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

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

    And Germans in a pool cabana (or even Israelis at a discotheque) are nothing compared with French on a tropical shore. A
middle-aged, heterosexual, college-educated male wearing a
Mickey Mouse T-shirt and a string-bikini bottom and carrying a
purse-what else could it be but a vacationing Frenchman? No
tropical shore is too stupid for the French. They turn up on the
coasts of Angola, Eritrea, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. For one day
they glory in l'atmosphere tres primitive then spend two weeks in an
ear-splitting snit because the natives won't make a steak frite out of
the family water buffalo.
    Also present in Angola, Eritrea and God-Knows-Where are
the new breed of yuppie "experience travelers." You'll be pinned
down by mortar fire in the middle of a genocide atrocity in the
Sudan, and right through it all come six law partners and their
wives, in Banana Republic bush jackets, taking an inflatable raft
trip down the White Nile and having an "experience."
    Mortar fire is to be preferred, of course, to British sports fans.
Has anyone checked the passenger list on The Spirit of Free
Enterprise? Were there any Liverpool United supporters on board?
That channel ferry may have been tipped over for fun. (Fortunately
the Brits have to be back at their place of unemployment on
Monday so they never get further than Spain.)
    Then there are the involuntary tourists. Back in 1867, what
with the suppression of the slave trade and all, they probably
thought they'd conquered the involuntary tourism problem. Alas,
no. Witness the African exchange students-miserable, cold, shivering, grumpy and selling cheap wrist watches from the top of
cardboard boxes worldwide. (Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University has a particularly disgruntled bunch.) And the Pakistani
family with twelve children who've been camped out in every
airport on the globe since 1970-will somebody please do something for these people? Their toddler has got my copy of the Asian
Wall Street Journal, and I won't be responsible if he tries to stuff it
down the barrel of the El Al security guard's Uzi again.
    Where will Mr. Clemens take these folks? What is the 1980's
equivalent of the Grand Tour? What are the travel "musts' of today?

    All the famous old monuments are still there, of course, but
they're surrounded by scaffolds and green nets and signs saying,
"Il pardonne la restoration bitte please." I don't know two people
who've ever seen the same famous old monument. I've seen Big
Ben. A friend of mine has seen half of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
No one has seen Notre Dame Cathedral for years. It's probably
been sold to a shopping mall developer in Phoenix.
    We've all, however, seen Dr. Meuller's Sex Shop in the Frankfurt airport. Dr. Meuller's has cozy booths where, for one deutsche
mark a minute, we modern tourists can watch things hardly thought
of in 1867. And there's nothing on the outside of the booths to
indicate whether you're in there viewing basically healthy Swedish
nude volleyball films or videos of naked Dobermans cavorting in
food. Dr. Meuller's is also a reliable way to meet your boss, old
Sunday School teacher or ex-wife's new husband, one of whom is
always walking by when you emerge.
    Dr. Meuller's is definitely a "must" of modern travel, as is the
Frankfurt airport itself. If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to
change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time
spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.
    What else? There are "local points of interest" available until
the real monuments are restored. These are small piles of stones
about which someone will