TRAVELLING LIFE

CAROL WRIGHT

Paris's image as a tourist city has not been rosy for some years now. She has been accused of high prices, rudeness and com- mercialisation of the visitor. Yet in spring, when travel thoughts turn to early love, there is nostalgia for her chestnut avenues, 'bouquinistes' along the quays, 'boule' games in the Tuileries and 'creperies' on the left bank.

Though my world-widened eyes are more cynical than when I was sixteen and idolised Paris, I'm happy we've come to good terms with each other again. Since I saw her last, she's cleaned her face. Public buildings like the Opera. Madeleine and Arc de Triomphe have lost their soot. The once brooding sullen crouch of the Louvre is now sunnily stretched with the recently added Maillol statues in front of nude ladies in attitudes of slipping on the bath soap.

Double-decker buses have appeared. Lady taxi drivers—more deadly than the male— have multiplied along with the traffic jams. The vegetable markets have moved out of Paris, but Les Halles is being preserved as a gastronomic and exhibition centre. By night, there is still onion soup and trout and dancing, by day the excellent 'Pharamonde' for sea food in its decor of fruit-decorated tiles round vast mirrors. The Flea Market at Clignancourt, that great Sunday morning excursion spot, still flourishes with extra impetus from a new inexpensive fashion gar- ment section: the Marche Malic.

Essential Paris remains untouched: the superb arrangements of Impressionist paint- ings in the Jeu de Paume, the romance of the tapestries of la Dame a la Licorne in the Cluny Museum. Walks in the desert dust of the Tuileries precede tea and cakes in the English tea-room above W. H. Smith's book- shop in the Rue de Rivoli.

The hotels, blessedly, haven't gone clinic- ally modern and lost their character. They are still mainly rambling, creaking buildings

with narrow stairs, rooms furnished in vague plush and print fin de .siecle decor. Most

fashionable is L' Hotel (£10 a night), 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, the place where Oscar Wilde died, Mistinguett lived and Maestroianni has a suite, The rooms are small but lushly fur- nished. The basement flagged dining-room with caged doves and fountain is pleasantly rural.

Another historic piece of Paris. the Con- tinental Hotel overlooking the Tuileries, has been taken over by Intercontinental Hotels.

Luckily they have preserved its Empress Eugenie period charm while adding 'tout confort'. The splendid façade remains with its narrow ledges along which English spy Major John Goldsmith escaped from the Germans. Cost here is £10 a night but it is so central, one benefits in taxi savings. I normally hesitate to recommend hotel res- taurants but La Rotisserie Rivoli at the Intercontinental has superb regional French menus; pumpkin soup and breast of goose from Normandy were delicious. Lower- priced hotels worth noting are the Metropole Opera, Rue de Grammont; and on the left bank the Hotel Saint Simon, 14, Rue de Saint Simon. Of course on a strict budget prices can be lowered and, though individ- ual travel comfort may be lost on charters, British tour operators are offering eight- day bed and breakfast tours to Paris for £19.90.

The late spring offers clear light and flow- ers among the fluted columns of ruins in the Greek isles. The sun is hot enough to tan, though the sea is chill. Greece has just become very approachable with low-priced charters and the cruising boom starting now. These highlight the pricing difference be- tween buying a package and travelling on one's own. An eight-day cruise—including flying to the joining port—in a four-berth cabin can be as low as £32 (£53 in the best cabin) in spring, while the scheduled tourist return fare is £99.65. The cheaper cruises tend to be more cramped in facilities and do not take in many historical sites.

Though Greece now has a good selection of comfortable hotels, especially on Corfu and Crete—two of the most currently popu- lar—still the best unbeaten way to enjoy a rich diet of ruins is on Swan's Hellenic cruises. Now in their thirteenth year, the cruises may seem highly priced at £350 for two weeks, but everything is included: BEA Comet flights to joining port, and all ex- cursions, guides, tips and the services of a professional photographer, as well as the best lecturers on archaeology, theology and botany.

Swan's cruises are not dull: the lectures often lose out to the swimming pool on board and sun and swimming time are built into the shore excursions. I remember eating good Turkish food on board the 'Ankara', the ship the company always charters, danc- ing to an Italian band after dinner, waking up in yet another navy blue bay edged with sugar-cube houses; padding up Patmos on donkey-back to look back at the misted Cyclades, picnicking under sparse trees in Turkey on the way to Troy, watching the sunset tinge the terraces of volcanic San- torini, dawn rising among the minarets as we glided down the Golden Horn, and listen- ing to a clergyman read St John in the great acoustically-perfect theatre at Ephesus.

Like swallows returning, a sign of spring is the reappearance in British ports of liners coming home after wintering on the Carib- bean circuit. Among them are '0E2' and 'France', the last of-.the big ones. From the end of April they run a pooled service across the Atlantic to New York.

Though there is now no call for a sea service to the States in winter the popu- larity of these two ships in summer perhaps underlines the point that if time is no object then more of us would prefer sea to air.

The Long Weekend (Friday to Tuesday) is how '0E2' bills her crossing and certainly with her sister ship (Trance' carries sixty- seven varieties of champagne on hoard, and has carpeted dog kennels complete with us fire hydrants and Parisian lamp-posts to make dogs feel at home) is one of the last personal pamper services left in the travelling world. Last year hijacking and dislike of jumbo jets added more people to her pas- senger lists.

Airlines should take a more sympathetic look at the needs of their passengers. They preach to us of space and economy; now they should heed the passengers' pleas. More trolleys are needed to cope with even mini- mal hand luggage on those endless corridors (allegedly a maximum length of 1,000 feet) from plane side to customs where the air-

line, not the airport, is responsible. Delay lounges should be set • up to relieve over- crowding in normal lounges, which on foggy days become Black Holes of Calcutta (Gat- wick now has a delay lounge with Tv). Seat allocation at check-in is perfectly practicable and prevents that brutal stampede to the plane to get the 'best' seats: on short dis- tance routes, airlines still don't bother. How- ever, BEA says it is trying this out experi- mentally this summer.

Short flights and the need to serve a meal (i.e. to hand out the pre-prepared trays like dealing a pack of cards) are blamed for poor drinks service. If the little dollies can't cope, why don't we copy States airlines and put order forms with money envelope in every seat pocket before take-off? The stewardess can colleot these and serve drinks smartly after take-off. Putting the girls on commis- sion, as Caledonian-Bun does, also works wonders of efficiency in service.