Don’t Travel “De Luxe” Says Rosita Forbes, Explorer

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 1 September 1928, Page 27

Don’t Travel “De Luxe” Says Rosita Forbes, Explorer

PtplJE interest of a holiday is in exact inverse ratio to the amount of money sp j you spend on it. I doubt if a plutocrat " has ever been known to tave a real holiday. All he does is to change the view outside the winnows of a series of palaces, ashore and afloat, or between the headlights of super-cylindered speed models. It isn’t a bit of use doing the same tilings in a different setting. Therefore, the poorer you are, the more likely your holiday to be full of excitements and adventures—in fact, of the unexpected. The most a train-de-luxe can do for you is to de-rail! otherwise it is bound to arrive at its recognised and conventional terminus, but, if you set forth on foot, in a rackety two-seater that doesn’t mind bumps, astride anything from a donkey to a water-buffalo, there’s no knowing where you may get to!

Pocketing Your Luggage Luggage is almost as detrimental to an adventurous holiday as timetables or a bursting notecase. What are pockets for except to carry all the luggage necessary to a real holiday? Once, long ago, I landed in Capetown with £SO and a blank four months in front of me. I spent most of my wealth on a horse, and with holsters bulging with camera, revolver, toothbrush, and a clean shirt —I don’t think there was anything else except a comb—l started riding north.

I don’t remember what happened to my original steed, but I changed it for innumerable others at hospitable police stations. I slept in native kraals, where I tied up the end of the greasy pillows to prevent the animal life exuding; in a mission hut, whose solitary inmate had incurred the wrath of the local witch-doctor and expected to be murdered within the week—the m’pane bushes by his door were already decorated with human intestines as a warning of what was to come! —and in a desolate kaffir store whose owner had once been at Eton, but who had “gone native” so whole-heartedly that I couldn’t connect him with the immaculately-flan-nelled group whose photograph was the sole decoration of a mud and thatch hovel.

Eventually I reached the Zambesi, which I crossed in a canoe hollowed out of a trunk, and propelled by six shrieking blacks, who became nearly epileptic with excitement as the prow caught in the swirl above some falls. I might have been going still, but a paternal governor intervened and sent me to visit King Khama of Bechuanaland, who invited me to be his hundredth or five-hundredth wife, with the remark that I was “too thin to be worth many cows.” Another time I was scuttling across North Africa in a car which looked like a biscuit-box impaled on a sewing machine, and we caine to a tangle of barbed wire, in the middle of which lurked a mud pillar-box that was really a fort.

A Meal of Octopuses The Italian officer commanding it was most kind. He fed me on little octopuses, swimming in oil, their insides scooped out and filled with garlic, and lent me a camp-bed which collapsed whenever I moved; but he warned me that, outside the wire, life was. to say the least of it, uncertain. His corporal had been found with a knife in his back a yard or two from the wall, so, when strange, stertorous sounds broke the stillness of midnight, I imagined fresh horrors, and, shivering, opened my door. Outside lay a roll of carpet which gurgled and stuttered. Gingerly, I poked it ... to discover that it was merely my sentry, asleep (of course!) and snoring!

In Samoa another girl and I went to look at a volcano, looked too long, and had to spend the night, head to feet, on the table in an empty pros-

pecting hut, while our retinue of a dozen flower-clad islanders slumbered on the floor, close-packed as sardines, ghostf r ° f WJld boar ’ ’ ’ and the lc^al On that occasion our luggage seems to have consisted solely of a mosquito net, which we draped over us from riding boots to heads. I woke in moonlight to find bites superimposed on bites, till my skin looked like the raised map of a mountainous country, and the filched net protecting the slumbers of the smug and cannv Samoans! I am sure one ought’nt to have to look nice on a holiday, and the first thing to do is to love every kind of lookingglass. If I were a man, I would grow thickets of beard and whisker and hide among their stubble! A holiday is a completely physical thing in which we revert to a cheerful paganism. It should have no particular goal and a time-limit as elastic as possible. After all, the world is as wide as your imagination, and if that be limited to yet another golf course, or the newest macadamised road, you must, of course, holiday in the wake of Croesus. But, if the horizon tempts you, every tramp burdened with copra or bananas or hemp is wallowing down the strange waters, the bells of every caravan echo between strange mountains. The world is yours and the map your passport!

Chasing a Smell I’ve arrived at a French inn in darkness and chased the smell of garlic to a pillow stuffed with it, within ten miles of a steam-heated hotel, and woken in a France entirely new to me, where they even spoke a new language. (Incidentally the coffee was mixed with onion and red pepper!) I’ve deserted a Government House, replete with modern comfort, to be the 'guest of shock-headed Fijians in their haystack huts, and stepped bare-footed in the night on to the back of a wet hen bent on laying an egg among my scattered garments. The feel of damp feathers on my sole was unpleasant—the wreck of the egg still more so! The great thing on a holiday is just to start —never mind about arriving anywhere. Leave all your habits behind. Be prepared to eat anything, from sea-worms grilled in a leaf to stewed locusts, which taste like spinach, and don’t be too particular about washing. Catering for the Clean! I once asked a German inn-keeper for a bath, and his retort was instantaneous. “Nothing doing. I only cater for clean people here!” In Syria the same request produced a cupful of liquid, scented with mint; in Abyssinia, a goat-skin in which the water was thick and coffee-coloured; and, in Japan, a hot sulphur spring on the hillside, packed with lobstercoloured men and women, all bpiling together in their birthday suits! Nothing matters on a holiday—except comfortable boots. The sun is your best watch, and remember, if you’re in the right mood, anything may happen round the next corner!