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116 From Traveler to Tourist:

Will we enlarge our experience on the moon? Only until tour-ist attractions have been prepared for us there.

Even our travel literaturę has shown a noticeable change. Formerly these books brought us information about the con-duct of life in foreign courts, about burial rites and marriage customs, about the strange ways of beggars, craftsmen, tavern hosts, and shopkeepers. Most travel literaturę long remained on the pattern of Marco Polo. Since the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, however, and especially in the twentieth century, travel books have increasingly become a record not of new information but of personal “reactions.” From “Life in Italy,” they become “The American in Italy.” People go to see what they \—--2>already know is there. The only thing to record, the only possible source of surprise, is their own reaction.

The foreign country, like the celebrity, is the confirmation of a pseudo-event. Much of our interest comes from our curi-osity about whether our impression resembles the images found in the newspapers, in movies, and on television. Is the Trevi Fountain in Romę really like its portrayal in the movie Three Coins in the Fountain? Is Hong Kong really like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing? Is it fuli of Suzie Wongs? We go not to test the image by the reality, but to test reality by

the image. Of course

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travel adventure is still possible. Nowadays, bowever, it is seldom the by-product of people going places. We must scheme, and contrive, and plan long in advance (at great expense) to be assured that when we arrive there we will encounter something other than the antiseptic, pleasant, relaxing, comfortable experience of the hundreds of thou-sands of other tourists. We must fabricate risks and dangers, or hunt them out. The writings of Richard Halliburton (The Royal Road to Romance, 1925; The Glorious Adventure, 1927; New World to Conąuer, 1929; The Flying Carpet, 1932; and Seven League Boots, 1935), became popular at the very time when travel for thousands of Americans was becoming a bland and riskless cominodity. To make a glorious adventure out of travel, Halliburton had to relive an-