bus ride to the actual site, which stands strikingly between two peaks. The scenery as one approaches the site is spectacular. The natural views are stunning and the site built into the mountain is among the world’s great sites.

The Incas were wonderful builders and architects who understood how to construct earthquake proof structures. They didn’t use mortar but cut each stone separately and carefully fitted them together, sometimes using a tongue and groove system. Speculation continues on for what Machu Picchu was built, in part because most of the mummies found have been women. The site seems to have combined elements of shrine and astronomical center, while also having an agricultural function.

While all visitors need be in shape for some climbing, younger and some older ambitious travelers approach Machu Picchu as part of a four day, three night trek on the Inca trail from Cusco and/or do a good deal of climbing within the Machu Picchu site. Most tourists return on the 3:30 train but we overnighted in the town Machu Picchu Pueblo where an unexpected highlight was an exquisite lunch at a French Peruvian restaurant, El Indio Feliz, that was among the bet meals of our trip.

After another night in Cusco, we flew to Juliaca and were driven to Puno where we stated at another Hotel Libertador, the only five star hotel in the Puno area, with a splendid view of Lake Titicaca. There we took an all day boat tour to the Uros Floating Islands, where we were rowed from one island to another one in a reed canoe, and then to the island of Taquile, where we did a considerable hike up to the main square at 13000 feet because no motored transportation is permitted. We also visited the Pre-Inca Sillustani burial sites between Puno and Juliaca.

Those who are not in robust condition need to know that visits to such sites as Machu Picchu, other Inca sites near Cusco, and Taquille on Lake Titicaca require physical exertion and that rapid changes in altitude from sea level to 11000 or even 13000 feet may be difficult. Many people have trouble adjusting to Cusco at 11,000 feet after arriving from Lima, which is at near sea level. Physical exercise will be more taxing. Some tourists take prescriptions drugs to adjust to the heights and avoid headaches and nausea.

Chile, with 16,600, 000 residents, about 6,000,000 of whom live in Santiago, is far more modern and European than Peru. We enjoyed Chile but we did not see any world-class sites in Chile. Nor is Chile as tourist friendly as Peru or other Latin American countries that I have visited. For one thing, tourism is not a major industry; that category includes exports of copper, seafood, and agriculture. Our Chilean company ADS Mundo—which we booked through an American agency that had done well for us in Peru, Argentina, and Brazil—was a bit parsimonious in its city tours and in the quality of hotels in the Lake District. (These were, the only hotels that I didn’t book myself). Beware of restaurants padding the bill with bogus charges and a general reluctance to be accommodating and flexible, something I never saw in Peru, Argentina, or Brazil.

Santiago is a bustling, attractive city with fewer beggars and street people than other major South American cities we have visited. The roads are excellent, and the metro is efficient and easy to use, although crowded. We enjoyed the Museum of Fine Arts—which had an outstanding exhibit on modern international artists influenced by Picasso--the Museum of Contemporary Art, and, especially, the splendid Pre-Columbian museum which I would rank with the Lima’s Museo Larca and the archeological museum in Mexico City as the great museums I have seen in Latin America. We also enjoyed a visit to the Central Market, where fresh fish along with inexpensive if not distinguished fish restaurants are featured.

We had a full day tour to Valparaiso, a major port of the nineteenth century before the Panama Canal and a center of Chile’s New Year festivities, and to the beach resort city, Vina del Mar. On our way, we passed through some wine and fruit growing regions reminiscent of Northern California, the climate of which is similar this region of Chile. We visited one of Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda’s houses in Valparaiso and a small archeological museum in Vina del Mar whose focus was Easter Island.

Our Sheraton Four Points hotel gave us a suite and a great view and treated us very well. We had a respectable and nicely presented Italian dinner at Rivoli and a decent fish dinner at Mare Nostrom, a fusion of Chilean and Peruvian food, but because the latter outrageously padded the bill, I would avoid it.

To begin our tour of the Lake District—the so-called Switzerland of Chile--we flew to Puerto Montt where we stayed at a modest but serviceable new Holiday Inn Express in a large room with a view overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In Puerto Montt, a regional capital which has a small town feel, we walked along the waterfront to the old market area known as Angelmo where we found crafts and a wonderful fish market. We had dinner at Rhenania, a quaint and pleasant sandwich and teashop.

On the following day we took a bus from Puerto Montt, stopped at a Petrohue Falls, and then crossed All the Saints Lake (Lago Todos Las Santes) to Parque Nacional Vicente. We stayed a night in Puella at the Hotel Natura in the park. This hotel and its sister hotel and have a few restaurants, but there is absolutely nothing else—not even shopping—on Puella. Were the weather clear, we might have chosen among the activities offered—hiking, boating, fly fishing, etc.-- but they were all canceled the day we arrived. While we did some walking during our 28 hours stay in Puello be aware that it rains over 250 days in the Lake District and that rain and clouds severely impede one’s view of the natural sites, including surrounding volcanoes and the Andes.

After recrossing the lake the next day, we spent our last night Puerto Varas where we stayed at Hotel Cabanas Del Lago with a fine view overlooking Lago Llanquihue. While the hotel is supposedly rated four stars, it was a modest establishment with small rooms and a tiny bathroom with a half-tub. In the Lake District the hotels have minimal staff and no air-conditioning. After a decent dinner at Las Buenas Brasas and falling asleep exhausted at 11, we awoke New Year’s Eve at midnight to an impressive midnight fireworks show.

The Lake District is it is not for those who expect world-class natural sites on the order of Iguassu Falls or Victoria Falls. In retrospect, probably we should have made day trips from Puerto Varas rather than done three hotels in three nights and/or possibly crossed the lakes into Argentina. To be sure we saw some splendid views, even in the rain, and we did take some scenic walks and visit the edge of Patagonia. Nevertheless, I would recommend skipping the Lake District and visiting either Easter Island, with its awesome statues, or the Chilean desert in the north, or perhaps going deeper into Patagonia.

Springing into the Lowlands: Exploring Major Cities in Holland and Belgium

"Let’s make our next Europe trip when the sun is shining and the days are long," remarked my wife during some grey days of a recent winter travels to Germany.

"Yes, I would love to explore Holland and Belgium. We could focus on Flemish art and Belgium and Dutch history, with a special focus on their colonial past and Jews during the Holocaust. And the cities are close together so we won’t waste a great deal of time moving from place to place."

Getting Started:

Holland and Belgium, known as the Lowlands, are easy countries to visit because cities are close together, most people speak at least some English (more so in Holland than Belgium), and the people are welcoming to tourists. Our trip included four nights in Amsterdam followed by two each in The Hague, Antwerp, Bruges, and three in Brussels. We flew to Amsterdam and returned from Brussels, using Delta from Syracuse. Within Europe we took trains, which are reliable and inexpensive and gave us an opportunity to see fine scenery.

Spring weather was as unpredictable as that of upstate New York. Our first three sun-drenched days contradicted the image of rainy Amsterdam: temperatures ranged from 70 to 80 Fahrenheit with slightly cooler nights. But the next three days in Amsterdam and The Hague more than made up for it in cold and rain. Our days in Belgium were mostly sunny and, after the a few chilly days in Antwerp, quite warm.

The dollar is weak against the Euro and with exchange charges—credit card companies charge as much as 3 per cent foreign exchange fee-- each Euro is worth about $1.40. The good news is that you not need be a world traveler to arrange your own Lowlands travel without joining a tour. Traveling on your own and making your own hotel arrangements via the Internet is easy and allows you more freedom within your travels. Except when visiting exotic places, we prefer this mode of travel to organized tours when we are on someone else’s schedule and cannot linger in museums, make new acquaintances, and or stumble upon exciting experiences. Holland’s Golden Age was the 17th century when it was a major economic and colonial power, due in part to the explorations of the Dutch West India Company. The Northern and Flemish part of Belgium known as Flanders belonged to Holland at that time and still speaks Dutch.

Amsterdam is a city of canals—particularly at the center-- and a good introduction is an hour-long boat trip through some of oldest canals in central city. Notable are the splendid 17th century canal houses along Herengracht and the houseboats on Prinsengracht. Amsterdam is a great walking city-- indeed, so were all the venues we visited-- and it is light past 10:00 pm in late May. The city is something of a revolving youth festival, drawing young people from all over the world, in part because of its tolerance of drugs and sex. The population is young and vibrant, and in our experience as friendly as any in Europe. The central square is Dam but the younger crowd migrates to Leidseplein.

The essential museums are the Anne Frank House, the Rijksmuseum, which is closed until 2010 except for a display in one wing of its masterworks, featuring Rembrandt (among the best known: “The Night Watch,” “The Guild Members,” “The Jewish Bride”) Vermeer (“The Love Letter,” “The Kitchen Maid”), Jan Steen and Franz Hals. The Van Gogh Museum, which not only has a wonderful Van Gogh collection and very viewer friendly displays and information, but also as well an outstanding special exhibit of Max Beckmann paintings.

Holland and Belgium were both occupied by the Nazis during World War II. With a full history of Jewish life in Holland, including a strong section on the Holocaust with filmed interviews of survivors, the Jewish Historical Museum (Nieuwe Amsterdam 1) is a wonderful complement to the Anne Frank house. As both places make clear, Jews were sent to Westerbrok, a transit camp, from which a train left every week for concentration and death camps.

Major sites include Oude Kirk, a Catholic basilica that began as the first parish church in the 14th century and then became major Protestant church before becoming an exhibition hall. Dating from the late 14th century, Nieuwe Kerk was the second parish church, and its current version dates from the 1650s; reflecting the centrality of the sermon in Protestant churches, its most elegant feature is a wood-craved pulpit. It is still used for coronations and royal weddings.

Amsterdam oscillates within virtually every block from chic to shock; elegant shops and fine restaurants are virtually adjacent to prostitutes displaying themselves in lingerie while sitting in shop windows marked by red lights and to stores selling what in Amsterdam are considered legal recreational drugs. The aforementioned Oude Kirk is adjacent to the red light district, which is active even in the daytime. Our hotel was near an upscale urban neighborhood with upscale housing. Yet even here prostitutes sat in windows. On our fifth day we took a forty-five minute train ride to The Hague, the political center of Holland where the government resides, although Amsterdam is the capitol. We spent 4 wonderful hours at the Mauritshuis, a terrific collection of Dutch masters through the 17th century with world class Rembrandts (“The Anatomy Lesson,” “Portrait of an Elderly Man”) and Vermeers (“Girl with a Pearl Earring”) as well as exceptional paintings by Rubens, Hals, Steen, Hobbema, Van Dyck, Holbein and others. Yet compared to the excitement and energy of Amsterdam, the Hague is vanilla.

One of our days in the Hague was a national holiday celebrating the Monday after Whitsunday—the day the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles—and many buildings were close. We took a substantial walk and saw the historic collection of government buildings known as Binnenhof where the Parliament meets. We also visited the Vredespaleis (The Peace Palace) where the International Court sits. Our next stop Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest city and its fashion center, features splendid baroque and neo-baroque architecture. Our hotel was on Groenplaat, the location of the largest cathedral in the Lowlands and one that is not only beautiful but has four works by Rubens, including “The Raising of the Cross” and “The Descent from the Cross,” both of which show the strong influence of Caravaggio. The Groenplaat is adjacent to Grote Markt, the most elegant square dominated by a stunningly imposing town hall and impressive guildhalls. The most important museum is the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, featuring Van Eyck, Memling, Rubens (“The Adoration of the Magi”) and Van Dyck. While lacking Rembrandt and Vermeer, this museum takes Flemish art into the twentieth century with a strong selection of the modernist James Ensor, among others.

Antwerp has a flourishing and observant Jewish quarter adjacent to the diamond district—am essential part of the world’s diamond industry-- near the elaborate 19th century Central Station. In the area branching out from Pelikaanstraat can be found many Hasidic groups among the mostly orthodox Jewish population and many synagogues worth visiting. Another notable site is Rubens House. To begin our two-night three-day visit to Bruges, we took a half hour canal boat tour to get ourselves grounded in the picturesque, quaint central city. Markt Square—featuring the Bell Tower (Belfort)-- as well as the adjoining Burg Square featuring Stadius-- the old town hall--and its great Gothic room are memorable sights. Much of the original medieval city has undergone several phases of reconstruction and refurbishing. Bruges subscribes to the Mambo Number Five theory of architecture, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, so gothic and baroque intermingle with Romanesque, Renaissance, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and belle époque. But the "more is more" philosophy works here, even when several styles co-exist in the same building.

We continued reveling in early Flemish art with a visit of several hours to the Groeningmuseum—featuring van Eyck’s” Virgin and Child with Canon”--and to the Memling museum (which contains five Memlings and much other contextual material) at the restored 12th century St. Johns Hospital.

The Church of Our Lady contains the only Michelangelo outside Italy, a small masterwork of the Madonna. St. Saviour’s cathedral dates to the 13th century and is an amalgam of styles and decoration, including beautiful stained glass. We happened by chance upon a Carmelite church and monastery, The archivist invited us to see the church’s breathtaking collection of ancient documents, including a thirteenth century letter from the Pope authorizing protection of the Carmelite orders from the jealousy of other monastic orders. Our last stop was Brussels where we stayed three nights before flying home. Brussels is mostly French speaking, especially the Southern part known as Wallonia, and fewer people will respond in English—or know rudimentary English-- than in other cities we visited. Our hotel was in the upper town where most of the museums are, but we made our way to the obligatory and quite dazzling tourist sites in the lower town, especially the Grand Place—the most prominent public square where tourists and locals congregate-- dating back to the middle ages. Major buildings are the Hotel de Ville and the Maison du Roi (House of the King). The architecture includes the characteristic Belgian mélange I mentioned above.

Originally the Lower Town was Flemish speaking and a trade center and the French-speaking aristocracy populated the Upper Town, but that distinction has broken down. A statue of King Leopold is prominently displayed near the Place Royale near the Royal Palace without, of course, any of mention of the horrors he inflicted on the Congo, the subject of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Other impressive buildings include the St Michael and Gudula Cathedral—dating from the 11th century—and the stylish Notre Dame du Sablon church, La Bourse (the stock exchange), the Palais de Justice, the Grand Synagogue, St. Nicholas Church and, perhaps most notably, the elegant Neo-Renaissance Galeries St. Hubert--the grand arcades dating to 1847 and considered the first European shopping arcade. Brussels is punctuated with sightly gardens and parks, and Place du petit Sablon, next to Notre Dame du Sablon, is a fine place for a picnic.

A visit to the Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts concluded our informal course in Flemish art (Highlights: Rubens “The Assumption of the Virgin” among many masterworks, several Memlings and Van Dycks). The admission ticket also includes the remarkable nineteenth and twentieth century Musee d’Art Moderne, which is attached and part of the Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts. We also visited the small Jewish history museum and a synagogue. Keep in mind that as in Holland, most museums are closed in Belgium on Monday.

Dining: All restaurant prices below are based on dinner with service for two and exclude alcohol but include $5 bottled water in Belgium. Bottled water is de rigueur in Belgium where, unlike Holland one cannot ever order tap water, (Beer is cheaper than water. Tipping is not required, although a nominal gratuity of loose change is appreciated.

Holland proved a culinary delight. Our most elegant dinner in Amsterdam was at Borderwijk (Noodermarkyt 1051; $95), known for its innovative and imaginative presentation. Yet perhaps our best Holland dinner was at Maxime (Denneweg 10B) in The Hague, which had a terrific value at 29 Euros per person ($84 for two) for a sophisticated four-course meal that is not only delicious but also beautifully presented.

We twice sampled Rijsstafel, the traditional Indonesian meal where all the courses are put on the table simultaneously. We chose an 11 course version at Kantjil and de Tijger (Spuistraat 291-293; $60). We had another Rijstaffel at De Poentdjak (Kneuterdijk, The Hague, $55),) which was spicier and had more courses but was no better than the one in Amsterdam. We enjoyed inventive small courses—kind of Belgian tapas-- at Lieve Belgisch restaurant (Herengracht 88 1015; $50)

Our premier dinner in Belgium was at Au Bon Coin, the restaurant of the Renaissance hotel where we were staying. Phillippe Lecompte, Executive chef, produced a feast for two featuring Risotto with chanterelles and prawn, followed by filet of lamb over white asparagus, and moelleux of chocolat ($90). At Saint Cantrois (Sint Jacobstraat 53; $60) in Bruges we dined on a marvellous set men, featuring red mullet, duck pate, and chocolate crepes.

We had an excellent mussel dinner in Antwerp at Rooden Hoed (Oude Koornmarkt; $70)—although mussels, a Belgian specialty are of out season and we had Canadian mussels.

Hotels: What we Americans think of as a three star hotel is often given four by the rating authorities in Holland and Belgium and some five star hotels are really more like a good four star.

Our best hotel was the Hilton Antwerp in old shopping center that looked like a Belle Epoque palace. Our room on the Executive floor was enormous and we couldn’t have been treated better. Truly a great hotel is a vacation in itself; it seduces you to spend some part of each day in your room or in the fitness facility and to try the hotel restaurant.

Our second best hotel was the Marriott Renaissance in Brussels but, although we had a fine room on the Marriott Club floor and it had a nice fitness center, it didn’t always seem to have the polish of a true five star luxury hotel until we had the aforementioned dinner at its restaurant. Breakfast lacked the true amenities of a top hotel, namely an eager staff, a capable breakfast chef, fresh juice and fruit, omelets as well as fried eggs to order, and light, flakey, buttery croissants—all of which we had at the Antwerp Hilton.

Well-located near the Central Station, the Golden Tulip Hotel Inntel Amsterdam Centre provided us with a king size bed, and the service was friendly but the hotel does not have a restaurant. Breakfast was quite ordinary—certainly not up to its four stars ---although one plus was that you could squeeze your own fresh juice.

In The Hague we stayed at the four star Eden Babylon hotel conveniently adjacent to the Central Station. Breakfast was not included and, while we had a splendid room on high floor, the hotel was in an uneasy transition from being a Sofitel. In Bruges, we stayed at the Scandic, which because of its location outside the central city cannot be recommended for a traveler without a car or bike. While a purportedly four star hotel and a good value, it was quite basic, especially breakfast.

Exploring Argentina and Brazil: Summer in December

Take Off:
We wanted to visit Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Iguassu Falls, one of the world’s great natural sites. We planned our trip with Jeanne Stone of Freegate Tourism, an agency in the New York area with experience in South America (1-888-373-3428.) We booked reasonably nice hotels, ignoring the canard that “you don’t spend much time in your hotel room.” In fact, most travelers—especially over age 40--spend a good deal of time in the hotel. It is great fun waking up to a sumptuous buffet breakfast, which is included in the price, and it obviates the need for a big lunch. Fine service is also a plus. We like to keep up with world events, and since we are not fluent in Spanish or Portuguese, that means CNN or BBC. We also wanted the convenience of drivers taking us to and from airports.

Buenos Aires:
Once the most prosperous country in South American, Argentina has experienced major economic problems for several years. One of the most European of South American cities, Buenos Aires—a city of nearly 3 million people has a population that is extraordinary diverse with significant Spanish, Italian, British, and Jewish presences. Our Art Deco hotel, the Claridge, was in the older Retiro barrio, near a long pedestrian street called Florida, which offers a vibrant urban street theatre, including mimes, jugglers, musicians, peddlers, and salespeople trying to get you into their shops. Even during daytime, women dress provocatively and one sees the kind of on street intimacy that one finds in Paris.

The legacy of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship thirty years ago still lingers in political rallies at Plaza de Mayo square in front of the Casa Rosada—the Palace of the executive branch of government---where we saw the weekly Monday protest not only on behalf of those who “disappeared” thirty years ago because they opposed the regime. But also the more recent disappearance three months before of someone who testified about what happened thirty years ago.

Tourists will find residents friendly and helpful, although in Spanish speaking Argentina, English is at more of a premium outside the hotel than in Europe. With serious devaluation of the peso five years ago, and a strong dollar relative to the peso—three pesos to one dollar-Argentina is inexpensive for most tourists.

Sites:
Buenos Aires is a city of distinct barrios or neighborhoods. Although the best way to begin is a standard city tour which will cost about five dollars, the way to see most major cities is to walk, and we did a good deal of walking in Buenos Aires.

The beautiful Metropolitan Cathedral in the Plaza de Mayo contains General San Martin’s monument memorializing the father of Argentine independence. The monument also has an honor guard. The cathedral even includes a small Holocaust memorial containing Jewish prayer books found in several camps.

Argentina has a large Jewish population, although it has been sharply reduced from 500, 00 to200, 000 Jews by anti-Semitism fueled by Juan Peron’s pro-Nazi policies, the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, and the economic turmoil of recent years. For Jewish tourists, a must see is Libertad Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Buenos Areas with 200 members. It is quite elegant, with an adjacent small Jewish museum. There is also a small Holocaust museum in Buenos Aires.

We visited the National Art Museum, which has a fine collection of Argentine art on the second floor and European art on the first floor. Although the collections cannot boast the world’s great European paintings, the ninetieth century and, especially, the twentieth century collection are quite fine and there are a few gems within many periods. We also visited the national cemetery, which is famous for elaborate crypts of important people, most notably Evita Peron’s.

We went to a tourist ranch, Fiesta Gaucho Santa Susan, on a day trip where we rode horses--very slowly with a guide leading—ate an Argentine barbecue with multiple meat courses, watched dancers do the tango and various indigenous dances, listened to some singing, and danced a bit ourselves. On that trip we were introduced to maté—a kind of herbal tea—indigenous to Argentina, and the ceremony for drinking it with a common straw; we passed on that challenge to public health.

When one sees a tango exhibition one understands the underlying sensuality of Argentine culture. The tango show at Tortoni, the city’s oldest café and an interesting site in its own right, is worth seeing. It includes a sophisticated history of tango. It is a good value at $10 a person; one can have a casual dinner there before the 8:30 show and still be in bed at a decent hour. Be advised that the Buenos Aires citizens are a nocturnal people who eat dinner at 9 or 10 and do their dancing well past midnight. Another possibility for tango is Café Ideal, which offers tango lessons in afternoon and dancing by proficient locals at night ($5 cover).

Not to miss on another night is an evening walk on the beautiful Plate riverfront, with many new expensive condos being built on the far side. Conclude that with great ice cream at Munchi’s at the beginning of the pedestrian street called Florida.

Brazil:
With a strong influx of African blood due to the slave trade, Brazil’s population is more varied than and more a Rainbow coalition than Buenos Aires. Here the native language is Portuguese, reflecting Brazil’s colonial history. The Brazilian real is worth 2.2 to the dollar and while not in the same bargain league as the Argentine peso, still makes for a good value for Americans. To be sure, Rio is pricier than Buenos Aires, and that is why upscale Brazilians come to Buenos Aires to shop.

Iguassu Falls:
With 275 separate falls combining into the world’s widest waterfall cluster, Iguassu Falls -–the name Iguassu comes from the Guarnani Indian word meaning “great water”--qualifies as one of the world’s great natural sights. The Falls are a not only an amazing visual panorama, with water surging between cliffs and gaps and cascading over rocks in bright sunlight, aggregations of mists hovering over the water, and vast expanses of verdure in the background, but an auditory celebration as the sound of water rushing over rocks creates a symphony. On the Argentine and Brazil sides, we saw a schmorgasborg of splendid birds: cormorants, jays, egrets, snail eagles, anhinga, and toucans and a host of other colorful birds.

A hotel within the Iguassu Park is a splendid complement to the visit to Iguassu Falls because it enables you to have a view of the Falls whenever you wish. We stayed at the four star Tropical das Cataratas , the only hotel inside Iguassu Falls Park on the Brazil side. The Sheraton is the only one within the park on the Argentine side.

During our two night stay, we twice took the walk on the Brazilian side from the hotel to a section of the Falls called Devil’s Throat where the water flows most powerfully over rocks. On the next day, accompanied by our private guide, we went to the Argentine side where we walked to a few different overlooks. Strapped into life jackets and holding on for dear life, we took the tourist boat under the Falls and got drenched—a purposeless but exhilarating adventure. The entire boat excursion included motor rafting in the rapids as well as an educational truck drive through the jungle with an Iguassu Park guide. (On the Argentine side the virtually same boat trip costs about $30 instead of the $70 on the Brazil side)

Rio de Janerio:
Rio—neither Brazil’s capital (Brasilia) nor its largest city (Sao Paulo)--is more exotic than Buenos Aires and spread out more. Its shantytowns or favelas speak to economic disparity.

We had a room on the 33rd floor of Le Meridien Copacabana with a stunning view the famous three-kilometer Copacabana beach located between bordering mountains on each side. The next major beach over is Ipanema. The Copacabana resort area itself is a mélange of expensive and not so expensive hotels and apartments, tourist restaurants, and back streets with a good deal of poverty. With most sightseeing sites closed on Christmas Day, we decided to use that day for a beach holiday.

We took three group tours in Rio. The best was a half-day tour to Sugar Loaf Mountain—reached by cable car—with its magnificent views of the entire city; that tour included an excellent city tour featuring the modern Nova (“new”’) cathedral that draws its inspiration from Mayan pyramids. We took an all day tour to the Imperial City, Petropolis, built by Brazil’s first emperor, Dom Pedro, who admired Napoleon. During the 80 minute drive, we enjoyed the striking scenery, notably rapid changes of topography, ravines, and rain forest verdure. The Imperial Palace, including the emperor’s bejeweled crown and throne, provides insight into 19th century Brazil. Our third half-day tour took us to the enormous statue---90 feet high-- of Christ the Redeemer on the Corcovado hill.

We found wonderful restaurants in Rio, but for lunch food from local bakeries is a good choice for the budget-minded or those who want a quick bite. Ice cream is inexpensive—often less than a dollar for a generous cup or cone-- and pervasive.

Travel Advice
Our trip exceeded expectations and whetted our appetite for more South America. Temperatures in December in Brazil and Argentina may be in the high 90s Fahrenheit during the day. Mornings are the best beach time to beat the crowds and be comfortable. While afternoon showers did on occasion cut the humidity, mid-day is a good time for a siesta on beach days in Rio. Be especially vigilant in both cities for predatory pickpockets; bring no jewelry and a very inexpensive watch. Be advised that Tam airlines—a second echelon airline in terms of food and service--was functioning spasmodically, in part due to an air controllers’ slow down. But plan for delays since South American time is less punctual that US time.

One downside to visiting Brazil is the $100 visa fee in retaliation for our charging a visa fee to Brazilians. A related problem is that one either has to appear in person at a Brazilian consulate in the US or hire a visa service at $75 a person.

If you go:
Restaurant recommendations (price for a couple includes one glass of wine for each).

Note: Portions are often enormous and, while there is a cover charge at many restaurants, there is no extra charge for sharing a dinner entrée. Argentina is the most carnivorous country I have ever visited (and Brazil is not far behind). I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found steak ice cream on a desert menu or an ice cream shop. Meat dishes were even available at the hotel breakfast buffet.

Hotel Recommendations:

Buenos Aires: Claridge. Refurbished older hotel but quite classy. The hotel has a gym, a small outdoor pool, and an excellent breakfast. The staff was unusually helpful to tourists whose Spanish was limited to a few words. Free wireless on the 10th floor and the fitness lounge.

Iguassu: Tropical das Cataratas. An old hotel without a gym, although it has a fine outdoor pool. The hotel offered a pool barbecue each night for about $24 but we preferred sit down dinners at the a la carte restaurant overlooking the Falls; the dinners were better than serviceable, and the magnificent view was a wonderful accompaniment. We experienced two power failures in our brief visit, and there is a charge for computer use. Breakfast was decent.

Rio de Janeiro: Le Meredien. Ocean view is essential. Quite sumptuous buffet breakfast with a chef making omelets, waffles, and fried eggs. The hotel has a small fitness facility and its own pool. The hotel charges exorbitantly for Internet.

Exploring Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti: Kangeroos, Wombats, and Koala Bears amidst Stunning Scenery

Australia and New Zealand are easy countries to visit because the host countries speak English and are friendly to all visitors, and especially Americans whom they credit with defending them successfully in World War II against a possible Japanese invasion. They are also countries with historical narratives of how the Europeans displaced the original settlers. Frequent encounters with nomadic young Americans who take a year off after university or a year or two sabbatical from work and who become temporary waiters, cooks and gardeners also give travelers a sense that they are not far from home.

In my only prior visit to Australia in 1993, I had given several lectures in Sydney, Canberra (the capital) and Melbourne and stayed about three weeks. That the year before I met Marcia Jacobson, my second wife, and her desire to see the South Pacific was matched by my desire to return, especially to Sydney, and to visit New Zealand for the first time. As on my last trip we arrived in the later part of Australia summer and, on the early legs of our trip, had some hot weather in Sydney and some hot and muggy weather in Cairns. We began our travels with Air Tahiti’s 23-hour flight (to Sydney. Because the flight had only 60 passengers to Tahiti we had a good deal of sleeping space during the thirteen hour fifteen minute flight; after little more than an hour transit we changed plans and began the 8 hour second leg to Sydney. Except for the food, which was the usual economy, dining experience that one has come to expect even on flights of epic length, the service and the comfort level on the newish planes of Air Tahiti Nui was above average and each seat had its own TV. Crossing the International Dateline, we left 5:15 pm Saturday and arrived exhausted at 7:30 am Monday. Since for me sleeping and not sleeping on a plane have similar effects in terms of rest, I subscribe to the take a nap theory on arrival rather than the gut it out to bedtime theory. We took something like 14 flights on Air Tahiti, Quantas, and Air New Zealand and the service was better and the flights prompter than on domestic carriers in our recent experience.

Overview

Australians are unusually friendly and helpful. They are eager to have you enjoy their country. They are proud of those who excel beyond their borders. For example, their focus on the Academy awards was on their own film figures like Ang Lee (?), whom they consider one of their own. Many are doubtful about American foreign policy and its embrace by its current conservative government (paradoxically, the conservative party is the Liberal party). I spoke to a Labor senator from Tasmania who feels that the government’s economic policy is too stringent in terms of cutting back overtime and extra pay on weekends in both the public and private sectors. Labor is probably to the left of much of the American Democratic party. A continuing issue is the plight of the Aborigines, the original inhabitants, and how to narrow the gap between their standard of living and the Europeans, Asians, and other immigrants and address the social problems of a minority culture without destroying the indigenous culture.

Sydney

I have a penchant for cities on the water—San Francisco, Vancouver, Barcelona. The glory of Sydney, a prosperous city of more than 4000000 people is its location on the South Pacific. Australia’s summer takes places in the months of our winter, although Sydney never gets cold by Northeastern standards.

The morning sun glistening on the water with the statuesque Harbor Bridge and the Sydney Opera House, a wonder of contemporary architecture, in the background, is one of the great urban vistas. The beautiful surf of Bondi beach compares with public beaches anywhere. When touched by a bright sun, the juxtaposition of sandstone Victorian architecture and harbor vistas is unforgettable. I highly recommend one of the guided Harbor Cruises that are offered by a number of companies, including the Sydney Ferries at Circular Key. The “guide” is an audio over a loudspeaker system but seeing Sydney from the water gives a sense of what Sydney has been and is now.

But it is the magnificence of Sydney brilliantly and gorgeously lit up at night that arouses the senses and lingers in our memory. With a splendid cruise ship sitting in the harbor and the city lights on both sides, what can compare to a late summer walk—along the Circular Quay with its seaside restaurants to Opera House and the and the Harbour Bridge. One thinks of Hong Kong and Shanghai, but Sydney’s is a more tactile beauty? Playing at the opera was an innovative physically and visually pleasing new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, one supplemented by an Australian theatre company Legs on (and?) the Wall, a company clearly influenced by Cirque Soleil. An Architectural wonder opened in 1973, the Opera House was designed by architect Jern Utzon and later somewhat refurbished With a theatrical and convert series, it is the center of Sydney’s cultural life although there are many other activities, including the annual Gay festival when hundreds of thousands gays gather from around the world for a giant party in February, a party I saw during my first visit 13 years ago.

Sydney’s architecture is a combination of 19th century sandstone and contemporary. Many of the sites are centrally located. One important sight is the 1898 sandstone Queen Victoria Building—now the site of expensive shops, particularly the upper floors-- which was once a railroad station. Within is a two ton jade coach made in China and the immense Royal Clock that chimes from 9am to 9pm with four separate tableaux.

Sydney has a wonderful zoo, which I visited on my previous trip. As part of a day drive to the Blue Mountains with one of my former graduate students, we stopped at Featherdale Wildlife Park to see Wombats, Kangaroos, Wallabies, Koalas, Fairy Penguins, Dingos, and other assorted creatures. In the Blue Mountains, we enjoyed some spectacular views at Winchester Falls and the Three Sisters mountain Peak.

Melbourne

Melbourne is a handsome city with beautiful gardens, the Yarra River, and a population of about 3.5 million and it is more cosmopolitan and diverse than it was during my last visit. We were there as the Commonwealth Games began and the Queen arrived. Among the sites I have enjoyed in two visits are the neo-gothic St. Patrick’s cathedral, Fitzroy Gardens, the King’s Domain Gardens featuring the moving Shrine of Remembrance memorial to Australian war dead, and the impressive and stately nineteenth century architecture in buildings such as State Houses of Parliament, the Town Hall, and imposing State Library—with a fine exhibit about the history of Australia--and the Victorian Arts Centre which is the counterpart of the Sydney Opera house in terms of hosting major performances of ballet, classical music, and opera. We also were fortunate enough to see a parade celebrating the opening of the Commonwealth games. Also going on was Melbourne’s local festival day called Moomba, and on March 13th, Australia’s Labor Day, a national Holiday.

Cairns:

The flight from Sydney to Cairns takes 2 and ½ hours. Cairns is the setting for journeys to Great Barrier Reef. It is a pleasant place whose main activity is tourism and where prices are heavily inflated for less than extraordinary experiences. A nice activity is a walk on the esplanade, which overlooks an enormous free swimming pool to compensate for the inability to swim in the estuary due to jellyfish, one of which stung me ion Green Island. Our days were punctuated by rain showers of various length which is a feature of March, part of the rain season.

I advise a tour to an island or pontoon closer to the Great Barrier Reef rather than to Green Island, where tour took us. Were it not for a trip on a glass bottom boat where we saw some beautiful coral reef, the trip to Green Island would have been a complete rather than a partial dud. The promised snorkeling from the shore was disappointing and the island is basically a tourist amusement park. Most tours take their clients to a pontoon on the reef from which they can snorkel and use an underwater observatory.

From Cairns, we bought a train trip on an old-fashioned train called Kuranda Scenic Railway that winds its way up the mountain to the small tourist village of Kuranda and took the Sky Train back over the rain forest for a pricey 99 Australian. One can from there go to a native village, but we spent out time enjoying arts and artifacts, some Aboriginal and at a small zoo called the Kohola Gardens where Marcia had her picture taken holding a Kohala bear and we fed kangaroos and Wallabies, one of which was carrying a joey which periodically came out of the mother’s pouch for a look around. Kuranda also has a butterfly sanctuary, Venom zoo, and Bird World.

Australian Museums

The most important art museum in Sydney is the Art Gallery of New South Wales which had a fine exhibit entitled Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, an exhibit which by American blockbuster standards was rather small, containing just one painting per artist, but which nonetheless included word class works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Velasquez. The permanent collection is somewhat spotty in terms of European masterworks, but Asian holdings from Chinese and Japanese to Southeast India on display are quite wonderful and are displayed impressively with information on the walls and on large individual cards that can be borrowed while browsing. In Sydney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, located next to the Circular Quay, seemed on both visits 13 years apart, somewhat idiosyncratic and hardly viewer friendly to those not steeped in such art. With that codicil, I enjoyed an exhibit of selected works from the collection, even though I did not think the curator was building an audience with his mode of exhibiting the works and the obscure narrative that he chose to accompany the exhibit in lieu of real contextual information.

Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria had a wonderful exhibit of the 19th century French impressionist Pissarro. Its European holdings have some highlights, including a nice Rembrandt, and it has fine Asian holdings.

Many museums are free but charge for the special exhibitions, in the Pissarro case about $11 American and $4 more for an excellent audio.

Australian Hotels and Food

Our Sydney hotel was the recently renovated Sofitel Wentworth, a 400-room hotel used by tourist groups and business travelers. Our first standard room had a stall shower and lacked a bathtub, but we moved to one more to our liking. One rule: Never accept the first room offered. The new room was reasonably satisfactory but hardly elegant for a supposed five star hotel. It did have the important plus of adequate lighting for reading, but the room—and the TV--were small and service unsteady. The use of a gym cost $10 and it did not provide CNN—a much better foreign product than its American counterpart-- on the TV which I, as someone who follows the news, considers a major minus which can be replaced by CNBC. Decoupling is very much part of the modern hotel business, and guest are charged for almost anything. A modest bottle of Evian at the minibar was $8 in Australian dollars (which recently has been fluctuating between .75 and .80 of a dollar).

Our Cairns hotel, the Oasis, is a modest nondescript 1950ish resort with a large swimming pool and close to the esplanade, but finally is a tourist hotel without any distinguishing style. Our Melbourne hotel was a Radisson a bit off the town center but with good service and nicely appointed rooms as well as CNN and complimentary use of the internet, although not complimentary hot wiring. The breakfast was one of the poorest we have had—tasteless croissants, few breads, no rolls-- on nine tours with a variety of companies and scores of trips on our own.

Experienced travelers who use tours either for exotic venues or, as in this case, to avoid the time-consuming activity of planning a long trip, know that tour guests are the hotel’s orphans. Contrary to what one might expect, a guest booking individually often has less leverage in terms of room location, amenities, and upgrades.

Australian—and New Zealand-- restaurants serve large portions and often splitting an entry while also ordering one appetizer, a side dish and/or desert worked well for us. Ethnic food is often a good choice in both Sydney and Melbourne. Dinner in Sydney’s Chinatown is a good value and a chance to see one of its ethnic enclaves. Any of the restaurants on Dixon Street or Sussex street is a good value, whether ordering their basic tourist dinner at 12 US or a la carte. In Melbourne’s Chinatown we sampled Malay restaurant called Banana Palm and had a particularly delicious duck dish. We were less successful at a local Greek Restaurant in Sydney, chosen illogically on the basis of my memory of great Greek food in Melbourne 13 years ago. In Cairns, we ate a local fish called Barramundi at Barnacle Bill’s Seafood—restaurant recommended by locals and guidebooks where the prices were reasonable considering the quality and where Bill himself welcomes you----but restaurants in the esplanade, including Barnacle Bill’s, were selling clawless lobsters for 105 Australian dollars and mud crabs for 79.

In both New Zealand and Australia, deserts and breads are rarely up to American or European standards, even at the pricier restaurants. Moreover, restaurants consider bread a side dish and charge accordingly. Extra cups of coffee are also charged in both countries.

Australians are helpful and generous people and want you to like them and their country. Casual acquaintances are hospitable and will offer to drive you places, make phone calls give you lifts and help make arrangements. They enjoy speaking to strangers and are unusually forthcoming in sharing their lives. They love their sports teams, a quality accentuated by the oncoming Commonwealth exam.

NEW ZEALAND

Overview

New Zealand is less part of what I call the International political than Australia, and much less part of the international cultural conversation than Melbourne or, especially, Sydney. But the scenery is magnificent and the country still relatively unspoiled for tourists.

Putting far less than its resources than many nations into armaments and led by a woman prime minister, New Zealand has about 4 million people, five provinces in each of the two major islands. Its people are among the most affable and welcoming in the world. Auckland in the North Island is the largest city with a population of about 1.3 million. There are 120 members of Parliament--which convenes in Wellington, the capital-- of which 100 are elected; for every five elected another is added.

The major industries are sheep and diary farming--with the latter becoming more dominant—with beef cattle playing an increasing role. New Zealand is suffering from emigration to Australia whose average income is 32 per cent higher. Meat and wool prices are down and farm income have been hammered. On the other hand, with housing prices soaring, household net worth is up over 50 per cent in the last three years.

Sports are very important---especially cricket, rugby, and golf. New Zealanders—who all themselves Kiwi after the flightless bird that `is indigenous to any place else—are proud of their national teams and Olympic and Commonwealth games. The South Island was quite cool, in the forties and fifties Fahrenheit. We bought a few beautiful wool sweaters and regularly enjoyed terrific ice cream and the beauty of its public gardens.

Christchurch and Queenstown

In New Zealand we were outsourced to a company called Pan Pacific. Our nine hour form Christchurch to Queenstown bus ride included some compelling but stark scenery once we reached the mountains—the maximum height was about 3000 feet-- after our lunch in stop Omarama. Winding our way through the heights, we didn’t see much vegetation in the high areas.

We arrived late at night in Christchurch on South Island and had only one full day before leaving by bus for three nights in which we used Queenstown as our base. With a population of about 400,000 Christchurch is the largest city of South Island and Canterbury’s provincial capital, but it is quiet and quaint city. We especially enjoyed the Botanical Gardens and kayaking on the Avon, the river running through Christchurch. Our explorations included Christchurch (Anglican) Cathedral and the lively area in front of the Cathedral known as Cathedral Square where vendors and chess games get the attention of visitors. We visited the Canterbury Museum that has a strong historical collection focusing on the region and the Arts Center, a complex of exhibits—one on the late Nobel Laureate in chemistry, Ernest Rutherford-- and shops located in the old Gothic revival buildings of the University of Canterbury. Our personal favorite was the modern building housing the Christchurch Art Gallery, a fine regional museum featuring New Zealand and European art. Queenstown overlooks Lake Wakatipu, backed by the stately Remarkables mountain range. The scenery recalls the paintings Adirondacks and the sublimity of the Hudson River school.Queenstown is a resort community dependent on tourist trade. Indeed, it is a kind of New Zealand Disneyland offering amusements, excursions, outdoor activities, and daredevil sports like bungee jumping. By New Zealand and Australian standards Queenstown can be pricey, although we found the restaurants excellent. On our full day we took the gondola up the mountain to see the view of the city, spent a few hours at the privately owned Kiwi Birdlife Park (about $18US)—a bird zoo with some Maori cultural sites where we saw 3 kiwis—nocturnal flightless and featherless bird which lay enormous eggs in relation to their size—and a tuatara, an indigenous reptile. We also walked in the Queenstown’s botanical gardens.

From Queenstown took an all day round trip via bus to Milford Sound where we took a boat cruise to see fiord overlooking the mouth of the Tasman Sea. In the boat and bus we saw the trip’s most spectacular scenery in the form of the magnificent topography—extraordinarily steep mountains, the Cleddau River chasm, impressive waterfalls-- of the 3 million acre Fiordland National Park that includes some of the Southern Alps.

We also spent one night on a farm visit in Fairlie. Several families hosted groups of about four on their family farm for dinner, breakfast, and an overnight. Our hosts Jenny and Steve Crone were an interesting couple in their late forties whose large farm of nearly 2000 acres was home to 2500 sheep and 200 cows. We learned a good deal about farming life and a little something about political attitudes. While the food was more homespun than gourmet, we thought—and so did many of our fellow travelers--that the stay was a trip highlight.

Auckland feels more like an urban city than the rest of New Zealand. Its harbors are its commercial and aesthetic lifeline. It has wonderful vistas from several perspectives, including Mount Eden and Westhaven marina. We enjoyed two excellent museums, the Auckland Art Gallery, which featured an exhibit entitled “Art & the 60s” originating in Tate Britain, and the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The latter, despite its limited title, has a scintillating Maori exhibit as well as a live show several times a day and several other exceptional exhibits including a small but moving one of the Holocaust and survivors who emigrated to New Zealand.

New Zealand Hotels and Food

While the Carleton hotel in Auckland was quite dine, our other New Zealand hotels were the typical middle price tourist hotels. comfortable but hardly elegant. The Novotel Garden in Queenstown had reasonably nice rooms and CNNN but has neither air-conditioning nor a gym; I imagine on hot days it would be uncomfortable. Novotel is the next level of the French owned Accor group of which Sofitel is the flagship. Our Christchurch hotel, the Corthorne Durham, had a more modest breakfast, but did have a serviceable fitness facility.

We hade some fine meals in New Zealand. Most notable was Cin Cin on Quay which justifiably advertises itself as providing “cutting edge cuisine” and features elaborate preparations of seafood as well as other notable dishes. In Christchurch, We had a wonderful dinner featuring lamb dishes at a French restaurant Le Bon Bolli near Cathedral Square perhaps the best of the trip. My Queenstown recommendations include in order of rising price: Cow (delicious designer pizza and pasta, Dux Lux (eclectic, including delicious Thai seafood curry and Boardwalk (upscale, fine rack of lamb). Bread in New Zealand was less than wonderful, with Boardwalk’s the best. We had a fine steak dinner at Tony’s Lorne Street in Auckland.

The Tour

We bought a 22-day package from Smartours. We chose this tour because dinners were not included and we had many optional days. While it added to the cost, I found the lack of group dinners a major plus. We went our own way spending time with friends in Sydney, making our own arrangements on optional days, and sampling the local cuisine at dinner. Like most tours, this one included an ample if unexciting breakfast that varied from the barely adequate to quite respectable.

This tour worked because most of the travelers were reasonably tolerant people. Our fellow travelers, including many widows, were not the most traveled group that we have met on tours; nor were they the youngest. Some were very anxious about bonding; others were more independent and pursued their own agenda. At 64 we were probably at or slightly below the mean in age. For a tour group made up of diverse personalities with different backgrounds, the group—or most of it--was relatively tolerant of one another and generally good-natured, although groups break into cliques. When touring with a group, one spends more time with tour members than one spends with family members—and sometimes with close friends--within a calendar year.

Smartours used to include more day trips, but now seems to charge for most of them as optionals on so-called “leisure days.” Their optional are often excursions into the countryside or various meals that used to be part of the included trip. But museums and musical and cultural events were omitted from the itinerary, both included and optional, and I considered this a major problem. The best of our tours tell a story about a civilization —India, Egypt, China, Vietnam and Cambodia—and this tour lacked an ongoing narrative about history and culture. This particular trip neglected museums and did not arrange any cultural events, such as an optional trip to the Sydney opera to see a performance.

Smartours takes a package of x days and collapses into x minus three days that creates good value and a fast pace. We flew 13 segments, although some were because our Qantas flights seem to begin and end in Sydney and our Air New Zealand flight between Auckland and Tahiti stopped in the Cook Islands at Raretonga.

Smartours included a few irrational travel plans—flying to Melbourne from Cairns via Sydney and to Melbourne to Christchurch via Sydney. Both these flights--only two days apart--killed lots of time that could have been spent in more profitable endeavors. The explanation, I am virtually sure, is that Smartours gets a better price that way since it minimizes one-way flight. Indeed, the answer to such questions on tours is, “Follow the Money.”

Arriving on early on a Monday morning when occupancy is low the tour company might have been able to arrange for rooms to be ready, but this company is not called Smartours for nothing. My wife felt that the tour was cruel and unusual punishment.

Instead of taking us to our hotel for a nap, we were taken on a four-hour city tour as we made our way from the airport to the hotel. Smartours is the name of a very smart tour company that combines two bus rides—the transit to hotel with a city tour that gave us a quick overview and a few photo ops and ended with an hour for lunch at Bondi beach.

Bus trips on tours mean the tour guide-- and on the several obligatory long bus days in New Zealand the bus driver-- have a captive audience to speak incessantly for hours disrupting reading, sleeping, and conversation. It is as if instead of getting a set time of 75 minutes twice a week, I would have 9 hours to speak about whatever came into my head instead of focusing on my subject. Far two few minutes on the bus are devoted to the political system, the health system of the educational system. Most passengers are so bored with bad jokes and information that could be digested into one fiftieth of the words that they fall sleep rather than, as I restrain myself from doing, begging for quiet. Bus trips also include shopping opportunities at shops where the guides and bus drivers get a percentage of sales; we bought some wool New Zealand sweaters not far from Christchurch at a shop called the Tin Shed.

Diana Green, our fifty-six year old guide, is a heavy set, reasonably competent if on occasion semi-organized women who has a positive attitude but when under stress had bad disposition. This is not a lucrative field and usually draws upon those living in the countries visited. She toes the party line and tells us how great the trip’s value is and how wonderful hotels are, whether they are or not. Her mother was an actress and she enjoys performing songs and poems on the bus, sometimes when quiet might have been preferred. She characteristically raves about every hotel, restaurant, shop along the bus route, and bus driver. She lives in the land of hyperbole. She actually described a bathroom stop on the way to Milford Pond as having ‘the best toilets along the road in New Zealand.” I thought, maybe the world.

After a somewhat hectic sightseeing journey, I often enjoy a few more casual days. What could be a more splendid coda than a few days in the South Pacific in two of the islands in the French Polynesian island group of Tahiti, especially given my interest in Gauguin! An added benefit was the interruption of what would have been with a change in LA a 24-hour flight home from Auckland to New York. We stayed one night in a the Intercontinental hotel in Papeete before taking a ferry to the Intercontinental resort in Moorea where we stayed a few nights and enjoyed swimming, the hotel’s dolphin and sea turtles areas, kayaking and glorious ocean and lagoon views punctuated by greenery and mountains.

IF YOU GO:

Restaurants: Chinatown in Sydney and Melbourne Cairns: Barnacle Bill’s (103 The Esplanade0 Christ Church: Le Bon Bolli (Montreal and Worcester streets) Queenstown: Cow (Cow Lane), Dux Lux (14 Church St.), Boardwalk (Steamer Wharf) Auckland: Cin Cin on the Quay (99 Quay St.), Tony’s (Lorne Street)

Exploring Germany: Sites, Sounds, History

Returning to Germany gave me an opportunity to explore my family heritage and my current interests. All my great-grandparents were born in central Europe and at least two and perhaps three in what is now Germany. While I have no direct knowledge of family lost in the Holocaust, the probability of some relatives suffering and dying in concentration and death camps is very great. Many Jews named Schwarz from Essen, the city of my father’s family, perished in the Holocaust.

In 1961-2 during a Junior Year Abroad, I had visited Munich and West Berlin and had a glimpse of East Berlin and East Germany while taking a train to Warsaw and Moscow. In that year when I first discovered my love of traveling, I crisscrossed Germany in a Renault Dauphin I bought and saw several smaller cities, including Aachen and Lubeck. I spent more time then talking with and learning from other students rather than visiting museums and going to concerts. Despite our having traveled quite widely in Europe and Asia, my wife, Marcia Jacobson, and I had spent only a day long layover in Frankfurt in a 1995 trip, a layover which gave us an opportunity to explore that city’s Roman ruins and contemporary art museum.

Twentieth century history speaks more loudly in contemporary Germany than in most European venues. Travelers to Germany will complement their experience by knowing a bit about the period after World War I and the era of World War II--especially Germany’s rebirth after Nazism, the Holocaust, and ignominious defeat-- and the post war division between West Germany, originally controlled after the war by the USA, Great Britain, and France (whom the allies pretended for Cold War reasons was a victor in the War) and the Soviet controlled East Germany (known as the GDR or German Democratic Republic) from 1945 to 1989.

West Germany played an important role in developing the European Economic Community and in the Post-War European economic and cultural rebirth. The fall in 1989 of the Berlin Wall in 1989 transformed Germany culturally and geographically into a central European country as well as Western country. We came to understand something of the opportunities and complexities resulting from the reunification of Germany, including new freedom of expression and democracy for the East. But we also learned of the difficult challenges in the East resulting from the need for former East Germans to find one own way now without the Communist system shaping their lives from cradle to grave.

The sun rarely shines in December and, although the bright lights decorating streets and hotels and the legendary Christmas markets gave cities a festive atmosphere, an argument could be made for going when the weather is more likely to be better. Yet, while for many people the 30-40 degree temperatures we found in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich and an occasional flurry might seem cold, for us upstate New Yorkers the weather was rather pleasant. An advantage of Europe in winter is not only lower prices, but also the paucity of tourists at museums and major sites. Throughout the year, Germany is not nearly as expensive as Great Britain, France, Ireland or Italy. The art museums and classical music---concerts, opera, and ballet—are wonderful and reasonably priced. Often good tickets can be had for $20 or so. When the theatres are not full, patrons in rear rows can move closer to the stage.

Berlin
Berlin is a walking city and our proximity to major sights and museums was a major plus. On our first morning, we took a walk on Unter den Linden to the nearby Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag. Approaching the Brandenburg gate, I expected to remember my prior visit until I realized I was approaching this time from the former East Berlin side. On another day we walked to Potsdamer Platz and saw the remnants of the wall that used to divide Germany. Once the heart of the city, but destroyed by Allied bombs, Potsdamer Platz was then divided by the wall, but since the 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell it has been rebuilt and is now a thriving commercial section.

At our first stop, Berlin, my wife and I stayed at the well-located Westin Grand Hotel on Friedrichstrasse—the city’s most glamorous street with stores such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci. The hotel and the fashionable shops on Friedrichstrasse--which crosses into the old West Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie-- are located in the former East Berlin, which came alive after the fall of the wall. We stayed at quite nice hotels while paying relatively modest prices. Always keep in mind that directly negotiating with a hotel abroad eliminates commissions for several intermediaries and that negotiating months in advance increases your leverage. Often you can do better that way than on the various discount hotel sites that often require instant payment, allow no changes in dates and exclude an ample breakfast, which can be convenient and fun. For example, included in the 136 euro price at the Berlin Westin was an elegant buffet breakfast-- a la carte it is 23 euros per person-- with a chef making omelets and complimentary champagne an option for those who wish their breakfast to include a festive note and/or for those who imbibe early. Breakfasts were quite impressive, with a wide assortment of breads, cheeses, cold fish, and meats. But the trick of “eggs over easy--and preserving the soft yolk-- remained a mystery to the egg chef as it has in so many other European hotels.

We spent six nights at the Berlin Westin Grand. Our first room was quite nice, but hardly sumptuous for a five star hotel. The hotel has 358 rooms of which 35 are suites. We had the relatively small standing TV typical of an ordinary European hotel. On the other hand, the common areas were quite elegant, particularly the large curving staircase and outsize chandelier, and the entire building was spectacularly lit inside and outside for the holiday season. Not included were the International Herald Tribune, wireless service for my computer, or complimentary bottled water—all of which one might expect at a five star property. We not only didn’t get CNN, which as most travelers know is much better abroad than at home and essential for those who wish to follow USA news, but nearly all the stations are in German. While a few light bulbs were burned out and the electric outlet on the desk was not working, the desire to please guests was strong and that took the form of excellent service, including the niceties of evening turndown service with chocolate at bedside and as well as complimentary shoe shines.

The second three nights we moved to a renovated version of the same room—one with a built in flat screen TV, a headboard, and two single beds pushed together—the usual European version of a king-size bed. Both rooms were hardly more elegant than a respectable American hotel and both rooms were on the less desirable lower floors.

My overall impression of the Berlin Grand Westin is that it is quite nice, but not really in what I think of as in the luxurious category that I have occasionally been fortunate to enjoy in such places as Hong Kong. The Westins are part of the Starwood chain that also owns the Sheratons. The service at times lacks the special graciousness one associates with truly world-class hotels. The Reservations Manager was particularly abrasive and scolding with a well-meaning guest who had a minor misunderstanding—resulting from another staff member speaking limited English-- that should have been dealt with in a courteous and forthcoming way.

We arrived in Berlin on Thursday, the day several museums are open to 10:00 pm with free admission after 6:00 pm. Thus we spent the first day at the museum complex called the Pergamonmuseum and the Egyptian Museum, both of which are on Museum Island. One ticket covers both if one goes, as we did, before the 6 o’clock jubilee of free tickets. The Egyptian museum—one of the world’s great collections of Egyptian cultural material, including the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti--was destroyed in WWII but is now located n the Old National Gallery. It will eventually have a new home where it can display far more of its collection. The Pergamonmuseum includes a fabulous collection of classical antiquities, the most notable of which is the Pergamon Altar dating from the second century BC and including a magnificent frieze. The Pergamon also includes important collections of Islamic Art and of Ancient Near Eastern Art. What makes the aforementioned museums even better are the wonderful audio guides in English.

Our visit also enabled me to pursue my lifelong fascination with Picasso, and I spent many glorious hours at a magnificent temporary exhibit entitled “The Private Picasso” at the Neue National Gallery, designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and completed in 1968. Most of the works in the exhibit came from the extensive Picasso collection in Musee Picasso in Paris, but the latter does not have space to display its entire collection at once. Nor does it usually stress, in its presentation as the Berlin exhibit did, the biographical aspect of Picasso’s work.

We spent the better part of another day looking at Old Masters at the Gemaldegalerie, which contains a wonderful European collection through the 18th century. In addition to spectacular examples of major German figures such as Durer, Cranach and Holbein, this museum features masterworks by Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer. One minor disappointment was that a special exhibit on early Renaissance painting lacked English audio or translations of written material Since English has become the international language—hardly the case when I first visited Europe 45 years ago or when I returned over the next three decades—I found this surprising. The apologetic curator told me that this was the result of budget constraints, but he assured me that this would soon be corrected.

During our Berlin stay, we also visited the National Museum on Museum Island; this museum features late and nineteenth German artists, especially David Friedrich, although it also includes a few galleries of French nineteenth century painting. This museum also had special exhibits on both Rodin—mostly photographs of his work—and f the twentieth century German painter Max Beckmann. While the permanent collection had an English audio, the special exhibits lacked either an English audio or translations of accompanying written material.

We saw a strong temporary exhibit on German immigration at the Exhibition Hall of the German Historical Museum—designed by I.M. Pei—to complement the reconstruction of the older historical museum on the same site. The exhibit emphasized implicitly and explicitly that Germany, like the United States, has long been a country of immigrants. We also saw the Berliner Dom—the great Protestant Cathedral—with its somewhat overstated baroque interior. That nearly every major museum and the aforementioned church are on the old East Berlin side allows one to see the cultural fissure that the wall created for West Berliners.

When one thinks of Germany one thinks particularly of music. Berlin offers a feast of alternatives with three opera houses—including the Staatskapelle Berlin, the orchestra of the Berlin’s major opera, directed by Daniel Barenboim--and outstanding concerts by other world-class artists. We saw an imaginatively staged La Boheme sung in German at the Berlin Comic Opera (komishe oper Berlin), although the Puccini opera is hardly comic. We also heard Pinchus Zuckerman as a soloist, playing both violin and viola with the Staatskapelle Berlin which he conducted. The concert was at the magnificent modern Philharmonie, with 2500 seats and enviable acoustics. For both events, we had no trouble getting tickets upon our arrival and we saw some empty seats.

Jewish Sites in Berlin:
Germany is attentive to its role in the Holocaust and German students are required to learn about Germany’s Jewish heritage. On the site of the Neue Synagogue, once the center of German Jewry that had seating for 3200 worshippers, the Germans have rebuilt the exterior dome and three rooms and turned these rooms into a small museum of Berlin Jewry focusing on the role of the synagogue in Berlin life. We also visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which is housed in a new postmodernist building designed by Daniel Libeskind as both am eloquent testimony and memorial to German-Jewish life. Its with narrow empty spaces represent Memory Voids. This large museum—visited by 700,000 people per year, including a great many German students-- stresses German-Jewish life since the Middle Ages and most of the exhibits have English translations.

In 2005 an impressive Holocaust memorial intelligently designed by Peter Eisenman opened in Berlin. Its English title “The Memorial To the Murdered Jews of Europe” hardly does justice to the integrity of the presentation and scholarship. Different sized concrete rectangles represent both the impersonality of unmarked memorial stones and of concentration camps. What is modestly called the “Information Center” is really a substantial Holocaust museum. The latter efficiently and succinctly presents the history of the Holocaust without pulling any punches about Germany’s role. The impeccable English translations and accompanying English audio materials make the entire exhibit accessible to an American audience. Most moving are individual dairies and family histories. Since Holocaust Studies is one of my academic fields, I have visited a fair share of these memorials and I found this one among the most effective in presenting factual material in a historical context. Jews, like me, whose have been in the US or other countries for a number of generations can look up family names in the database of Yad Vashem—the Holocaust museum and research facility in Jerusalem—that is available at the Memorial and speculate on how many are distant relatives. Looking up Schwarz from Essen and finding quite a number of names was a moving experience, although I cannot pinpoint which were my relatives.

Dresden:
After taking a scheduled two hour train ride to Dresden in the former GDR, we stayed at the Westin Bellevue in Dresden—cost about $130 per night with breakfast-- for our two nights. From our hotel we had a view of the baroque silhouette that makes Dresden the consensus view as Germany’s most attractive city. Our room and the exercise facility were quite similar to those at the Berlin Westin, although we did have CNN on our TV. But our breakfast was less sumptuous.

While close to the main sites, the walk over Augustus Bridge to the ancient city was a little daunting in the evening because in Dresden we encountered cold, rainy weather. On our first night we returned to the hotel for a dinner and a Las Vegas type show that had played successfully in Berlin for seven years. Few in the audience could understand lyrics from American pop music, but that didn’t stop them from being overwhelmingly enthusiastic. For a dinner served to a hundred guests the quality was quite high.

On our second night we saw the Dresden Ballet’s presentation of Ludwig Minkus’s “Don Quixote” at its baroque Semperoper opera house, rebuilt by the GDR. Severely bombed by the allies at the end of World War II, culturally isolated during the Soviet domination of East Germany, and the victim of a serious flood within the last few years, Dresden has had its share of twentieth century traumas. With its striking baroque architecture at is cultural center and its location on the Elbe, Dresden recalls Prague as a quaint river city.

Dresden is relatively prosperous but the former East Germany has a much higher unemployment rate than the West, particularly in rural areas, and many young people find jobs in the former West Germany. It is noticeable that most service jobs in the hotels and restaurants we visited are held, not by recent immigrants, but young Germans whose families have lived in Germany for generations.

Dresden’s great sights include some memorable churches—the Catholic Hofkirche and the rebuilt Protestant Frauenkirche—a well as the Old Masters Gallery (Gemaldegallerie) which houses one of the great collections in Europe, including Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and which had a fascinating and brilliantly organized special exhibit of Spanish art: Goya, Velasquez, El Greco. The Nazis destroyed the old baroque synagogue but a new modern structure with a congregation of 90 per cent Russian immigrants has been built in its place.

Munich:
We took a tiring seven hour plus train ride with two stops to Munich (cost about $76) and arrived at the main train station where we took the underground to the Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel, which is a nice property but is a little out of the way from the main sites. We did not get to explore the main squares until the next day, Dec. 24th, celebrated in Munich as much if not more of a holiday than Christmas itself. While museums were closed that day, many opened on Christmas day. But we saw a wonderful array of gothic and rococo churches as well as shops—including the little temporary shops comprising the outdoor Christmas markets that are a custom in all the cities we visited—were open until 2:00pm.

We enjoyed a cup of warm mulled wine at one of these festive shops in Marianplatz, the square that is the heart of Munich. Marianplatz features a Glockenspiel clock, a nineteenth century neo-gothic City Hall (Neues Rathaus), and a column on which stands a statue of the Virgin Mary for which the square is named. Nearby by are two of my favorite Munich churches, the tiny but magnificently ornate rococo Asamkirche at 62 Sendlingenstrasse and the baroque Theatinerkirche with its white interior. We spent much of Christmas Day at the Haus der Kunst—once the sight of Hitler’s exhibits of Degenerate Art (read: modernism) as well as Nazi art—which had three splendid exhibits: 17th and 18th century French masterpieces from German collections; art by siblings (the Breughals, Duchamps, and Giacomettis, among others); and the American photographer Lee Friedlander. None of the exhibits provided audios in English, and only the Friedlander (which originated in MOMA) had English titles. A Munich highlight on our last night in Germany was a spectacular Christmas evening performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the world famous Munich National opera House (Bayerische Staatsooer), although the only available tickets were for standing room.

Food:
As a student in 1962 I recall eating weinerschnitzl every night, but we feasted on some wonderful meals at moderate prices. We had quite a splendid dinner at Refugium in Gendarmenmarkt (close to our Berlin hotel) where we had a fish translated as perchpike and a three course special dinner, each course including a dish made from wild duck. Perhaps even better was Bocca di Bacca, one of Berlin’s finest Italian restaurants, which was within a 100 yards of our hotel on Friedrichstasse, where we had scampi risotto and thin spaghetti with sea urchin and artichokes one night and gnocchi with quail ragout and a ravioli with ricotta another. To describe briefly these Italian briefly is to give short shrift to signature cooking of the kind one would pay a great deal more for in Manhattan.

Among the more interesting meals were those featuring game such as goose, wild duck, wild boar, and venison. Meals even at quite good restaurants tended not to be too expensive. Since tax and tip are included—one adds a few Euros for the waiter—the menu cost is the total cost. In Berlin we had dinner at the Westin’s restaurant, Friedrich’s, and found the service courteous if slow, the food quite good if not exceptional, and the price quite reasonable. The portions were on the small size but the experience was positive and the cost with one beer about $65. Marcia and I invariably order two entrees together and share, and we had venison and wild boar. In Munich we at the our hotel’s featured restaurant, Paulaner’s, and were impressed with the exquisite presentation of some dishes, especially a delicious small fried lobster. We also ate a their less expensive Bavarian restaurant where we had a moderately priced dinner with main courses of exceptional roast duck and respectable venison.

Overview
On the whole the Germans are friendly and forthcoming, but English is spoken less than travelers might expect, especially outside of Berlin. Our composite German proficiency, while not zero, made communication more difficult than in many European countries. Yet many Germans—especially those in their twenties and thirties--were extremely gracious in helping us figure out how to buy train and underground tickets, especially in Munich where many different options—all in German—are offered. Contrary to stereotypes, Germans were for the most part friendly and helpful, although waiters and waitresses do not work for tips and some seemed tad perfunctory. For the most part service at the Westin was excellent, although occasionally requests for ice took a while.

Germany is an innovative and socially responsive nation, with a concern for the environment and the less fortunate in its own ranks and in the world beyond. But it faces many interrelated challenges, including income disparity between West and East and unemployment, especially in the East. The latter results in displacement because people reluctantly leave their hometowns in the old GDR for employment in the Western part. Some of those lagging behind economically feel a sense of alienation and uselessness and this can accompany their resentment of recent immigrants. Thoughtful Germans worry about the threat of political extremism that derives in part from widespread mistrust in political leadership and a growing gap between rich and poor. Some of our pleasures were conversations with people we met, especially well-informed younger people whom we met on trains and other public transportation as well as in museums. Many of these people expressed cautious optimism about the New Europe that is emerging and an idealistic and thoughtful commitment to a united and democratic Germany. Their hope is that history written by coming generations will reflect Germany’s leadership role in responding to the world’s social ills while including a full awareness of Germany’s wrongs in the first half of the twentieth century.

IF YOU GO: GERMANY

Air: Direct Flight on Delta from JFK to Berlin; Return on Delta: Munich/Paris/ Kennedy. We drove down and left our car--indoor parking which is convenient in winter-- for 12 nights at Radisson JFK and then stayed overnight on our return. One Night Hotel and Parking: $179.

Hotels:
Berlin: The Westin Grand (www.wesin.com/berlin)
Dresden: Westin Bellevue (email: hotelinfo@westin-bellevue.com)
Munich: Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel (www. arabellasheraton.com)

Dining:
Berlin: Bocca di Bacco; Refugium; Friedrich’s
Dresden: Palais
Munich: Paulaner’s

Exploring the Republic of South Africa and its Neighbors: Problems, Wonders

“Our troubles started when the when the white man landed and reported that there were no people here.” (Former political prisoner on Robben Island who was imprisoned there with Nelson Mandela)

“Let me break into my story.” (Ron McGregor, our tour guide)

South Africa is a beautiful area, rich in natural resources, but it is a troubled area. The term South Africa denotes both the Republic of South Africa and a conglomerate of countries, many of which we visited, including Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe (the former British colony Southern Rhodesia) and--very briefly--Zambia (the former British colony Northern Rhodesia).

My wife and I bought a tour to South Africa from Smartours, a middle-priced tour company whose clients tend to be well-traveled people who have been to most of Europe. Their tours are good value. Smartours does not use travel agents and sells packages directly to clients. Omitting the middleman--the travel agent--reduces costs. Their tours vary but usually include airfare, a tour guide, some local guides, first class (but not deluxe) hotels, buffet breakfasts, and a handful of other meals. Smartours also had a number of options on this tour including a four-day three-night extension to Victoria Falls (Zimbabwe), which substantially added to the cost. Both the South African tour and the Victoria Falls extension included safaris to observe wild animal and exotic birds. With the optionals and the meals we purchased, our cost was about $4200 each.

Smartours sells the tour as its own, but (and this is a common practice) they outsource the trip to a local company, in this case Atlas tours, who in turn outsources the Victoria Falls extensions to yet another company who, if readers can believe this, outsources the Safari day in Botswana to yet a fourth company. Smartours keeps their price below competitors by selling as options what some other tour companies include and by leaving clients to buy more of their own meals. The upside of this is that one spends less time with the tour group, not such a bad thing when one considers that, unless you take along your own friends, you will be spending a great deal of time with total strangers—perhaps more than you spend in a year with your adult children, parents, and closest friends.

In part to reduce the days on tour as a way of reducing the price, Smartours often does in 12 days—the length of the basic tour without the four day Victoria Falls add on--what it takes other companies 15 or 17 days to do. (Our dates, before the add-on, were May 15-27th ). This can mean the inconvenience of changing hotels every night as we did at one point four nights in a row. Smartours takes more clients on its tours than some of the higher priced companies. Finally, Smartours often keeps the price down by having passengers fly from one city—in this case, Atlanta—which means added cost to get to that city unless one happens to live there. On some tours they do offer—for an add-on--other additional originating cities.

The flight from Johannesburg on South African airlines is a 17-hour plus nightmare-- and that was followed by a three-hour layover and two hour flight to Cape Town. We returned from Johannesburg on a 19-hour flight after a two-hour flight from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg followed by a six and half hour layover in the Johannesburg airport where Smartours arranged for us to use one of the elite lounges. The flight is so onerous that the crew changes at Sal, a small Portuguese Island that is part of the Cape Verde cluster, where the plane does an hour fuel stop without allowing passengers to deplane.

South African Airlines belongs to the minimalist school of airlines—inedible food, perfunctory and indifferent service, untidy if not disgusting bathrooms, and an unspoken but clear sense that comfort matters less to the passengers in economy than to the crew. One occasionally encounters this attitude on shorter flights by some of the less distinguished airlines—read: various US carriers-- but this was my first experience of this on a flight of the ten-hour plus variety.

The Atlanta-Johannesburg and Johannesburg-Atlanta flights are among the world’s longest and in economy (or steerage) class they are a challenge to even the most experienced traveler. One of the people in the seat behind me—a member of our tour—had what could only be called a mini-nervous breakdown because he thought my wife was moving too much while sleeping. The upgrade to business class can cost more than the entire tour, but if you have frequent flyer points it is an option worth considering.

Our tour guide, Ron McGregor, was knowledgeable and articulate, but, on occasion, prolix to a fault. To be sure, he was a great source of information and conscientious in following his company’s tour plan and able to improvise slightly when necessary. Ron would talk for hours on end to the captive audience on the bus, and, while profiting from his knowledge, I for one found his oversimplifications, reductive explanations, and stereotyping to be annoying. Part of the problem is that the South African Republic has two histories, a black one that began with racial suppression but has a new volume with the end of Apartheid and a white one that includes a history of colonial dominance and a conflict between the British and Afrikaners-- a group descended from the Dutch—which crystallized in the Boer War. While the British-Afrikaner history occupies a central place in the white imagination, it is of little moment to the majority black population.

We have traveled with Smartours before and we find that the quality of our fellow traveler’s intellectual curiosity varies. Few of our group seemed interested in an in depth understanding of what makes contemporary South Africa the country it is and might become. If one prefers an engaged group familiar with history and culture and wanting to engage in informed discussion, I suspect an Elderhostel tour or one organized by a university or museum would be better. On tours we have taken to Egypt, India, and China—with India being the only Smartours trip of the three--we found our fellow travelers more informed and better read about the places we visited. Our group included a tightly knit group of Jehovah’s witnesses; keen photographers (especially of animals on our safari days); and, not surprisingly, considering South Africa’s growing reputation as a wine producing country, some serious wine connoisseurs. Many of our fellow travelers slept while the guide discussed history and culture –admittedly at times in greater detail than necessary and often losing the thread of his narrative—and a few were rather gossipy and judgmental about their fellow travelers.

Cape Town was our first stop. It is a beautiful seaport on the Atlantic Ocean with a rebuilt vibrant if commercial waterfront area. We spent four nights at the Protea President hotel, the chain that Smartours used for most of its stops prior to Victoria Falls. Protea hotels ranged from what I would rate high four star in Durban to more modest properties such as the lodge next to Krueger Park or the Protea President at Sea Point in Cape Town which had the disadvantage of being located some distance from the museums and sites of downtown Cape Town.

Because we were in the Southern Hemisphere’s late fall, daily temperatures tended to be in the 60s and evening temperatures in the 50s. In Cape Town we had occasional rain which did put a damper on our visit to the Botanical Gardens, The rest of the weather was excellent with the added bonus of its being too cool for mosquitoes when we were in the bush, Although we still took the CDC ‘s (Center for Disease Control) recommended precaution of taking anti-malaria pills,

To understand The Republic of South Africa one needs to understand Apartheid, a political system by which the ruling white minority in 1948 that divided people into four racial groups: white, black (the vast majority), colored or mixed race, and Indian. The word Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for segregation and it describes a policy in which racial classification determined where one could live and work and with whom one could have intimate relations. Blacks who actively opposed the system—many of whom belonged to Nelson Mandala’s group, the African National Congress, were imprisoned and whites who opposed it with some exceptions were marginalized. While the Sharpeville massacres took place in 1960 and a major revolt in the form of the Soweto riots took place in 1976, the system really began to crumble in the 1980s and didn’t end until Mandala’s release from prison in 1990.

On our own, we bought a tour to Robben Island, where Mandala, was imprisoned for eighteen years, and learned about resistance to Apartheid and the consequences. Our guides had been prisoners there and were proud to have been part of the resistance movement. The half-day trip cost us about $12 each rather than the usual $25 because we took the 9:00 am ferry; this option is not advertised—you need to ask—but it is available in their late fall and winter when tourism is down. This important and moving site should have been included in the Smartours itinerary because it gives travelers a strong sense of South Africa’s history and might well have given our tour group the gravitas or seriousness that it lacked.

On a full day day’s bus drive—generally I do not like ten or more hours on a tourist bus--we enjoyed spectacular scenery on the Cape Peninsula, including the historic Cape of Good Hope, the Southwestern-most tip of Africa, around which the Portuguese sailed when they discovered a route to India via circumnavigating Africa. The Cape area includes a nature preserve with wild ostriches and baboons; we also saw African penguins at the seaside restaurant where we lunched.

Our Cape Town highlights included astounding views from Table Mountain, named for its resemblance to a flat table and the most prominent of the granite mountains that define the landscape of Cape Town. We took a cable car up the mountain, although hiking on paths is a possibility.

Most of the Cape Town cultural sites are located in an area called Company’s Gardens, the attractive and delightful botanic garden that dates back to the 17th century. My wife Marcia and I rarely miss Jewish sites and in Cape Town we visited the Jewish museum, the Holocaust Center and the large and flourishing Great Synagogue, all of which testify to the strong Jewish presence in South Africa, although the Jewish population has been declining for decades under the weight of Apartheid and the uncertainty of the political situation. We saw some strong exhibits in the South African National Gallery which featured an exhibit of photographs of Mandela as well as an exhibit of South African art entitled “A Decade of Democracy”--art created since 1994 when the black majority took over political leadership. We also visited the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, although in the Southern Hemisphere May is late fall and the gardens were not in full bloom.

We next flew to Durban, the center of Indian culture in South Africa, and experienced the hustle-bustle of the colorful Indian market and visited the Durban Botanical Gardens, before going to our hotel, the Protea Edward Hotel. The hotel overlooking the sea but is in an area too dangerous to walk at night. We had our best meal of the trip at Saagries, a recommended Indian restaurant independently owned, but located in the Holiday Inn next to our hotel (address: 167 Marine Parade).

After watching a remarkable sunrise over the ocean, we walked along the pristinely clean beach in the morning before embarking on the bus to Zululand in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. There we visited a touristy Zulu village, complete with topless young women, and watched a dance performance after seeing demonstrations of Zulu crafts and customs.

At the end of our day with the Zulus, we entered Swaziland. After a night at the Hluhluwe Inn adjacent to Hluhluwe Park, a wildlife preserve featuring white rhinos, we departed in open vehicles at 6:00 am, supposedly the ideal time to begin sighting big game. Here we saw our first rhinos, zebras, giraffes, warthogs, and elephants, and it was incredibly exciting. We had seen elephants in India, but these African six-ton and up bull elephants stepping out from the bush a few feet in front of our vehicles are a sight I’ll never forget. Game sighting requires binoculars and keen vision as well as observant guides and fellow travelers. At one point our Hluhluwe guide saw the ear of an elephant fifty yards away, and assured us the huge elephant would come our way; to our delight it did.

After almost four hours of game drive, we had breakfast and departed for Kruger Park, where we stayed at the Kruger Gate Protea Hotel for two nights and spent the days looking for wildlife in the African bush. Our trip offered only a half-day in open vehicles and the rest of the two days in the motor coach, but because the open vehicles can go down dirt roads and get close to the animals, we paid $110 each extra for a day and half more in open vehicles. While I am not sure I am a candidate for a 14 day safari, it is a terrific thrill to see elephants, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, zebras, crocodiles, mongoose, otters, warthogs, Cape buffalo, monkeys, baboons, and a variety of antelopes to say nothing of eagles and other exotic birds up close. While some in our group riding in a different vehicle saw a leopard, we were content to see four lions. Because Kruger is larger than Hluhluwe more time is spent driving around looking for sightings, but the drivers are connected to one another by radio so they share their sightings.

The notion of tipping the guide is somewhat redundant since they are really entrepreneurs making a profit for themselves on every transaction, including whatever you buy at the seemingly countless shopping stops. When the guide on these trips arranges options—particularly ones in which they make arrangements in which they handle cash—one can be sure he is making a profit for himself. The guides expect an ample tip –the tour recommends $5 a day per person which I think is exorbitant, particularly since if you forego optional excursions and launch out on your own, there are days when you never see the guide. It is a little like tipping the person from whom you bought a car.

Following our two full days in Kruger Park, we spent a long day on the bus. After a splendid morning of sightseeing in the Drakensburg mountains, where we saw the splendors of the Blyde River Canyon and Bourke’s Luck Pot Holes— the holes in rocks caused by river erosion reminded me of the gorges in Tompkins County—and a long lunch stop at Pilgrim’s Rest, we then journeyed by bus to Johannesburg, where we stayed for two nights at the quite nice Protea Hotel Balalaika in the suburb of Sandton.

Contemporary Johannesburg is a disaster. Ugly mountains of mine tailings (waste) surround the city. And the city itself is not safe, which is why we stayed in Sandton. With is boarded up hotels and shops, its hoards of unemployed men mingling aimlessly and its street debris, most of the areas in downtown Johannesburg, look like the worst American city streets in the late 1960s. I kept thinking of a line in Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country: when someone looking to the future says something about South Africa building more cities like Johannesburg, the narrator comments that one is enough.

We did take a guided tour of Soweto district of Johannesburg which is interesting for not only for its past history—a testimony to the misery of Apartheid and the site where arguably the demise of Apartheid began with the aforementioned 1976 uprisings in Soweto —but a place where one can see both hope in the new dwellings and despair in the poverty of shantytowns.

At this point in Johannesburg, we said goodbye to about two-thirds of our group, and went with the other third who had bought the four-day add-on to Victoria Falls. With its cascading water and spray, its constantly changing and spectacular views, its rainbows, its sheer immensity, Victoria Falls—the world’s largest waterfall--is one of the world’s wonders. The falls makes a thundering noise and sends up dense clouds of mist. To see it all one needs to buy a helicopter ride--$85 for 15 minutes, $165 for a half hour—but buying a day pass to Victoria Park enables one to get terrific views if incomplete views of the falls Perhaps the most spectacular land view is from the bridge from Zimbabwe to Zambia, a bridge we spent time on and walked across.

The Victoria Falls extension was really the splurge part of our trip: we stayed in the quite elegant Victoria Falls Safari Lodge where we had by good fortune a lovely suite. The lodge, and especially our particular rooms, had a wonderful views of bush through which animals roamed. At nighttime the animals come to the lodge’s water hole, in part because the lodge puts out salt to attract them for their paying guests. One evening we saw well over two hundred Cape buffalo streaming toward the big watering hole opposite the lodge. The buffalo drank for a while, then, hearing rustling in the bush, stopped in their tracks and listened as if in prayer. As we saw 15 elephants descend on the watering hole, the buffalo resumed drinking before slowly beginning to disperse. Many of the elephants stayed for several hours, eating and drinking beneath the open-air restaurant.

Our last major event was a full day in Botswana, another expensive add on which included a day in Chobe National Park divided into a morning water safari on the Chobe River and an afternoon in open vehicles. The advantage of a water safari—we did a small one as part of a sunset cruise on the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe--is that the small boats get very close to the shore and you get a good view of animals like hippos and crocodiles living in water or elephants and other animals coming down for a drink. In the afternoon we went on a vehicle safari in Chobe Park. And we saw as many as 300 elephants at once! The Chobe guide said they were hoping to send some to Angola, but the Kruger people say they have not had good luck moving elephants--they are subject to poachers (South Africa and Botswana control the poachers) and they try to return home.

Let me conclude by returning return to my title: problems and wonders.
Due to rampant crime we were continually warned not to walk the streets at night in major cities and even suburbs, to be wary even during the day. Johannesburg has collapsed as a functioning city and its white population has fled to the suburbs. South Africa has experienced a brain drain by whites in South Africa who fear that majority black government won’t work for them. While we were in Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, the dysfunctional Zimbabwe government under Robert Mugabe was bulldozing and burning shantytowns and street businesses in Harare, its capital, and other cities, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless and leaving the remnants of the middle class to say that Mugabe was twice as bad as colonialism. On the streets of the town of Victoria Falls, we saw some of the 80 or 90 per cent unemployed either selling junk or begging. We learned that in Botswana--a country the size of France but with a population of 1.5 million--over 30 per cent of the population is HIV positive.

Yet Southern Africa is a region of wonders that left us with a lifetime of memories: hoards of elephants, white rhinos, zebra and giraffes and wildebeests sharing an open field, hippos sunning next to crocodiles, a caravan of two hundred buffalo making their way in single file to a watering hole, stunning mountain scenery and gorges, monumental Victoria Falls, spectacular ocean views in Durban, and mountain views in Cape Town. And, notwithstanding its disgraceful past and current difficulties, the Republic of South Africa shows promise of being an economically viable multiracial society and the hope of the continent.

Suggested Reading: Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Paul Therouz, Dark Star Safari, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Exploring Portugal: The Other Coast of the Atlantic

“Why are you and your wife Marcia going to Portugal?” a friend asked.
“Every 63 years I visit Portugal.”
“You must be running out of places to visit.”
“Hardly. We’ve only begun to explore our world. We’ve heard wonderful things about Portugal and a ten day trip over spring break seems the ideal time to shorten winter and see a country we’ve never visited.”

Beautiful tiled mosaics, Romanesque churches, spectacular views in Lisbon that recall San Francisco, quaint meandering cobblestone streets dating back centuries, friendly people in Porto who welcome tourists as guests and friends and who when asked for directions often offer a ride, picnic lunches on rivers and the Atlantic ocean, an indigenous cuisine: Portugal--a venue somewhat neglected by American tourists-- is a delight to visit. While Portugal lacks world-class sites like the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon or the Pyramids, it contains wonderful pleasures for the tourist and is an easy place to visit. Notwithstanding the dollar’s shrunken standing in relation to the Euro, Portugal is inexpensive compared to the rest of Western Europe. Put another way, the dollar goes further in Portugal.

While my wife, Marcia Jacobson, and I have traveled widely in Europe and Asia, we had never visited Portugal, a country of only 10,200,000 people. To arrange the trip I called Abreu Tours in New York, recommended to me by TAP (Portugal Airlines) as an agency that deals mainly with tour groups but does some retail business. Abreu put together for us an efficient and reasonably priced individual package that included air travel on TAP, transfers, and half day tours of Porto and Lisbon.

Most of us know less about Portugal than we do of the countries that have played a major role in recent European history, and one of the pleasures for us was learning about its history and culture. For me the delight of the trip was accentuated by my reading as we traveled the 1998 Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago’s remarkable novel, The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

After defeating the Moors in 1147, Portugal reaching the peak of its influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when it built a far-reaching empire following the explorations of da Gama, Dias, Cabral, and Magellan. Many Portuguese monuments and buildings were built during the reign of Dom Manuel I (1495-1521) in a late Gothic and somewhat pompous style that the Portuguese called Manueline. During the twentieth century Portugal was dominated by a dictator, Antonia Salazar from 1928 until 1968 and his successor Marcelo Caetano who ruled until he was overthrown in what is called the Velvet Revolution on April 25th, 1974. After that, Portugal granted independence to its remaining colonies, although in reality it had no choice. The economy began to improve and Portugal began to take part in Europe’s post-war renaissance, although it is far poorer than most of the ten countries in the European Union prior to recent expansion of that body.

After an uneventful flight on TAP, we landed in Porto March 19th to find a driver holding a card with our names written on it-- always a welcome sight to arriving passengers. I might note that the tasteless airplane food and indifferent service on both ends of the round trip flight were at the lower end of current standards for tourist class flights to Europe.

Porto, on the River Douro, is Portugal’s second largest city and the major city of Northern Portugal. Arriving at our hotel, the four star Mercure Batalha, we went through the routine of being shown mediocre lower floor rooms facing a brick wall and smelling of smoke before settling into a non-smoking small suite on the seventh floor overlooking a nice park. Experienced travelers know that the size and quality of hotel rooms in most European hotels vary greatly and that they are likely to be given a small room on a lower floor without much of a view if they do not ask for a better one.

The strengths of the Mercure Batalha are its central location, its courteous staff, its attractive lobby and public spaces, and its ample buffet breakfast featuring an array of fresh breads and fresh fruit as well as a degree of personal service. Its weaknesses are that even the good rooms are kind of dreary if not shabby, the furnishings are not attractive, unexceptional evening dining, and the hotel looks like a dormitory from the outside. But we were close to the San Bento railroad station, could walk easily to virtually any important location from our hotel, and, on balance, I’d recommend it. For a more upscale but not quite as well-located hotel, try the Porto Sheraton.

Hospitable, understated, and homogenous, Porto recalls Europe decades ago. It has been traditionally rather prosperous, but it has suffered from the demise of its textile industry. Even during Easter season, one finds relatively few tourists, a quiet pace of life, and a welcoming environment. Yet, as happens quite often in our travels, we ran into Ithaca acquaintances, in this case two people who were spending one night in our hotel as part of an Elderhostel tour.

We had a wonderful half-day tour with a company called Diana Tours including a visit to the stunning Cathedral, the Bolsa--the 19th century stock exchange with a highly decorative ballroom in Turkish style--and the cellars of a Port winery where we saw aging casks and enjoyed a small tasting. Two English tourists and two Portuguese-speaking couples from Brazil, joined us, but our personable guide easily and impressively moved back and forth between English to Portuguese. Because of her rich sense of Porto’s history, we felt that this was one of the best city tours that we had ever taken.

We explored the rest of Porto alone. Nicolau Nasoni designed much of the city’s neo-classic architecture, including interior additions to the Cathedral and the Archbishop’s Palace behind the Cathedral. Among other major sights are the elaborately decorated Church of St. Francis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art—supposedly the largest museum in Portugal—that has an international collection of post-war Art.

Although we are not observant Jews, I have written a book on Holocaust narratives, and visiting synagogues is an important part of our European travels. In Porto, we visited the beautiful Kadoorie synagogue that was built in the unfulfilled hope that European Jews would settle in Porto after the Holocaust and that some of the descendents of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 15th century--but who maintained some semblance of their Jewish identity--would become Jews again. Portuguese Jews, who had played an important role in the growth of the Portuguese empire, were given a choice between conversion and expulsion in 1496. The king converted them in one huge ceremony and called them New Christians, but many continued to secretly practice Judaism until the Inquisition of 1547.

The active Porto synagogue has a small congregation. We also visited the beautiful but smaller Lisbon synagogue that has a larger and more active congregation.

Because of security considerations due to anti-Semitic incidents, it is best for synagogue visitors to make prior appointments. But we rarely do this; instead we simply ring the bell outside the often discreet and walled site. After being vetted by an armed security official, we usually are courteously and most times enthusiastically shown around.

One of the great sites in Porto is the San Bento central train station, decorated inside with elegant tiles depicting the history of Portuguese transportation. On our third day in Porto, we took a train from there to Braga, an attractive city with a cathedral and a university with many young and ebullient students who enjoy talking to visitors and showing them the city’s highlights.

While there is no express train, and the fastest train stops every few minutes, we had a pleasant hour ride to cover the 33 or so miles. In the mid afternoon we took a bus—there is no train service-- from Braga to Guimaraes, Portugal’s first capital, which now features a castle and medieval buildings. Although we enjoyed the rolling hills and saw splendid scenery throughout the day, we also needed our umbrellas. . We returned by train to Porto in the early evening in time for dinner at our hotel.

Our dining experiences in Porto made it clear that we weren’t in Italy where virtually every dinner is a festive event and some dinners are fabulous. Portugal is obsessed with dried, salted codfish (bacelhau) prepared in seemingly dozens of ways, and we sampled a number of different varieties, some of which were more appealing than others. Our first dinner was at the historic Majestic Café, which is both a beautiful Art deco café where Porto’s upper income folk come to be seen and a decent restaurant. As we usually do, Marcia and I ordered and split two entrees. The codfish cakes there were appealing, although I would have voted for the steak. We found the fried codfish at the Casa Filha da Mae Preta, a restaurant along the scenic waterfront recommended in guidebooks, singularly unattractive. Our generous-- indeed monstrous--portions were so large that we gave most of our entrees to a couple sitting down nearby and saved them much of the cost of the dinner.

On March 25th we flew south to Lisbon. We hadn’t realized when purchasing our trip that all our transfers would be by private car, and that was a major plus in terms of comfort and convenience. Our hotel was he four star Mundial in the well-located Baixa district or Lower Town, an attractive area of parallel streets built after the 1755 earthquake. After being shown a few mediocre-minus rooms, we were given an acceptable room on the non-smoking floor. Two days later we were upgraded to a quite splendid room with a king size bed and a stunning view the Castle of St. George (Castelo de Sao Jorge). The strengths of this hotel were its pleasantly appointed public spaces, better room furnishings than our Porto hotel, and two quite nice restaurants. The weaknesses were perfunctory service and a dormitory quality breakfast featuring canned fruit salad, undistinguished breads, and huge serve yourself vats of coffee.

Our half-day Lisbon tour with a company called Cityrama was disappointing. More than forty people were jammed on a bus, the tour director spoke four languages to the various groups, with the result that each group had ¼ of a three hour tour in terms of information, and we were shown, along with the Monastery of Jerome, more superficial sights such as the National Coach Museum rather than the renowned Museum of Antique Arts which was in the same Belem area. For the 30 Euro (or $39 per person fee) most paid—our fee was included in the Abreu tour package--tourists received precious little.

Our Lisbon highlights included the aforementioned Castle of St. George; Easter Sunday mass at the Cathedral; the Gulbenkian museum with an eclectic collection of western, Moslem, and Chinese treasures as well as a brilliantly presented exhibit of African Diaspora art that originated in the African Museum of New York; Rua Portas de Santo Antao (a street with wonderful fresh fish restaurants in the Baixa area); the deservedly legendary pastry shop Pasteclaria Suica in the Rossario (the principal downtown square since the Middle Ages); a performance of Hayden’s Creation; the Monastery of St. Jerome; and the narrow cobblestone streets of the Alfama, the medieval section of Lisbon. Lisbon is a walking city but also has a brightly lit inexpensive underground, trams, and buses.

Our dinners in Lisbon were more interesting than in Porto. For one thing, the fish was fresh and the Dorado and trout were delicious. We had delicious versions of the fish stew known as Caldierada. For another, the deserts and pastries, especially in Porto in the aforementioned Pasteclaria Suica, were more delicate and subtle than those we sampled in Porto. While not world class, the upscale restaurant on the top floor in our Lisbon hotel served quite an elegant dinner and the hotel’s other restaurant was excellent and reasonably priced.

One feature of Portuguese restaurants is that instead of a cover charge they charge for every piece of bread and pat of butter that you eat. If they serve a cheese or pate with the bread they will charge for that, too. On the other hand, tax is not added on and service is included, although a small tip of a Euro is much appreciated.

We made two train excursions from Lisbon, one by train to Sintra on a cold, rainy day, another to the beach resort community of Cascais on a sunny day. Sintra attracted English writers such as Byron and Robert Southey—who described Sintra as “the most blessed spot on the whole inhabitable globe” because of its mountainous beauty and winding streets.

By chance we met the mayor of the Sintra region while we were exploring the town hall. He not only graciously told us about the prosperous and growing Sintra region but also gave us a gift a wonderful book of Sintra photographs. One major pleasure of travel is the people one meets, and this was particularly true on this trip where we had one enjoyable encounter after another with Portuguese people who spoke English reasonably well.

A little outside Sintra and at the top of the mountain are not only the ruins of the 9th century Moorish castle but also the notable nineteenth century Pena Palace where the final kings of Portugal lived until the monarchy was overthrown in 1910. The 2 ½ mile walk up the hill is a challenge and on Good Friday—probably an unwise day to make the excursion since Good Friday seemed to be as much as secular as a religious holiday to the young Portuguese--these sights were crowded and involved long waits on entrance lines.

The next day we took a train to Cascais on the Estoril Coast. Stopping briefly at the suburban beach town of Estoril before getting back on the train and going to Cascais, a lovely seaside village. After buying sandwiches at a local café-- everywhere we visited we found small cafes to be excellent sources for inexpensive and excellent sandwiches--we had a picnic overlooking the ocean before walking a little over a mile to Boca de Inferno, a natural grotto along the coastline where one can see and hear strong waves beating against cliffs and gurgling water rushing through the adjacent rocks. As we walked back to the village and the late afternoon train, we supplemented lunch with a gelato that was a legitimate rival to Italian gelato.

Because our last day was Easter Sunday, we had postponed our cathedral visit to that day, although we had done some walking in the Alfama district that contains the Romanesque Cathedral founded in 1150 to honor the victorious 1147 siege of Lisbon by Dom Afonso Henriques.

With museums closed we spent the rest of the day walking, exploring the churches, the Commercial Square next to the river, walking along the Tagus River to the district of Belem, and, stopping for lunch a small local café as we walked diagonally back narrow hilly streets through the residential Barrio Alto and on to our hotel.

Portugal is an excellent destination for those who wish a warm and welcoming vacation and are curious to learn more about a European culture that is somewhat neglected in our newspapers and standard history books. The accessible tourist offices in major and smaller cities are particularly helpful and the hotels and restaurants in general make visitors welcome tourists as guests rather than merely as sources of Euros. More like a family visit than a major wedding, more like a sonata than an opera, Portugal offers the kind of small pleasures that invite smiles and gentle memories.

If you go:

Abreu Tours, Inc.
350 fifth ave. suite # 2414
New York, NY 10118
Tel # 1-212-760-1119
Fax# 1-212-760-3306
Toll free 1-800-223-1580

Hotels (four stars with CNN and the usual amenities of first class but not deluxe hotels)
Porto: Mercure Batalha (www.mercure.com)
Lisbon: Mundial (www.hotel-mundial.pt)

Dining:
Porto: Majestic Cafe
Lisbon:
Any fish restaurant along the Rua Portas de Santo Antao (a street with wonderful fresh fish restaurants in the Baixa area).

Pastries and coffee at Pasteclaria Suica.

Exploring Japan; A Return Visit

"The sea is beautiful. . . .The sea is my friend. It allows me to take fish"

Hiroshi Fukumine, quoted in Norimitsu Onishi, "The Old Man Has Begun to Fear His Old Friend the Sea,"in the New York Times, A4, July 13, 2004)

Blending historical sites dating back to the first millennium and modern conveniences our Japanese trip balanced the traditional culture venus such as Kyoto's wondrous temples with innovative recent technology like the bullet train (Shinkansen), Tokyo's modern architecture, and Kyoto's impressive new railroad station.

In the past four years, Marcia Jacobson, my wife of six years and I have been taking tours that visit Asia: India, Nepal, Thailand, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia. Shortly before meeting her, I had travelled--- while teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1992-3-- to China, Japan, Indonesia and Australia. We booked with Smartours-a company we have used before with reasonable satisfaction--a tour entitled "Discover Japan" from July 16 to July 25h, leaving and returning to Los Angeles, the trip's point of departure. The tout included four nights each in Tokyo and Kyoto, a few days and half-days of guided sightseeing, and a good deal of time to do our own exploring. While this is the shortest tour we ever took, it was also the most efficient in the sense we didn't spend time traveling from place to place, often using virtually whole days getting to and waiting in airports and then busing to hotel upon arrival.

This particular tour didn't include a rigid schedule or group lunches and dinner we found a major plus since we do not like too many organized activities, long days on buses, or meals homogenized to a one size--or taste--fits all. And on longer tours we weary of our fellow tour-mates as I am sure they do on us.

Spending two nights in LA before our departure gave us the opportunity to see the stunning Getty museum which I had seen in its earlier sight in Malibu, a sight which will still be used for ancient art. What is most impressive is the physical site--the gardens and landscaping even more than the imposing physical structure-- rather than the actual paintings, which are splendid but as a collection not in the league of the the Louvre, the Prado (Madrid) Uffizi, the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), the National Gallery (London) or what may be the world's best, the Met in NYC.

In Japan we had to contend with recording breaking temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit accompanied by high humidity. I am not sure I have in a hotter place and it affected how much we walked. Usually we walk at least five and often eight miles in cities as a way of experiencing the life and physical shape of a city. But here we often relied on exceptional public transportation and often took subways and buses and an occasional taxi.

What makes Japan a relatively easy place to visit among Asian sites is that the people are, as I discovered on both my visits, the most accommodating people in the world. When asked directions they are struggle mightily to understand, ask for your maps, stop others on the streets, apologize profusely for the delay in getting an answer, and even walk you to your destination.

Japanese are the most polite people I have encountered, always apologizing if they can't help and trying to please in shops and restaurants. Buying a 19th scroll for our home in the art and antique section of Kyoto (the area around Shinmonzen-dori in the Gion area of Eastern Kyoto)was a gentle and satisfying experience. It was if we were the shopowners guests not simply his customers. With his limited English the elderly shopowner could only tell us so much about then piece in which we were interested and eventually bought, but found and xeroxed material in Japan which our good friend Brett de Barry translated for us. Japanese retailers do not bargain.

One difficulty about which visitors need be forewarned: The Japanese study written English in schools and learn the grammar, but are not very adept English speakers. Indeed, in cities and tourist areas (and often beyond the major cities of China, Thailand, or even Vietnam and Cambodia, one is more likely to find people who understand simple English.

In Tokyo we stayed at the Prince Hotel, a tourist hotel with reasonable amenities, near the Tokyo tower. We had a king size bed, and the air-conditioning was adequate and the service excellent. After a guided tour of Tokyo, we attended a late afternoon Kabucki performance at the famous Kabuki-za theatre. This ritualized theatre, combining song, dance and drama was not so easy to follow but fun to observe. One can buy inexpensive gallery tickets for a partial performance (one act, 85 minutes) to get the flavor. While one can purchase audios in English, a little reading prior to going gives a strong idea of what is going on.

Another Tokyo highlight was Senso-ji, a major Shinto shrine complex with a number of temples; it is in the center of the Asakusa area, a lively area with shops and stalls. Here we were approached by children wanting to speak English and parents wanting us to take pictures of their children, but no one asked us for money as would have happened elsewhere.

The immaculate and comfortable bullet train (Shinkhausen), taking us from Tokyo to Kyoto in less than 2 hours, is a pleasurable adventure in its own right. Our hotel in Kyoto,t he efficient if not elegant New Miyako is located most conveniently across from the railroad station from which subways and buses as well as trains depart.

Kyoto, the capitol from 794 to 1868, has over 1600 Buddhist temples and 200 Shinto shrines, many of which have unique architecture, and we tried to see some of the major ones. We especially enjoyed Chion-in with its 79 foot entrance at the top of a considerable number of steps, Higashi-Hongan-ji, the second largest wooden structure in Japan, Perhaps our favorite was Kiyomizu-dera which stands on a steep hillside and overlooks the city. To Ithacans, its boast of a waterfall seemed rather risible when we discovered three small trickles of water. One walks to this temple through some winding streets with many tourist shops, although off the central streets are some fine pottery shops. Perhaps the most impressive site was Nijo-jo, the castle built in 1603 by the shogun Tokugawa to emphasize that he had replaced the emporer as the central political figure.

One day the tour took a half day bus from Kyoto to the temple complex Todai-ji in Nara, Japan's first capital, to see the world's largest indoor buddha, which dominates the world's largest wooden structure, the Daibutsu-den. In Nara we also visited Kasuga Taisha, a shrine famous for the 2,000 stone lanterns on the paths that approach it.

Unlike other of our tour members, we took time to visit some of the major musems including the Kyoto National Museum which has splendid works from every era of Japanese history and the National Museum of Modern Art.
Visits to markets are a not only great fun but wonderful way to see how a culture lives, what they eat, and how they to business with one another. While in Tokyo Marcia and I awoke one morning at 4:45 in order take a taxi to the fish auction in the Ginza district by 5:30 and to tour the wholesale fish market as well as the fruit and vegetable market. Although I grew up close to the ocean and know something about ocean fish, I saw a wide variety of fish and sea creatures that were new to my experience. Japanese is an island that has traditionally lived on what the sea provides. One of our cultural differences is Japan's insisting on harvesting whales and eating whale meat.

At these markets, one had to be on the ready to avoid being hit by various commercial vehicles delivering and removing purchased items, but the merchants were hospitable.

When most Americans think of Japanese food, they think of Tempora, Sushi and Sashami if not the Sukiyaka Japanese steak houses of years past. But we found a variety of other food at restaurants specializing in noodles (soba--thin, brown buckwheat noodles, and udon--thick white wheat noodles) soups, and pancakes. While we were warned about how expensive Japanese restaurants were, we found excellent moderately priced restaurants in department stores and in major rail stations. For example, within the new Kyoto station (Kyoti Eki) --a modern, asymmetrical, architectural marvel built in 1997, incorporates a whole shopping mall including the department store where we ate.

The store that has, in a section called "the cube" seven restaurants on its top floor, each with a different focus and specialty. One focuses on dishes with eel, although my wife wanted to pass on that one. Another that we did try specialized in Japanese pancakes (okonomiyaki and yoshoku yaki). The hotel provided a choice of Japanese breakfasts, western breakfasts, or a mixture of the two. Since we like some bread courses and juice at breakfast, we chose the latter most days although we did have the Japanese breakfast with its smoked and dried fish, miso soup, and tofu dishes.

Japan has landscapes recalling upstate New York. Last time I enjoyed the mountainous terrain when I travelled through the more rural areas of Northern Japan as far as Sendai and stayed in a small inn known as a ryokan where guests often don traditional obes and have breakfast and dinner served traditional style in one's room. This time we took an entire day bussing to Mt. Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. The bus went as far as the fifth station from where had several good looks at magnificent Mt. Fuji. Young people--and some older ones-- hike to the top, often departing at midnight and returning at 10am; on occasion, they go a good deal of the way on horseback. We then had lunch at the hot spring town of Hakone before taking a scenic bus ride on Lake Ashi to a cable car taking us up Mt. Komogatake where we had a spectacular view not only of Fuji but of the lake and park below.

Dress, especially for young women has changed since my first visit. What I call "International adolescence and young adult style" now dominates the cities. Eleven years ago I didn't see women dressed in tight jeans, long hair dyed a reddish tint, and western make up, some even with bare tummies. While their mothers are less conservatively dressed than in the past, they wear clothing that was in style in the US two decades ago. Men in white collar jobs wear jackets and ties, even on the hottest days. While women play a larger role in the workplace, many of them work part-time.

The trip itself was excellent and a good value. I was glad not to have group meals, and find the Japanese cuisine interesting and reasonably priced. I had been once before but my wife had not. Maybe it should be a day or two longer with another day in Tokyo and a visit to Hiroshima. The negatives were overwhelming heat---temperatures records were broken--and an incompetent guide in Tokyo who needs to be replaced. I will make a fuller report (and probably write a piece on the trip).

Exploring Vietnam and Cambodia (with a Bangkok Coda)

"Vietnam is like a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside," our Hanoi guide told us when my wife, Marcia, and I began our first full tour day Dec. 17, 2003 to launch our 17 day trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangkok.

Along with our 25 Smartours travelling companions, we landed in Hanoi, the political capital, and, after four nights, flew to Central Vietnam where we visited Hue, the ancient cultural capital but now a city in decline. We next visited Hoi An, something of a shopping mecca for tourists seeking to have clothes made or buy Vietnamese art, and Danang, which was the center of the American military presence. We completed the Vietnam portion of our trip south after flying to the former Saigon, the economic capital (now officially called Ho Chi Minh City but called Saigon by its denizens). While in Saigon, we took day trips to the remarkable Cu Chi tunnels which the Viet Cong used to bedevil the French and Americans and, on another day, visited the fertile Mekong Delta area. We then flew to Siem Reap where we saw the Angkor temples, especially focusing our visit on Angkor Wat. Our last stop was Bankgok, a thriving modern city which we had visited a few years ago.

Vietnam has a population of 80 million and lists its per capita income at $420, but that is supplemented considerable by unreported tourist dollars and the billions of dollars on and off the record that are sent back from the Viet Kieu, or "overseas" Vietnamese families that have left Vietnam, most of whom had been part of the South Vietamese-American wartime alliance. Notwithstanding barriers to their return, 300,000 Viet Kieu visit each year, and some have decided to stay, particularly as the government relaxes restrictions and realizes that the visitors and returnees might bring capital into the country in the form of both investments and assistance to family members still living there. Of course, anything that adds to tourist dollars is more than welcome. Yet, because a low per capita income convinces such organizations as the World Bank to give the government favorable loan terms, it is in the interest of the Vietnamese government to keep the unreported, underground economy quiet,

The Vietnamese have survived Chinese invasions, the French Colonial presence, and the American intervention on the side of the former South Vietnam government in the civil war that followed the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. After the American withdrawal in 1975, Hanoi consolidated its hold on the entire country and turned it in into a Marxist state. For eleven years it recused itself from most of the world and suffered economic deprivation. But in 1986 the policy of doi moi or "economic regulation" enabled Vietnam to join the Asian and world economy by introducing elements of a free-market economy."

Even now, as in only three other nations--China, Cuba and North Korea--the Communist party dominates every facet of political and cultural life, and most of its 2.5 million members live in the north. Newspapers are still censored, political criticism discouraged, and elections limited to choosing candidates of similar ideological views. It is accepted wisdom that the Communist party under the leadership of the late Ho Chi Minh--affectionately called "Uncle Ho," particularly in the north-- saved the country from foreign domination and is responsible, under the leadership of his successors, for the improved living standards in the past decade. Enthusiasm for Communism and Ho Chi Minh is far more muted in the South, no doubt in part because 400,000 people of the once South Vietnam who didn't leave after Hanoi's liberation on April 30, 1975 had to undergo severe re-education in camps established for that purpose.

The Vietnamese are a hardworking proud people. Notwithstanding the sacrifice of colonial wars--or perhaps because of it--they are oriented towards family and think in terms of improving the lot of the next generation. They value education and, according to our guides, actually have to pay for their children to attend school. In Hoi An, a commercial town with a strong tourist trade, shops-- often employing three generations of the owner's family--are open seven days a week from 7am to 9pm.

People who can't afford shops sell stuff on the streets. We saw poverty but not starvation. With the exception of an occasionally maimed beggar, no one looked hungry. On the streets the poorest, including children, sell trinkets, postcards, souvenirs, and pirated English books that they have xeroxed and bound. Adults who have nothing else to sell are lottery ticket agents. The food in local markets here and elsewhere not only seemed plentiful but inexpensive; indeed the variety, quality, and quantity of produce and fish in local markets were quite impressive.

As in China the early shoots of the capitalistic garden often means petty cheating. On occasion, vendors gave the wrong change. Particularly in Hanoi, we would agree on a price for a t-shirt or a trinket, and it would change when the transaction took place seconds later. Also as in China, one can shop and negotiate in English. We were surprised at the number of people who knew some English. But perhaps we forget that, with the fall of the Russian empire, English has become the international commercial and informational language taught in schools even in such places as China and Vietnam.

As in other Asian countries we have visited, the dollar is a much valued international currency and preferred not only by vendors but also by the official agencies selling local visas and departure taxes at the airport. These tourist fees comprise a considerable source of revenue for these developing countries.

Smartours used Korean airlines to and from the United States. We went to Hanoi on a six hour flight after a 14 and half hour flight to Seoul and a layover of a few hours and, on our return home, returned to Seoul on a redeye from Bangkok that took over five hours. But with the recent signing of a protocol between the US and Vietnam, soon there will be direct flights between the two countries andthe 30 hour nightmare of travel to and from Hanoi, will be a thing of the past.

Hanoi is a rather austere place with little indication of Western capitalism and only a handful of signs indicating the presence of international corporations.

That on the first day we arrived in Hanoi Tan showed us Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and Ho's house as central sights gives some indication of the way "Uncle Ho" remains a cult figure a quarter of a century after his death. As I was part of the river of people streaming past Ho's tomb under the watchful if not intimidating presence of armed soldiers, I realized that veneration of Uncle Ho is a kind of religion, perhaps partaking of aspects of ancient Vietnamese ancestor worship.

The first full sightseeing day featured another important political sight, namely the "Hanoi Hilton"--an old French prison (there is still a guillotine there!), where downed American flyers were imprisoned. The site is now fitted out with pictures of imprisoned Americans being well treated--John McCain is particularly featured-- along with signs honoring Vietnamese martyrs abused by the French.

Other than Hoi An, our central Vietnam highlights were the remnants of the Hue Citadel, mostly destroyed by war, and the Cham collection in the Danang museum. During their tenth century Golden Age, the Cham (or Champa) as they are sometimes called) produced magnificent stylized religious sculptures, depicting Hindu Gods understated in their facial features, yet large in size, as well as wonderful elephants, lions, and fanciful monsters.

The hustle and bustle of Ho Chi Minh City took us into a more cosmopolitan world, one that had a traditional western department store and a few quite decent French restaurants. On Christmas Eve, the city was in a particularly celebratory mood, far exceeding what one might expect from a country where about 10 per cent are Christians, mostly Catholic. Hoards of adolescents and young adults--many with Santa Claus hats--were out tooling around on motor bikes which are the vehicle of choice for urban youngsters, many of whom dress as if they had been watching MTV. While we lost the military battle, we may have won the cultural war.

The most remarkable Vietnam site for me was the 250 miles of tunnels near Ho Chi Minh City centered in Cu Chi but stretching almost into Ho Chi Minh City. Begun in the Indo-China War with the French and vastly extended in the Viet Nam war, these tunnels enabled the Viet Cong to live underground during the day and infiltrate the South at night. (In the DMZ near Danang there is another tunnel complex that we didn't see).

Before tourists can explore the tunnels, they are subjected to a propaganda film emphasizing the destruction that America's military wreaked upon the Vietnamese people and how the Viet Cong fought back to defend their country. Some of the first level tunnels have been widened to admit Western frames larger than the trim Vietnamese. I was one of the few of our group who descended with a guide into the second of three levels; the tunnels there were so low and narrow that I could only crawl. Tourists are not admitted to third level because of the poor oxygen supply.

With small hospitals, dining quarters, and meeting rooms all underground, Cu Chi is a remarkable sight that speaks to the tenacity and courage of the Viet Cong as well as the American folly of thinking that the Viet Cong would give up. At night the Viet Cong set mines and other explosives to kill Americans who had little idea of the extent and sophistication of the tunnels.

While, on the whole the Vietnamese population did seem young and vigorous, on occasion we saw maimed older people who were in all probability wartime victims. Today even older people seem to separate their attitudes to American visitors from their anger at the American military.

General Giap, the choreographer of Vietnamese guerilla warfare and of the victories over the American and French, put little value on individual lives and spoke of being willing to lose ten men for every one that the US lost. In a culture where older means wiser, where ancestors are worshipped, where foreign armies had been repelled for two thousand years, and where time is measured in eras not moments, America had little chance of imposing its will on Uncle Ho's version of Nationalistic Communism.

We flew from Saigon to Siem Reap, Cambodia to see the world famous temples of Angkor. While it would take weeks to see the entire Angkor complex, three or four days is a fine introduction. On the bas reliefs of these temples are narratives of daily life, including victorious battles, as well as episodes from classic epics; the monarchs wanted to link their human life to legendary figures like Rama and larger than life figures like Buddha. Thus the kings are depicted among sensual and passionate figures--supposedly celestial dancers--striking poses associated with Shiva.

The magnificent Angkor Wat is one of the world's great sites. The friezes on the outer walls are magnificently carved narratives of Cambodian history when the kingdom was at the height as well as of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. (A performance of the elegantly stylized Cambodian dance that night reinforced the centrality of the Ramayana in the temple culture.).The wonderful East Gallery contains the most famous panel of bas-relief stone sculptures known as "Churning of the Ocean of Milk" from the Hindu epic Bagavata-Pourana.

While the early temples were dominated by Hindu culture, Buddhism plays a larger role in the later ones. One sees hints of Buddhism even in those temples built first. The Buddhist temple Bayon, perhaps the second most impressive temple after Angkor Wat, stands at the very center of the city complex known as Angkor Thom, the last capital before the Khmer empire began to disintegrate in the 13th century. Huge faces, representing the king imagining himself as Buddha, decorate its 54 towers. Another striking site within Angkor Thom is the Terrace of the Elephants.

I shall treasure the memory of seeing--from the upper platform of the temple Phnom Bakheng--the stunning sunset hovering over the Ankgor complex. Nor shall I ever forget Ta Prohm which archeologists have left as if it were still embedded in the jungle. With roots entangling and moss protecting the temple, nature plays its role as destroyer and preserver.

Cambodia, a poorer country than its neighbor, has a population of about 12 million. Once part of French Indochina, it is a constitutional monarchy with Norodom Sihanouk the nominal head of state. Cambodia has ambiguous feelings toward Vietnam. On one hand Vietnamese troops liberated Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge on Jan 7, 1979 as the climax a 1978 invasion. On the other hand, the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia for more than a decade and installed a puppet government, including Hun Sen, a Khmer Rouge deserter who arrived with the invading army and has been part of every government since and Prime Minister since 1983.

Jan.7, once called "National Liberation Day," is now called "End of Genocide Day"--and "Vietnam Invasion Day" by some younger Cambodians who think Vietnam did to Cambodia what America did to Vietnam. Furthermore, Cambodians regard the entire Mekong Delta as theirs and regard the dividing line between Vietnam and Cambodia that gave Vietnam much of the Delta as the unfortunate result of colonial mapping. Our guides told us what while in Cambodia, we should not wear souvenir t-shirts or hats that we bought in Vietnam.

In Cambodia we saw more poverty and more wounded older men than we saw in Vietnam. The population seemed older than Vietnam, although we did again encounter children selling books and trinkets in the streets. While among these seemingly gentle people, one wonders how many of the survivor's families sympathized with the Khmer Rouge regime or took part in atrocities that killed 1.7 million people in less that four years. Everyone speaks of their losses during the period; our Cambodian guide told us that his family was decimated, but surely some of the perpetrators and their children survive.

Our return to Bangkok was a kind of coda which enabled us to re-visit the dazzling Emerald Buddha--really jade-- within the palace complex and to visit Wat Arum, a complex we had missed last time when our focus was on such wonderful sites as the Reclining Buddha, the Gold Buddha, and the Marble Buddha. Knowing the city from our past visit, we were comfortable getting around by water-taxi and Sky Train, essential for a city known for its traffic jams. Bangkok is one of Asia's major cities, but powerful memories of Vietnam's history and Cambodia's cultural treasures at Angkor are what will linger in our minds.


Suggested Reading:
Angkor, Dawn Rooney.
Vietnam Now, David Lamb
Catfish and Mandela, Andrew X. Pham

Revisiting China


"Call me Jevons," our guide said, when he met us at our hotel at 11:30 p.m. Sept. 22, 2002 in Beijing, not realizing the resonance with the opening of Moby Dick or the sharp contrast between his ebullient personality and that of the isolate Ishmael. Our guide was a talented 24 year old who accompanied us the entire trip: Beijing, Xian, Chongqinq, the Yangtze Cruise from Chongqing to Wuhan, and Shanghai. Among the tour guides we have had he was certainly the most personable. (On our more exotic trips like Egypt, India, and one that focused on Thailand and included Hong Kong and Singapore, we have been buying a full tour package and those packages includes a tour guide who accompanies the entire trip upon landing and sometimes even accompanies the group to and from the USA.

Dapperly dressed with a proclivity to jewelry and something of a dandy, Jevons's English was excellent. Indeed, he was a crystallizing image of the New China I confronted upon my return nine years after my first visit and an indication of how Deng Xiaoping's pragmatism, economic reforms, and willingness to accept some Western influences--but not democracy, free speech, free press, and freedom of religion--have gradually succeeded Mao Zedong's ideological communist dogma; this dogma lingered well after his death in 1976 even as his successors tried to dismantle much of it.

Returning to China, I encountered a vastly different country from the one I visited in 1993, close to the fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. At that time I hadn't yet visited India, but I felt that China was as different from anything I had ever seen--and I had been to some relatively exotic places. While the last time, especially at Beijing University where the uprising had originated was a time of elegiac gloom, this visit took place at a time of public celebration. For we were there during the period celebrating the Oct. 1, 1949 official establishment of the People's Republic. To be sure many of the tourist highlights were the same as when I had visited Beijing and Shanghai nine yours ago: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, The Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, and the life-size Terra Cotta Army that was rediscovered in the 1974 but dates from the Qin dynasty 220-206 BC.

The Yangtze cruise with the overwhelmingly stunning gorges was new experience. But perhaps the most amazing sight to me was the economic modernization, especially in Shanghai--even as China continues eschew the democratization that most Westerners assume must be the counterpart of a free market economy. Even though my reading prepared me for McDonald's and Starbucks, this economic westernization was still quite a shock to see. I still cannot believe that as one exits Mao's tomb in Tiannaman Square --a kind of shrine to recent Chinese history--one encounters, virtually at the exit, a free lance group of young entrepreneurs selling Nikes or Nike imitations as well as other imitation brand products and trinkets. While the Chinese authorities brook no protest and, indeed, jumped in seconds upon someone who unfurled a protesting placard, they have infinite toleration for commerce, no matter how sacred the ground or bad the taste.

China's major cities, especially Shanghai and Beijing have become centers of commerce and industry. Capitalism has never found a more comfortable home than in the People's Republic. Everything is for sale and the entrepreneurial spirits stalks the land. At times it seems as if everyone has something to sell, and everyone is hustling. Put another way: If we have capitalism in America, China has it to the third power. We need remember, however, that there was a time when China was the most prosperous and advanced country in the world. As Nicholas Kristoff reminds us, although it stagnated about 1450, "even as late as 1820 China amounted to 32 per cent of the world's G.D.P--and then it utterly collapsed" (NY Times, Dec. 3 2002, A31).

At a time in 1993 when the Olympic Committee was deciding on the appropriate venue for the 2000 Olympics, I visited China and Sydney within a few months of one another. While the major factor in the 2000 decision was the suppression of the students in 1989 at Tiananmen, surely the committee realized, as I did, that the lack of foreign language speakers, the cumbersome nature of travel arrangements, the lack of a transportation infrastructure to move people from city to city, and the dearth of quality hotel space would have made for a most difficult Olympics.

During my first visit, a Beijing University Professor purchased my ticket to Xian at the only office where domestic tickets could be purchased and when I went to the airport, it turned out I had a ticket for a different city. All this has changed and one can see how the Chinese has made large strides in eliminating the foregoing problems. If this progress originated in part to convince the Olympic committee that China could host the Olympics and fulfill the commitments made to the committee, it now far transcends that and is part of the transformation of China into a world class tourist site and economic player. For example there is no comparison between domestic air travel on old military planes in 1993 and the current domestic air system.

In 1993 one saw occasional tourists. Now China is a major tourist mecca and expects to become the world's #1 tourist site in the a handful of years. In 1993 most of Chinese wore dowdy clothes, featuring the Mao jacket and loosely fitting pants, while resembling men's pajamas, and women eschewed makeup and styled hair. Now many urban Chinese, especially the younger generation in their twenties and thirties, wear stylish and often form fitting Western clothes. Attractive and dressed in trendy fashion, many of he young people look no different from our Asian and Asian-American students at Cornell. With exposed midriffs, makeup, curled and sometimes tinted hair, and tight jeans, some teens mime their Western counterparts at malls. To see women in Shanghai shopping in crowded upscale fashionable clothing stores for expensive and revealing western underwear was for my wife a surprising touch of sexual globalization.

Notwithstanding Mao Zedong's own rather frisky sexual history, he imposed a strict Puritanism on his followers. In 1993 heterosexual couples walking with arms around one--or even another holding hands in a manner approaching intimacy--would have feared being denounced as decadent Westerners. This time it was not uncommon in Beijing and Shanghai to see couples kissing and embracing in public. Another change is the change in language. Those who spoke English well in 1993 used polite and controlled understatement and now one hears words like "amazing" and "greatest" resonating in the Chinese rendition of English speech as if the Chinese were trying to outdo Americans in English hyperbole.

My wife and I bought a tour package from Ritz Tours, a Los Angeles based company that specializes in China and seems to have a large clientele. Our dates were Sept.21-Oct. 8, 2002. For us the Yangtze sights were a trip highlight. The downstream version of the Ritz cruise took four days, but one can do a five night upstream version on the fifteen day tour or a longer seven night version and more extended tours. We were correctly instructed that within the four days one can see the Three Gorges and the lovely Lesser Gorges (which one does on power operated sampans) and the incredible but unfinished Three Gorges Dam. Some friends on other tours felt that for the Yangtze cruise seven and even five days was a bit too long.

We took our Yangtze cruise at the extraordinary time when people were moving from the lower towns and cities to be flooded to above the line marking the water level where brand new towns and cities had been built. While not luxurious, the Victoria Cruise boats used by Ritz Tours--and supposedly among the nicest cruise lines on the Yangtze-- was in terms of accommodations surprisingly comfortable. Although, as we have learned on our travels, river cruise ships are rarely to be confused with ocean cruise ships, all the rooms had an outside view, air-conditioning, and a small but comfortable bathroom area with a shower, sink, and toilet. On balance, the meals were adequate on ship, although the meal portions allotted at dinner for tables of ten guests could have been more generous.

One reason that we booked with Ritz is that within the fifteen day trip (the first two and much of the last of which are taken by travel to and from the US) were the two free days when we could go off and explore on our own. My wife and I get tired of the regimentation of getting on a bus at 8am every morning--even on the river cruise we left the boat daily for touring-- especially because every day included one mandated shopping stop. One reason these tours are relatively inexpensive is that the Government requires the guides to take the tours to a variety of cloisonné, silk, carpet, and jade factories or to a Government owned "Friendshp" store. Because the guides get a cut of the take from each tour, the group stays until the last shopper ceases shopping. Some of our group, including us, had to remind our guide somewhat sternly that we didn't come to China to shop. But we had others in the group who reveled in every opportunity to buy merchandise that often could have been purchased home for the same price or less.

Inexpensive packages abound; ours was tad more expensive than the lowest price tours, but included five star or luxury hotels--although within the category "five star" our hotels were not always the most expensive. The basic cost per person was about $2200 plus a $200 add on from Syracuse to San Francisco. But consider the value when the air ticket price on our ticket was $1904 and that did not include domestic flights from Beijing to Xian, Xian to Chongqinq, or Wuhan to Shanghai! When travelling in Asia on tours, fine hotels are less than an extravagance than one might expect, after a day of boarding buses for twelve of fourteen hours of touring, being stuck in traffic jams, fighting crowds, and breathing polluted air. Our hotels all had exercise facilities, often including swimming pools, and knowledgeable concierges who could give us directions in English when we ventured out alone.

Among other things, the hotel concierges could direct taxi drivers in Chinese when we wanted to make forays on our own, something which we did more than most of our group. Taxis in China are inexpensive and a good way to supplement the tour. A necessary prelude to an efficient return taxi journey is to take hotel cards to give to your drivers--a good idea in any country where English is not the primary language and where you are not conversant with the national tongue. While the taxi drivers do not know any English and knew we were tourists, only once were we taken on anything other than a direct route and that cost us only another dollar or so. What is different form 1993 is the traffic; in 1993 virtually the only cars were taxis and one could move from one place to another in a matter of a few minutes. Now, even with new roads in place and others under construction, Beijing and Shanghai are overwhelmed with an assortment of trucks, buses, private cars, and taxis.

Our tour director, Jevons not only was informative about China in 2002 but generally gave us more valuable information about the local sights than the local guides; the guides on the ship were also helpful in discussing contemporary China. But most of the local guides were capable, even if they varied in quality, attention, and English skills. The local guide in Xian, whose English name was Frank Lee, was more a comedian than a guide and his favorite joke was "Frankly [Frank Lee] speaking." The local guide in Chongqing did little but show us the town hall building and take us shopping. A few of us visited the wonderful sculpture park outside, but we found that ourselves.

The shortcomings of the trip: too much shopping, sometimes at the sacrifice of major sights such as the Provincial museum in Xian which I saw in 1993 and which is one of the great museums in China, on the level of the Shaanxi Lishi Bowuguan (Shanghai History Museum) which was also not on the tour. I counted nine shopping ventures, many of which took three hours when one included the bus detours through traffic. With the omission of the Beijing Zhongguo Lishi Bowuguan (Museum of Chinese History), the tour missed all three of the great museums in China. However, on our own, Marcia, and I did spend several hours in the Shanghai History Museum and the Beijing Museum of Chinese History.

Most meals during our land stay were included and the quality ranged from quite fine--some of the hotel buffets--to adequate minus (a few of the lunches). The group tour Peking Duck dinner and Dumpling dinner were fun but hardly world class dining. The J. C. Mandarin hotel in Shanghai, rather than giving us the same breakfast buffet as other guests, had a tourist breakfast buffet that was notably less exciting than the more lavish breakfasts at other hotels; these breakfasts often included a choice of Western, Japanese, and Chinese items. The Chinese breakfast at the New Otani Hotel in Beijing was elegantly served in a separate room. The best meals we had in terms of food and service were the few nights we went off on our own to recommended but not very expensive restaurants where Marcia and I were the lone Westerners. Meilongzhen, one of Shanghai's oldest and most famous restaurants, is excellent.

When I visited China in 1993 the university professors were humiliatingly asked to show identification every time they walked through the gates of the university compound. I was told that the university was run by government factotums, and that what was done there came under Party scrutiny. As the fourth anniversary of the 1989 uprising approached, Tiananmen was closely watched by soldiers and lacked the throngs of tourists--Chinese and foreign--that wander about now. Although a few colleagues whom I knew from their having studied at Cornell were more open in private than in public, one had the sense of their anxiety about who was watching and listening.

While our guide and our ship guides were more revealing about politics than some of us expected, information was limited or distorted. Certainly questions about China's drug and AIDS problems, its rampant pollution, or how China dealt with dissent were met with obfuscation. And it took a while to get Jevons and the ship guides--who led seminars on China on board ship--to acknowledge that the private schools in the city for which families pay tuition are not available in most of rural China and, in fact, that illiteracy is still a problem there. We were told China had too many people for democracy, although, of course, India with a similar population has a thriving if imperfect democracy--albeit a much less effervescent economy. The Government has banned the search engine Google, does not allow the International Tribune to be sold on the streets, and does not allow CNN in private homes. (Both the Tribune and CNN are available in the better hotels). Nothing crystallizes how decisions are made arbitrarily from above better than the Yangtze Dam project where entire cities below the flood line are simply moved above the line without the input of the citizens and where flooding and huge silt deposits will affect the ecosystem for generations to come in ways that are not fully understood. Touring the Lesser Gorges in small boats, we saw monkeys at water level. Will they know--and have time-- to go up over 550 meters when the dam is flooded? What about the flooding not only of antiquities and but of the felt life of human history within the towns and villages?

Despite my reservations, I was exhilarated during my return to China by the sheer beauty of the gorges and the mountainous views from the Great Wall (at Badaling Changcheng outside Beijing) and around the Ming Tombs in Xian. I was impressed by the effort in Shanghai to replicate the stunning views of Hong Kong. But I what I most remember is the invisible hand of friendship epitomized by Chinese wishing to talk to us, in part to test their English but much more to learn about the world beyond. These encounters usually took place when my wife and I went off by ourselves into museums and restaurants frequented by Chinese. This gregariousness was different from the wary and cautious Chinese--and I include even most of the students with whom I interacted-- in 1993. Upon returning to the US, I had emails waiting to me from people we had met casually, wanting to continue our conversations.