NEW TRAVEL IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 February 1939, Page 9

NEW TRAVEL IDEAS

TOURS IN FRANCE & MOROCCO.

The quest for something new, something different, has spread to the world of travel, and tourists who have taken the habit of handing their money and their troubles over to a tour•ist agency which will show them the world are now asking with the rest for new travel ideas. The coming tourist season will see a number of novelties in tourist travel. For instance, there is talk of a horseback tour in the Pyrenees, of which the organisers promise that for a given number of days the party will travel across country and see nothing of motor vehicles or anything modern. Another tour will be exclusively for people who find their chief pleasure | in fishing. They will be invited to group themselves into fishing parties and fish in the famous rivers of France.

Morocco, however, caps all with a new tour that will take parties to a newly opened up part of Morocco on the southern side of the Atlas mountains. The range will be crossed by a snow-covered pass at an attitude of over 7,000 feet, to follow northwards a valley and plateau bordering on the Sahara. Here the parties will be in constant touch with the Foreign' Legion so that the tour will travel along military roads and will in fact in a way be a close-up study of that famous international corps. At two points the travellers will pass the night at military posts under their protection. At another poirft of the trip a palm forest with over 500,000 palms will be visited, and the party will pass through a gorge of rocks, following a pathway sixty feet wide, with the walls of the gorge rising sheer each side to a height of 650 feet, almost twice the height of St Paul’s. Berber villages, Arab villages and small towns with their mosques, minarets and kasbahs and their picturesque bazaars will be visited before the Atlas mountains are crossed once more. This is the first tour of its kind which will be half civil and half military.