The Sarong Comes From Saks

I Decided a long time ago that there are only two essential and immutable rules of pleasure travel: (1) If you kind of think you might like to go, go. (2) Keep your eye on your luggage. My ability to abide strictly by the first rule has been somewhat restricted, of course, by the bankruptcy laws of the state of New York, but I do my best, bolstered by the knowledge that I have never regretted a trip to anywhere and that I am still trying to figure out why I passed up an opportunity to visit Alexandria in 1958 when I had gone as far as Athens anyway. (Maybe I had gone only as far as Rome, but it obviously would have been silly not to go on to Athens as long as I had gone as far as Rome.) My observance of the second rule of travel is somewhere between strict and maniacal. I am likely to hang back in the line of passengers boarding a plane in, say, Montreal, not from any fear of flying (several years ago, I discovered that I could prevent the plane I was flying on from crashing by refusing to adjust my watch to the new time zone until we were on the ground, and I have used that method successfully ever since) but from the fear that unless I see my suitcase physically lifted into the belly of the plane, I will have to fly all the way to Toronto gripped by the dread certainty that my luggage has been put on the nonstop to Caracas, Venezuela. I was the man you may have noticed at Kennedy Airport in New York trying to impress upon the TWA ticket agent my absolute certainty that three suitcases, a typewriter and a gift package of homemade cream cheese with scallions would easily fit under my seat on a flight to San Francisco. That was also me you may have seen wrestling our family's 500 pounds of luggage from some eager porter in an Italian airport-no burden being too heavy to bear if it protects me from the possibility that the porter, crazed, perhaps, by a niggardly tip he received from a U. S. Marine colonel moments before, has been searching for some American luggage to toss into the reflecting pool in front of the International Arrivals building. All in all, I manage to do a lot of traveling, and I rarely lose my luggage more than once a month.

For people who do a lot of traveling, it sometimes seems that the first rule of conversation about travel is always to imply that any place anyone else is about to visit is ruined. "I suppose Sumbawa has about had it by now," the speaker will say, leaving the unspoken implication that he managed to get in a few idyllic Sumbawan weeks before the place was overrun. There are people whose first response to being told that you are about to visit some outer island of the Marquesas is: "Pity about the Marquesas. I remember thinking years ago that if that semi-monthly prop service from Fiji ever started, that would be it." American travelers live in constant fear that the places they are about to go have been ruined by the presence of too many people like themselves.

Being ruined is not the same as being discovered. An old travel adage goes, "There are only a few remaining undiscovered places in the world, and none of them have enough clean towels." The economics governing hotel accommodations in rarely visited places means that a comfortable hotel becomes economically feasible when the number of tourists increases to the point at which the reason for going to the place no longer exists. There are, of course, exceptions. Once, due to a fortuitous mechanical problem in what was then Air Polynesia's entire fleet of plane, my wife and I were forced to remain in the Kingdom of Tonga for a week that I had planned to spend doing some fairly dismal work in Pago Pago-which is, despite the romance its name conjures, fairly dismal itself. The Kingdom of Tonga turned out to be a paradise that had been made quite a bit more paradisiacal a couple of years before, when, in anticipation of the important international visitors expected for the coronation of King Taufaahau Tupou IV, the capital city of Nukualofa became blessed with the kind of first-rate hotel that would ordinarily not be built until there were enough tourists to support four or five boutiques and a Hertz agency. As a sort of bonus to the arrangement, the most splendid public functions in the kingdom were held in the hotel's outdoor dining room, so that the few overnight guests became included merely by showing up for dinner-a policy that permitted us to be present at the Miss Nukualofa contest and to cheer home as the winner a young woman who was sponsored by a local bakery and entered as Miss Friendly Island Biscuits.

There is a theory among some heavy travelers-it is known as the Acapulco Law-that the last accessible undiscovered place was discovered sometime around the first or second week of August 1968 and was ruined by the middle of the following summer. According to those who believe in the Acapulco Law, there are so many tourists in so many places these days that the daily arrival in a town of eight tour buses, bristling with Instamatics, merely indicates that the town is more photographable and therefore probably more pleasant than a town that attracts only four tour buses daily. The law got its name from the belief that the sophisticated people who used to go to Acapulco fled as the American Express tours thundered in, ran all around the world only to find themselves, at the most, three or four weeks ahead of the American Express tours, and finally returned to Acapulco on the theory that as long as they had to be in a place overrun with tourists anyway, they might as well be in one with decent weather and a direct flight to Los Angeles. According to devout believers in the Acapulco Law, the logical extension of believing a place desirable because there are no other tourists there is to save one's money all year for three weeks in Youngstown, Ohio-a plan that at least has the virtue of avoiding all the sophisticated people who still go to Acapulco.

The Acapulco Law is tempting. Several years ago, when my wife and I were thinking about spending some time in Malindi, on the Kenyan shore of the Indian Ocean-a place that sounded rather remote to us, perhaps because we had never heard of it until we arrived in East Africa-the response of people we knew in Nairobi was that Malindi would be all right if we didn't mind German package tours. I do think there are still a few undiscovered spots in the world, some of them pleasant enough to make a man forget even his standards of towel nappiness. But, given the ordinary restrictions of time and money, practically any traveler has to do most of his traveling in a well-traveled place-and has to spend the two months before he leaves listening to his neighbor tell him that the place is completely ruined. The neighbor, of course, has never made a systematic study of what makes some well-traveled places ruined and what makes some of them as satisfying as they were when nobody there ever heard of Kleenex. Fortunately, I have. I have studied ruined cities and ruined villages and ruined beach resorts and even ruined ruins. I have studied unruined versions of each. I can now reveal my theories, known collectively as the Rules of Ruination with an Index of Spoilation Factors.

A small town is easier to ruin than a large city, and any place recommended to you by more than two people as "A Quaint Little Fishing Village" was ruined in 1959.

One ruination tipping point-the point at which the attractions a tourist is going to see exist mainly because he is going to see them-is obviously harder to reach in Paris than in a tiny village whose largest industry before discovery was a three-man gnocchi factory. The formula on ruination of the kind of place that is spoken of as a Quaint Little Fishing Village or a Charming Hill Town is simple: The number of cobblestones divided by the number of boutiques cannot, when multiplied by half of the resident potters, exceed the number of hotels in which the waiters speak English. The same results can be obtained by substituting a tenth of the English paperback books available for the number of boutiques, and the formula works equally well backward.

Contrary to common belief, the best Mexican example of the small-town law of ruination is not Taxco, which I have always thought of not as a town but as a shopping center that happened to have had a particularly tasteful architect. (A sensitive traveler who spent more than two days in the center of Taxco, staring at the discreet hand-lettered signs on the freshly whitewashed buildings, could find himself yearning for the sight of a neon hamburger sign and an auto junk yard or two.) The best example, I think, is San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era town in which a lot of the old houses have been restored with the kind of authentic Mexican detail understood only by Texas oil-men with Italian interior decorators. A town that exists only to be preserved ends up, like Wonder Bread, tasting mainly of preservatives. Walking around San Miguel is like touring the set of a movie that has hired a couple of thousand Mexican extras to play Mexicans. Being quaintly ruined may not be as bad as (continued on page 198)The Sarong comes from Saks(continued from page 158) being gaudily ruined or tackily ruined-Torremolinos, a former Little Spanish Fishing Village, can make one yearn for the sight of Taxco or even of Atlantic City-but a place that is quaintly ruined is still ruined.

A Direct Flight is very convenient, but, then, the Bus the Army provided to take you to basic training was very convenient, too.

A number of experienced ruination experts believe in something called the Law of One Block from the Square. It holds that a certain type of traveler will not go one block out of his way for anything-meaning that a bar one block from the square even in Palma de Mallorca might very well be a place in which a man can have a decent, reasonably priced drink without being asked if he has ever been to Minneapolis. A corollary to the Law of One Block from the Square is that people who won't wander a block from the square-known in the trade as One-Blockers-will not bother to go anyplace that requires an inconvenient change of planes. It is an important corollary, since there is universal agreement that One-Blockers have the highest spoilation effect of any travelers. I have calculated that being visited by three busloads of One-Blockers is the equivalent in spoilation impact of being visited for two thirds of a normal-length spring vacation by the junior class of Michigan State University. People who are fanatical about avoiding One-Blockers will, when looking for a beach resort on the Yucatán Peninsula, tend to go to Isla Mujeres instead of Cozumel, since Cozumel has a direct flight from Miami (and an airport shop called Aeroboutique). I have always suspected that the main hotel on Isla Mujeres was run by the Cornell School of Hotel Administration as a final examination-any student who cannot find 85 managerial atrocities in an hour flunks-and it is a good place for anti-One-Blockers to gather with compatible people and gloat over the fact that even a One-Blocker who wandered into the place by mistake would soon leave rather than put up with the lack of air conditioning and the surliness of the help.

If the direct-flight corollary is true, it would follow that Tahiti was ruined on the day Pan Am announced its nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Papeete. The people in Tahiti who dispute that conclusion tend to argue not that Tahiti is unruined but that it was actually ruined by the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty-a protracted filming that apparently had the cultural and economic impact of 14 American naval bases. In fact, among the numerous claims Marlon Brando may have to a place in history is the fact that there are people who hold him personally responsible for ruining the most important French possession in the Pacific.

It took a long time for the running of the bulls at Pamplona to turn into the running of the Sophomores.

A place with a strong culture is difficult to ruin, even with a mass invasion of One-Blockers. There are plenty of tourists now in Oaxaca, the great Mexican marketing city, but the Saturday market is still the same kind of legitimate extravaganza it would be if no tourists got south of Cuernavaca, and the care taken in making the craft articles sold mostly to tourists is consistent with the care a market woman takes in stacking her display of tomatoes. A traveler who in another Mexican town might point out as a symbol of ruin the peddlers trying to hustle souvenirs in outdoor cafés can bargain cheerfully with the peddlers of serapes and rebozos in Oaxaca. One reason may be quality: No Oaxacan peddler would be seen in public with one of those straw baskets covered with artificial flowers that people hustle to tourists in lesser Mexican cities.

For years after Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, the San Fermin festival at Pamplona remained the wonder of ruination specialists. A shortage of hotels kept down the number of package-tour visitors, but the number of neo-Hemingway college boys in town would ordinarily have been enough to ruin a festival twice the size of San Fermin. Yet it took years for their presence to have a significant ruination impact. The reason, I think, is simply that even the college boys who considered themselves varsity material as drinkers and carousers were so inferior to the local Basques when it came to serious celebrating that they were hardly noticed. They were the equivalent of a few neckers at an orgy.

Although you may never have heard of Peggy's Cove, it is ruined. Although you have certainly heard of the Eiffel Tower, it isn't.

Peggy's Cove is one of several dozen equally picturesque fishing coves in Nova Scotia, but, for reasons known only to the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, it is the only one that attracts any tourists. When a tourist in Nova Scotia wants to see a peaceful little fishing cove, he drives straight to Peggy's Cove and only Peggy's Cove-with the result that a list of the dozens of peaceful fishing coves in Nova Scotia would no longer include Peggy's Cove, which is peaceful only on an occasional rainy day in February. If something is built to attract tourists, though-the Eiffel Tower, for instance-it obviously can't be ruined by attracting tourists. American tourists have been able to pull off some minor acts of ruination around Buckingham Palace-the traditionally expressionless Queen's Guards finally had to be taken inside the palace gate when tourists persisted in trying to test their ability to remain traditionally expressionless while being tickled-but a huge crowd of tourists cannot ruin, say, the ceremonial changing of the guard: What's the use of having a ceremony if no one is watching?

What spoils a place obviously has to do with what the place was meant to be in the first place. One more garish hot-dog stand only enhances Coney Island. The strongest argument supporting the theory that Tahiti was ruined by a direct flight rather than by Marlon Brando is that the whole point of Tahiti-the vision its name brings of Gauguin and Tahitian maidens and waterfront bars-depended on its being out of the way. A neon sign does it much less damage than a well-designed airline advertisement telling people in Glendale and Canoga Park what a convenient place it is for a honeymoon. I realize that if ruination depends partly on whether or not a place remains true to the vision its name conjures, a place like Miami Beach is technically not ruined. Appalling, maybe, but not ruined. Liverpool is another city that has remained true to itself.

Also, I must admit, Youngstown.