The Traveling Dollar

By Otto Friedrich

Imagine ocean waves engulfing the topmost girders of the Eiffel Tower. Imagine Buckingham Palace under water, and St. Peter's too. Well, that is just a joke, a metaphor, but it is what one travel agent thinks of when she looks ahead to the travel season this spring and summer. "Europe is going to sink into the ocean under the sheer weight of American tourists," says Jane Levin of Boston's Garber Travel Agency. "In 24 years in the travel business, I have never seen it so busy so early. It's incredible."

Every spring the siren calls to travel are very much the same--Oh, to be in England, now that April's there, or at the bullfights at the feria de abril in Seville--yet new attractions keep appearing too. This year there is an extra boon in foreign travel: the strong dollar. American currency now buys about a third more abroad than it did four years ago and 13% more than just a year ago. That makes a bargain out of everything from nights on the town in Paris to jewelry shopping in the Far East.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, planeloads of graying and thickening Americans are suddenly arriving in strange lands and looking around them with half-remembering wonderment at half-forgotten places with names like Torgau, Remagen, Iwo Jima. Torgau is the German town where U.S. and Soviet forces linked up along the Elbe River on April 25, 1945. The recent Soviet shooting of an American officer in East Germany has cast a pall on the anniversary celebration. The U.S. military now says that it would be inappropriate to attend, but Robert Swan, an organizer of the reunion, defends it as a partial remedy to "40 years of fear, 40 years of ignorance, 40 years of mistrust of each other."

For those who would rather not think about World War II, or the cold war either, one of the main events of the year is the 300th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach.* Anyone who missed the St. Matthew Passion in Bach's hometown of Leipzig on his actual birthday, March 21, can sample Bach festivals in Hamburg, Berlin, Heidelberg and Stuttgart, as well as the nine-day Bachanalia on the island of Madeira in June. And if this seems a surfeit of baroque music, remember that June 16 is Bloomsday in Dublin, when admirers of James Joyce spend 18 hours retracing the steps of the hero of Ulysses from church to pub and onward.

Nor is Europe the only place to go. Bored with running around the Central Park Reservoir in Manhattan? For $2,345, jaded joggers can fly from New York's Kennedy Airport to Peking on April 26 and then join in a 10-km run to the Great Wall. Just want to get away from it all? For $1,264, Chile's Ladeco airline periodically flies tourists from Santiago to Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magel

lan; Chilean military aircraft take them on to Lieut. Marsh Base in Antarctica for a spot of penguin watching. Looking for something really different? For $751 you can fly from Paris to Tamanrasset, an Algerian town at the edge of the Sahara. From there you travel by Land Rover on a two-week trek into the desert. You can ride a camel too, but beware of scorpions.

Americans have always been eager for travel, that being how they got to the New World in the first place. Yet the current high rate of the dollar means that prosperous American tourists can fly more, see more, do more and buy much more than ever before. The State Department expects to issue 5 million passports this year, 6% more than last year. How long this boom will last is anybody's guess, but for now Americans are simply grabbing their strong dollars and taking off.

Europe is traditionally the main overseas attraction. Last year a record 5.6 million Americans flocked there--more than 2 million to Britain alone--and estimates this year run to well over 6 million, some up to 7 million. (By comparison, 33 million Americans crossed the border into Canada in 1984 to spend the falling Canadian dollar; 4 million visited Mexico, where the peso has suffered three big devaluations since 1982; and 5 million frolicked in the Caribbean.)

Though the tourist flood will not crest until this summer, TWA agents in New York say their bookings for Super Saver European tours in the first quarter are three times as high as last year's rate. Atlanta's Osborne Travel Agency reports sales running 100% ahead of 1984 for the firm's $4,000 tours and 200% ahead for cheaper excursions. Says the agency's president, Phil Osborne: "Beginning as early as mid-April, people are going to find Europe virtually sold out." By now, the best hotels in Paris and London are all but booked solid for the spring. Says Atlanta Travel Agent Ken Ward: "We're already planning itineraries for people in September and October."

Even the high-priced Caribbean enjoyed a 10% increase in tourists this winter. Japan Club Tours in Los Angeles has doubled its business to Asia and is now booking 1,500 customers a month. Says Co-Owner John Graeler: "People are banging down our doors for tours. My partner and I are forever running over to Hong Kong to look for more hotel space. First we beg, then we scream, then we rant and rave, and we still don't get as much as we'd like." A cruise to Brazil to observe the progress of Halley's comet is already sold out at prices of about $3,450, depending on accommodations, even though the cruise does not begin until March of next year. To Terry Lazar, vice president of New York's Vacation Travel Concepts, the action is more than a matter of favorable exchange rates. Says he: "People are going abroad because they feel good. There is optimism in the air. It's a great time to live it up."

It is also a great time for the popular sport of bargain hunting, even when some bargains turn out to be extravagantly expensive. Says Frank Drewitt, managing director of Harrods of London: "An American couple flew in on the Concorde one evening, bought some fine luggage and a fur coat the next day, and flew back home on the Concorde that evening."

Harrods is, of course, an institution. It took in an estimated $60 million from American tourists last year, 6% of all they spent in Britain. The department store advertised its post-Christmas sale in the New York Times, and one Wisconsin woman stood outside all night before the sale began so that she could lead the stampede into the fur department, where a $69,000 sable coat went for $33,600.

On more modest levels, the bargains are still impressive. Harrods' best sellers last week included Pringle cashmere sweaters at $100 (typical New York price: $175), Wedgwood's Runnymede dinner service at $556 for a 25-piece set ($800), a dozen Waterford crystal glasses at $258 ($402). At the nearby Laura Ashley shop, just off Sloane Square, about half the customers are Americans. They spend an average of $245 each on such items as a pastel flowered frock ($43) or a cotton sweater ($37)--about a third to a half the prices in Ashley's U.S. branches. Tourists crowding into the china-reject shops in Knightsbridge find a five-piece place setting of Royal Worcester's Evesham for $26, Baccarat crystal wineglasses for $38.

The same is true throughout Europe. A Hermes silk scarf is $70 in Paris, $100 in New York City; a bottle of Dom Perignon 1976 is $23 in Paris, $41 in New York. At the Giorgio Armani boutique on Milan's Via Sant' Andrea, a smartly cut black leather jacket is $600, half the price in New York. At Zeiss Optical in Munich, a pair of binoculars costs $815, vs. $1,140. Says Miami Travel Agency Owner Constanza DeFelice: "I even bought two Cabbage Patch dolls in a Madrid department store for less than $20 apiece." "Our tour conductors take people into shops, and they become a little bit crazy. They just buy up the whole place," says Jeffrey Joseph, executive vice president of New York's Globus-Gateway/Cosmos Tours. "Going, their suitcases are practically empty. * But they are coming back with a full suitcase, plus they have bought another suitcase and filled it up, and there is hardly enough room on the bus for all the extra luggage."

It takes quite a lot of savings on bargain-price champagne, of course, to pay for a ticket on the Concorde (one way New York to London: $2,466). And although the dollar is high, so are the prices of many goods and services aimed at Americans. The Hermes scarf that now costs "only" $70 in Paris was also about $70 three or four years ago, when the dollar was worth 5 francs instead of nearly 10. At $131, the cheapest room at the Plaza-Athenee is a soupcon higher than it was five years ago, although the rate for more expensive rooms is lower. The tourist traffic, though, is not strictly rational. To a passionate bargain hunter, squandering money is part of the fun. One Californian, Joanne Pearson, flew to France just to accompany her son home. Says she, almost straight-faced: "He needed someone to carry an extra bag."

Some of the best bargains are in luxury goods--antique furniture, for example. In a recent sale at the Phillips auction house in London, American dealers and collectors bid up the prices of fruitwood furniture one- third or more above the advance estimates. An 18th century walnut desk that went unsold at $1,875 last year brought $4,680; a Queen Anne walnut bureau expected to go for $16,800 reached $33,600. Such prices wiped out the savings that American buyers got from the strong dollar, but London prices for decorative furniture are still at least 20% lower than New York's.

"This was the most buoyant furniture sale I've had in 20 years," says Christopher Hawkins, Phillips' managing director. "This has been my busiest month ever," says Rodd McLennan, an antiques dealer in Chelsea. "Mostly because Americans were buying furniture, always furniture: Regency, Biedermeier and English country house." Despite the price hikes, bargains can be found. One American woman talks gleefully of finding some Victorian pressed glass for almost nothing. "We are in pig heaven," she says. "This is play money buying treasures."

At the Louvre des Antiquaires in Paris, where an inlaid l8th century commode starts at $10,000, tourists are bidding on practically everything. "The Americans are in the process of buying out the entire French patrimony," complains a haughty young dealer who is doing his best to help them. "Everything, from the 12th century to the 20th, absolutely everything. And prices? There is no limit." France has a wide variety of luxuries, and despite the new exchange rates, Parisian prices too remain pretty luxurious. As one survivor puts it, "Paris has gone from the ridiculous to the merely exorbitant." For oenophiles who have graduated from Mouton Cadet (price: $3), the Bordeaux to search for is Chateau Petrus, which sells out as soon as it is available, at $120 to $150 a bottle. And while many French wines are no cheaper in France than they are in the U.S., one of the top shippers in Bordeaux, the Maison Dubos, reports a steadily increasing number of American customers who buy 200 cases at a time at a cost of up to $20,000.

"We have many Americans coming in here now, and they are buying some of our best furs," says Claire de Montesquiou of Revillon, where a trench-style coat in black mink sells for $7,600, in contrast to $10,200 at the Revillon salon in Saks Fifth Avenue. The most expensive fur coats in France are the rare Russian lynx. Revillon sold one this winter for $303,000, but thinks it indiscreet to say who bought it. Eat your heart out, Lorelei Lee.

For those who already have fur coats, there are interesting bargains in deluxe cars. Dr. Barry Henderson, an Atlanta physician, has a Jaguar XJ6 on his shopping list, a burgundy-colored four-door sedan. "You can get a Jaguar in the mid-20s," he says, "and they're at least $35,000 in the U.S. You have to have it modified for EPA regulations, but the savings outweigh the modification costs."

"Until 18 months ago, 90% of our business came from the Middle East, and now 90% comes from the U.S.," says John Lashmar, managing director of London's Trasco International, which rebuilds and re-exports Mercedes-Benz at a saving of about 50% for an American customer.

Then there is the Californian diplomatically known as Mr. X who ordered a Mercedes limousine in London for $30,000, a theoretical saving of $15,000. But Mr. X was not primarily interested in bargains. He ordered the limousine cut in half and stretched 4 ft., repainted in Porsche metallic blue and retrimmed in Connolly English magnolia leather throughout. He had a bar, television and telephone installed. The total price came to $92,000, in contrast to a U.S. price of God knows what. Normally he would have paid $850 for shipment to Los Angeles, but he wanted his toy in a hurry, so he had it air-freighted for $3,000. And worth every penny, he chortled to his tax accountant.

One additional saving for the determined shopper is that West European prices generally include a value-added tax, which averages about 15% of the retail price in most places.* To get refunds, the customers usually must fill in a form and send it back to the store after they have

cleared Customs at the airport. This process can be cumbersome. In London and Paris you must hunt around the airport to find the special desk where the goods are inspected and then usually stand in a long line behind other bargain hunters. Since the refund check may be difficult or expensive to cash in the U.S., the best way to pay the VAT is with a credit-card voucher, which the storekeeper can destroy after receiving the form from Customs. On the other hand, U.S. Customs lies in wait at the other end. Returning travelers can bring in $400 worth of merchandise free, but they are charged 10% for the next $1,000, and a variety of rates, depending on the object, for everything over that.

But traveling to Europe only for the shopping bargains would be like going to the Super Bowl to buy a souvenir T shirt. Looking at the rose windows of Chartres, one of the great creations in the Western world, does not cost anything at all, nor does the view of the moon rising over the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Sights like these, combined with the pleasures of good food and drink, are the perennial bargains of European travel.

"London is everything I wanted it to be," says Bonnie Graham, a Temple University attorney, who is making her first trip to Britain. "I love it. I love it. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. It's perfect." "It's great, it's just great. We're not sleeping at all," says Carol Arend, a French teacher from Clarkston, Mich., as she sips a drink on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. In the four days since she arrived with a group of 35 students and teachers, she has done Chartres, the Loire valley chateaux, a champagne cellar near Reims, and the Eiffel Tower. Still ahead: the Louvre, Fontainebleau and a ballet.

Jack and Ann Riddle, a California couple visiting France, think their greatest bargain was getting their daughter Susan to transfer her studies from Wellesley to Aix-en-Provence, a saving of about one-third. "I've lived here so much more comfortably than at Wellesley," agrees Susan. "There I pinch every penny. Here I can eat out." Says another Wellesley student, Virginia Baskett, newly returned from Greece: "Half our class is missing, studying abroad."

( Greg Hubbard, a Los Angeles construction worker, and his wife Linda both converted to Catholicism recently, and they made their first trip to Italy, a two-week tour of Rome and five other cities, for $2,500. "It was nicer than we thought it would be," says Linda, "particularly when you compare it with all that neon we get at home."

Beyond such traditional attractions as London, Paris and Rome lie the superbargains. Denmark is quite cheap; Spain and Portugal are very cheap. A palatially balconied room at the onetime royal hunting lodge in Portugal's magnificent Bucaco Forest costs $35 a couple a night. The pottery shops around the noble monastery of Batalha or the Moorish stronghold of Cintra sell beautiful 18th century-style china for prices as low as $7 a plate. Greece is beyond cheap, particularly if you concentrate on the best bargain it has to offer: find yourself an out-of-the-way island in the Aegean--almost any of them will serve--and spend a week doing nothing. The wild flowers are already out by now, whole fields of yellow and purple, and there are rumors that habitable seaside cottages can still be bought outright for as little as $5,000.

For the adventurous, Eastern Europe provides a wide range of possibilities, from the art treasures of Leningrad's Hermitage Museum to mountain climbing in the Caucasus to inspecting the Transylvanian castle of Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula (just turn right at the Borgo Pass). "East Germany is probably the best single buy in travel right now," says Bern Marcowitz, vice president of the Cortell Group, a New York tour organizer who offers a 15-day, four-country tour that starts in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. Cost: $712. "Eastern Europe in general is more inexpensive, and it's attracting a lot of Americans who are looking for something new."

The wave of tourists in some ways resembles the first postwar invasion of Americans arriving in the 1950s; it is beginning to arouse the same kind of carping among Europeans, some of whom can no longer afford the shopping expeditions to the U.S. that they enjoyed a few years ago when the dollar was very low. Foreign travel to the U.S. has declined 10% since 1981.

Kenneth Lawson, a Seattle lawyer, was surprised to find that an old friend in France had become somewhat chilly. "He constantly made digs about how the artificially high rate of the dollar was ruining the franc and the French economy," says Lawson. "I'd definitely say the high dollar has hindered our ! friendship." A Los Angeles sales-promotion executive, Vicki Carr, experienced some hostility in Britain about lavish American spending on luxuries that Britons can ill afford. Says she: "In the past I felt Londoners were very, very friendly. This year they were not that helpful, not that willing. I felt antagonism. We heard from people there that they resent Americans coming over and buying."

And a few Americans, inevitably, tell sad tales of money running out, no matter what the rate of exchange. Stephanie Marcus, 20, of Palo Alto, Calif., was sitting glumly in the waiting room of the Munich railroad station not long ago, pondering the fact that she had a plane ticket home from London but no money to get there from Munich. "I had hoped to get a job of some kind in Italy, but I hadn't set up anything beforehand," she said ruefully. "Then somebody picked my pocket in Rome, and the problem got serious." (Yes, she is safely back in the U.S., thanks to money wired by Papa.)

The 1985 American wanderlust is reaching such a pitch that tourists are thronging even to places where no bargains can be found. Take Israel, where tourist prices are pegged to the dollar and inflation today is running at 400% a year. A woman from New York recently spent $50 to buy her son a sweater that she could have found for $30 at home. Still, bookings for Passover and Easter from the U.S. (about half Christian, half Jewish) were more than 25% ahead of last year's rates, and the 1984 overall total of 400,000 American travelers to Israel is expected to increase substantially in 1985.

Fear seems to be the one force that keeps the American tourist away. Mexico, for example, has been hurt not only by inflation but also by news stories about the murder of a U.S. narcotics agent and the kidnaping or disappearance of six other Americans in Guadalajara. Though inbound flights are still full, the number of Americans arriving by land is down an estimated 15%. India, though recently popularized in the film A Passage to India and the TV series The Jewel in the Crown, has been shunned by many potential visitors because of the rioting that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. To a lesser extent, Jamaica, Brazil and the Philippines have also suffered from reports of violence.

Short of actual gunfire, though, it is hard to deter American tourists from their wanderings. The more exotic the place the better. Why cruise to the familiar Bahamas when the Queen Elizabeth 2 now sails to places like the Thailand resort of Pattaya? Why shop at Harrods when you can buy diamonds and sapphires at a discount in Hong Kong?

Not every spot in the Far East is a shopper's paradise. Japan, for example, attracts about 500,000 Americans a year, but most are on business, and as one of them puts it, "At 50 bucks for a steak dinner, no one's about to burst into song." Frank Morrison, an AT&T executive, brought along a catalog from a New York discount camera store. Says he: "I carried it around to six different stores here to see if anyone could meet or beat the prices. None came within 20%."

Manila is expensive too, and so is Singapore, but a bargain-hungry tourist just has to keep looking. On Bali's beautiful Kuta Beach, small hotels known as losmens offer clean, comfortable rooms for $5 a night, and copies of name- brand California swimming suits sell for $2. Houston Travel Agent Esther Grossberg returned from Hong Kong with 21 silk dresses, ten pairs of Charles Jourdan shoes, and a galaxy of jade, ivory and turquoise, all acquired at bargain prices. "I feel like I'm stealing," she says, "but could you resist? I tell everybody to take along an empty suitcase. I never travel without one."

Even in East Africa, which has been afflicted by drought and famine, Americans are arriving to watch the spectacle of the great animal migrations across the plains. The Kenyan capital of Nairobi will be so crowded this summer by thousands of delegates to a U.N. women's conference and a Eucharistic Congress that most ordinary tourists will be banned from all the main hotels in the city. Nonetheless, light planes fly directly from Nairobi's airport to an assortment of safari lodges where the prices of rooms range from $92 to as low as $30 a night. There is even a Hilton Salt Lick Lodge on the edge of Kenya's Tsavo National Park, with a tunnel that enables the tourist to approach surreptitiously to within a few feet of an elephants' watering hole.

The most elegant way to watch the annual migration of wild animals between Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve and Tanzania's Serengeti Park is by balloon, at dawn. It costs about $100 an hour to soar over the galloping herds of zebras, wildebeestes, gazelles and giraffes, with no sound but the pounding of hooves below and the morning breeze rustling the balloon's wickerwork basket. The rental price includes a champagne breakfast after landing.

Though a few hunters still pursue big game in the Central African Republic or ) Botswana, the most fashionable safaris these days involve a quest to see the mountain gorilla in the bamboo thickets of Rwanda's Virunga National Park. For $300, the searchers fly from Nairobi to the town of Ruhengeri, then (for $200 more) proceed into the park on foot. Guided parties are limited to ten visitors (there is a long waiting list) so that the mighty gorillas will not be frightened.

One exotic land that is both cheap and expensive, in varying ways, is China, which is making a sometimes bewildering effort to attract Western tourists. While airlines in much of the world have been cutting prices, the Chinese national airline, CAAC, which is reputed to be one of the world's least comfortable and least safe, recently increased the round-trip fare between Hong Kong and Peking from $370 to $385 in an effort to earn more foreign currency.

One of the first Chinese a tourist encounters is likely to be a scruffy man in a battered leather cap and a frayed coat who sidles up and mutters, "Change money?" He will offer about 1.70 renminbi, the Chinese currency, for 1 waihuijuan, an exchange unit issued only to foreigners (at 2.8 per dollar) and officially worth the same as a renminbi. If the man in the battered leather cap gets caught, he will probably be imprisoned. An American tourist discovered in such a deal would probably be fined and "invited" to get out of the country. But no tourist is yet known to have been nabbed changing money on the black market.

Inflation is a problem in China, not because of the powerful dollar but because the government is abolishing many subsidies and price controls. Overall consumer prices rose about 18% last year, and food costs may go up as much as 30% this year. To lure in more tourists, China has gone on a hotel- building spree. The results, often co-financed or managed by foreigners, are comfortable but not cheap. Rooms at Peking's new Great Wall Sheraton Hotel cost $100 and up a day, drinks for two at the hotel's Cosmos Club disco can run to $20, and dinner up on the 21st floor can reach $40 a person before the roast duck ever appears. Still, a bargain hunter can find interesting propositions. A yard of good silk costs only about $4, a cashmere sweater $25. Antique furniture confiscated from prosperous officials during Mao's Cultural Revolution is turning up in state-run stores. A desk from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) can be found for as little as $250.

The number of Americans visiting China is still relatively small (54,000 tourists and 159,000 businessmen last year), but the Chinese announced in February that they are increasing the number of cities and counties open to foreigners from 148 to 257. In the West, imaginative travel agents keep dreaming up new sales pitches. A New York operation called Special Tours for Special People offers 30 different trips to China, including a garden tour, a pottery tour, a five-day cruise on the Yangtze River and a program for Spanish-speaking people. Prices: $2,695 and up. How could anyone have said that East and West would never meet?

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that when the first Dutch sailors neared what they would call Nieuw Amsterdam and saw the "fresh, green breast of the new world," man came "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." Fitzgerald wrote in hyperboles, for he had never taken a five-day cruise on the Yangtze River, not to mention going in search of the mountain gorillas of Virunga Park. Something commensurate to the capacity for wonder is on display, somewhere in the world, every day. All that is needed is a certain amount of curiosity and a certain number of traveler's checks.

FOOTNOTE: *This year also marks the 300th birthday of George Frederick Handel and Domenico Scarlatti. For musical good measure, it is the 100th birthday of Alban Berg and the 400th of Heinrich Schutz. Anniversary mania knows no bounds: the French are observing the 100th year since the death of Victor Hugo, the British the 500th since the start of the Tudor dynasty, and the Germans the 2,000th since the Romans' founding of Augsburg.

FOOTNOTE: *VAT rates are 15% in Britain, 8% to 33% in France and up to 38% in Italy.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/London, Robert T. Grieves/Peking and Alastair Matheson/Nairobi, with other bureaus