Heading west
Carol Wright
The big countries, the States and Canada, deter the tourist by their very size and diversity. Does the visitor go for the big City syndrome or head west into cowboy country? Does he go for beaches, people, or the widest of wide open spaces? The culture vulture can certainly find museums aplenty of superb calibre like the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Guggenheim museum of modern art or gently old fashioned Frick in New York. Chicago too has superb art museums as well as the Adler planetarium and astronomical museum and museum of science and industry.
One can be smugly European about North America and say one does not go for the History. But the Americans are passionate about their history and its display. Like the British, the Americans have a masochistic reverence for their disasters. One can stand in memory before JFK's grave in Arlington Cemetery, Washington or see the battle panorama of Custer's Last Stand near Billings, Montana.
The crushed Red Indians are a historical embarrastsment the Americans try to hide, One does not go for the folklore, the Pathetic groups of Indians stomp, stomping before the tourists, the chuck Wagon suppers of baked beans and bacon Slopped up for 1,400 people at a time as cowboys sing hillbilly songs, the Red Indian souvenirs and the bead work marked ' made in Hong Kong.' More modern fare is topless watusi dancing, billed from 6.30 am in Las Vegas.
The folklore of today is, as they say, something else. Take a no names, no passPort TWA tour round Cape Kennedy and see the phallic, powerful rockets poised to leave the earth. In Toronto's Ontario Place take a time trip and by means of film trickery find yourself amidst a battle of the Redcoat soldiers. The Man and His World exhibition on Montreal's Expo 67 site still enchants with its displays and after dark amusement areas. Disneylands in Florida and California are as much for adults as children. The cult of Hollywood Shows off the Forest Lawns cemetery, bus tours round the outsides of thickly hedged homes of the stars, or there's the Paramount back lot to see how it's all fakcd.
Part of the trouble with assimilating the States is that it has been created in our minds on celluloid. The reality may be less glossy, yet the film image sheds a glamour hard to displace. lit is bigger and more Cinemascope than we preconceive. If you bypass the first-timers' tour of the east coast: New York, Chicago, Washington, Toronto and Montreal area, and the second time ardund the west Coast visit, then in the middle there are the Mg country lands, It surprises me that America's great tourist plus of Wild west country and cowboys is not packaged and exploited to Zoreigners.
This is the big riding-into-the-sunset scene we all came for. And it does happen. The dude ranches are maligned by their name, they are well run, some a little piously, but the horses are good quality and many are genuine working ranches where one gains a pleasant family atmosphere eating with the ranchers in their home. The guest activities are a round of local rodeos, evening hay rides, riding at dawn, as I did in Montana.
The families out west do proud the nation's hospitality reputation. Favourite entertainment is a chuck wagon breakfast with waffles, bacon, eggs, potatoes, and rich thick coffee and of course an 'eye opener' of beer and tomato juice taken among the corn shoots round a coral fence. And always there is space and horizons unfilled with humanity. The Rockies in Colorado are studded with ski resorts like Vail, which, in summer, provide comfortable bases from which to go on wilderness trails tented or on horseback.
Apart from dude ranches, and the unique delight of the small wild west style hotel at Medora in the Dakotan Badlands, the scene of Teddy Roosevelt's cattle ranching days, this ghost town has been turned into a charming old Wild west tourist town by a household cleaner millionaire. I am not warmed by the do-it-yourself, characterless American hotel: tote your bag, turn your bed, walk for miles through courts and feel isolated from life behind your double locked door watching TV. I prefer Canadian hotels where there still exists a modicum of European style service. There's the Chateau Champlain and Queen Elizabeth in Montreal, the Four Seasons in Toronto that fathered London's Inn on the Park, the Bay Shore in Vancouver with its superb yacht harbour views, the Jasper Park glamour in 'the Rockies and above all the Calgary Inn for one of the best service and value-for-money establishments in North America. Montreal still maintains a pride in providing better-than-them sophisticated food and night entertainment. Calgary, on the other hand, glows in her hearty brash western vigour. It is a bowl 'em over city in stampede time when broncos leap, bramah bulls twist cowboys to the dust and slash them with their hooves and the parties that begin at dawn are considered failures if everyone is not drunk by 9 aril. The nearby Rockies; calm trails of woods and peaks with good caravan parks can be Visisted by trailers hired through schemes run by BOAC and Air Canada. Canada is many scenes. It is slipping out from foggy Halifax harbour in the early morning to catch fish. It is watching stars from the observation car of a train snaking through the Rockies. It is talking to Red Indian chiefs while their children watch a TV western. It is:nasal-timbred Shakespeare in the tents of, Stratford and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving in dip maple leafed Laurentians and the first snow flicking through the concrete' canyons of Montreal driving everyone underground to the huge warren of warin shops and restaurants.
Packaging a continent is difficult, but with ever-lowering transatlantic fares,1 it is more possible. Trains in the States are being boosted as cheaper transport, ind with suitable overnight .,accommodation for tourists wanting to see a lot. Houlder Brothers have a USA-Canada programme Which includes use of trains. A week's holiday in New York is E1',13, ten, days costs £133. Using air antPlnotor nxch connections you can cram in *si ng seven cities in sixteen days:, (fotirteen nights) costing from £175.
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