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

tell you extravagant lies for five dollars.
("And here, please, the Tomb of the Infant Jesus.") And there are
the great mini-bars of Europe-three paper cartons of aniseflavored soda pop, two bottles of beer with suspended vegetable
matter, a triangular candy bar made of chocolate-covered edelweiss
and a pack of Marlboros manufactured locally under license.
(NB.: Open that split of Mumm's'/2-star in there, and $200 goes on
your hotel bill faster than you can say "service non compris.")
    In place of celebrated palaces, our era has celebrated parking
spots, most of them in Rome. Romans will back a Fiat into the
middle of your linguine al pesto if you're sitting too close to the
restaurant window.
    Instead of cathedrals, mosques and ancient temples, we have
duty-free shops-at their best in Kuwait. I never knew there was so
much stuff I didn't want. I assumed I wanted most stuff. But that
was before I saw a $110,000 crepe de chine Givenchy chador and a solid-gold camel saddle with twelve Rolex watches embedded in
the seat.

    The "sermons in stone" these days are all sung with cement.
Cement is the granite, the marble, the porphyry of our time.
Someday, no doubt, there will be "Elgin Cements" in the British
Museum. Meanwhile, we tour the Warsaw Pact countries-cement
everywhere, including, at the official level, quite a bit of cement in
their heads.
    Every modern tourist has seen Mannix dubbed in forty languages and the amazing watch adjustments of Newfoundland, Malaysia and Nepal (where time zones are, yes, half an hour off), and
France in August when you can travel through the entire country
without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered
with anything that's open for business-though, somehow, the fresh
dog crap is still a foot deep on the streets of Paris.
    Astonishing toilets for humans are also a staple of up-to-date
foreign adventure. Anyone who thinks international culture has
become bland and uniform hasn't been to the bathroom, especially
not in Yugoslavia where it's a hole in the floor with a scary old lady
with a mop standing next to it. And, for astonishing toilet paper,
there's India where there isn't any.
    No present-day traveler, even an extra-odoriferous Central
European one, can say he's done it all if he hasn't been on a smell
tour of Asia. Maybe what seems pungent to the locals only becomes
alarming when sniffed through a giant Western proboscis, but there
are some odors in China that make a visit to Bhopal seem like a
picnic downwind from the Arpege factory. Hark to the cry of the
tourist in the East: "Is it dead or is it dinner?"
    Nothing beats the Orient for grand vistas, however, particularly of go-go girls. True, they can't Boogaloo and have no
interest in learning. But Thai exotic dancers are the one people left
who prefer American-made to Japanese. And they come and sit on
your lap between sets, something the girls at the Crazy Horse never
do. Now, where'd my wallet go?
    Many contemporary tourist attractions are not located in one
special place the way tourist attractions used to be. Now they pop
up everywhere-that villainous cab driver with the all-consonant
last name, for instance. He's waiting outside hotels from Sun City to the Seward Peninsula. He can't speak five languages and can't
understand another ten. Hey! Hey! Hey, you! This isn't the way to
the Frankfurt airport! Nein! Non! Nyet! Ixnay!

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