ENDPAPERS
Border Lines
By LESLIE ADRIAN Russia? Ten questions. No picture. No other documentation. Twenty-four hours' turn-round. Citizens of the USSR need a visa to enter Britain. United States citizens do not. Another piece of paper I acquired from the United States Travel Service says, 'The US Travel Service pro- gram is designed primarily to promote business and pleasure travel.' I can think of one quick way to add to the pleasure.
The US'TS began its campaign to 'attract British tourists in 1962, during which time the number visiting the United States on business and pleasure has risen by about 50,000 a year. It is an expensive holiday (the average Briton parts with £235 for a two-week stay, including fares) and there are in. addition those unneces- sary, pompous formalities.
'A travel-writer friend was refused a visa to God's own country because there was no free page in his passport to accommodate it. There was room on several pages, but not one entirely blank, 'and US visas are not stamped on pages with other countries' stamps,' the man said. He got it done eventually through the press attaches office, but what poor PR from the land that in- vented public relations!
A quick look around Europe, prodded on by the desire to see just how free the free world is becoming, revealed to me that you can not only travel over most of the Continent without a visa, but even without your passport. It's less convenient, because you have to fill in long forms of indemnity (indemnifying your carrier, not yourself) and explaining yourself to frontier official4. But it can be done. A few months ago 1 left my passport at home on a two-day trip to France and no one batted an eyelid. The carbon copy of your indemnity form serves as a kind of laissez-passer and, as long as 'they' don't turn difficult, you can make the journey. If the foreign country does delay you because of having no passport, you have indemnified the airline against the cost of accommodating you while your plea goes through various channels to enable you to cross one.
Eastern Europe is, on the whole, soft about
visas. Rumania makes no charge, very little fuss and takes one day. Bulgaria is the same but charges 8s. Hungary is inefficient and slow and charges 25s. Poland asks a lot of silly questions ('What is your husband's mother's maiden. name?'), but not as many and as embarrassing as the Yanks, demands four copies of your answers and a photo, but seems uninterested in tourism. Albania won't grant visas to individual tourists at all. Yugoslavia's application is about the size of one of those cards you fill in when booking into hotels in France. No charge and one day's delay. Czechoslovakia includes cur- rency questions on the application form, which comes done up like a greetings telegram, and evi- dently expects you to use a travel agency. There is also a sinister bit about registering with the police on arrival. Apart from these, Europe seems easy enough to wander about in nowadays.
Provided, presumably, you do not do what Bernard Levin claims to have done when filling in forms at frontiers: say that your address is Buckingham Palace, Manchester, and that your father and mother were Antony and Cleopatra. I never believed that, anyway.
Seeing is not always believing. Not seeing an order form in Peter Dominic's Wine Mine, that highly entertaining wine list, I commented critically the other week. In fact I received a 'review copy,' says Anthony Hogg of Dominic's, from which the form has been removed 'in the hope that it will be judged on its literary merit, not as an organ of vulgar commerce.' Having
levoted the current list to 'Wine and Music,' I ippreciate his reaction to my apparent Philistin-
SM•
It had been a nasty wet day and the train vas an hour late. The voice over the loud- .peaker at the main-line destination apologised nost reasonably for the delay, saying that British Rail were sorry and all that but the coal had got wet.
Surprised passengers filing off the platform looked wonderingly at the loco that had hauled them 300 miles. It was a diesel.
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