TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 15

In the United States, the National Geographic magazine offered something different:
armchair travel. Arriving on the scene about the same time as the Baedekers, the National
Geographic was a magazine with scientific intentions to explore unmapped wilderness
and publish articles about the geography of the planet. The first editions featured stories
about the river systems of Pennsylvania and the digging of the Panama Canal, which de-
scribes the author's overland trek surveying the jungle, including nightly suppers of wild
pig, monkey or iguana. Explorations were as common as articles about “The Hermit Na-
tion of Korea” or “Peking: the City of the Unexpected.”
By the time of World War I, travelogues were taking on the air of anthropology. Travel-
ing by camel caravan across the Sahara to Tunisia's prize date gardens, Thomas H. Kear-
ney began his article with an Arab proverb that the palm tree thrives with “its feet in the
water and its head in the fire” in the Sahara oases. By the 1920s, the National Geograph-
ic had declared itself “pre-eminently a magazine of travel,” reducing its emphasis on sci-
entific explorations. Showing a new inclination to savor travel, the Geographic published
articles like a winter's “ramble” through Concord, Massachusetts, to honor Henry David
Thoreau by retracing the poet's steps to photograph “ice that looks like a loose web of small
white feathers.”
The world still needed explorers—Admiral Richard E. Byrd received the Geographic 's
Special Gold Medal of Honor in 1930 for his Arctic voyage—but more of the globe was
now pleasant enough for tourists. Authors like Rudyard Kipling and Evelyn Waugh wrote
sophisticated essays for the Geographic that resembled articles by foreign correspondents,
weaving current events into portraits of foreign cultures and countries.
A master of the genre was Rebecca West. In her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Journey
Through Yugoslavia , Ms. West produced a travelogue that any tourist could follow, bring-
ing the country and culture to life and plotting out the routes she took across the region,
painting unforgettable portraits: “Under red and white umbrellas in the market place of
Zagreb the peasants stood sturdy and square on their feet. The women wore two broad ap-
rons, one covering the front part of the body and one the back, overlapping at the sides,
and underneath showed very brave red woolen stockings. They gave the sense of the very
opposite of what we mean by the word 'peasant' when we use it in a derogatory sense,
thinking of women made doltish by repeated pregnancies and a lifetime spent in the ser-
vice of oafs in villages that swim in mud to the thresholds every winter. This costume was
evolved by women who could stride along if they were eight months gone with child, and
who would dance in the mud if they felt like it, no matter what any oaf said.”
She also explored why this region was the source of such trouble for Europe. Written as
World War II was about to break out, she presumed the traveler wanted to understand the
complicated history that had turned this corner of Europe into a tinderbox. Her goal, she
said, was to write about “the past side by side with the present it created. . . . Bosnia and
Herzegovina had driven out the Turks and had been cheated out of the freedom they had