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In Trippe's world trading view, such mass tourism, besides being fun for the tourist and a source of profit for Pan American Airways, is also a painless means to a practical end. It is an ideal way of spreading U.S. dollars abroad, so that the world can pay for U.S. exports. Last year American tourists spent $850 million overseas. Trippe preaches that if such spending could be multiplied, it would take much of the cost of EGA and other world recovery programs off the taxpayer's back and strengthen the U.S. as a trading nation.
To lure his customers abroad with all the comforts of home, Trippe is promoting an $80 million chain of eleven tourist hotels. Local capital is financing them, but Pan Am's Intercontinental Hotels Corp., holding a token 1% interest, will run them. Costing $5 to $10 million each, they will dot South America, with more to be built later in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One in Montevideo is almost finished; others are abuilding in Caracas and Bogotá.
Fly Away. Even now, well-heeled nomads can outdo Phileas Fogg by taking a trip around the world in 6½ days for only $1,700. Returning from such a jaunt, wiry Eddie Eagan, New York State boxing commissioner and a Yale classmate ('21) of Trippe's, assured the Circumnavigators Club that it was a cinch: all you needed was a toothbrush, a good book and a few sleeping pills.
Foreign air travel does not have to be that strenuous. Last week the thousands who flitted between the continents at high speed found plane riding at least as comfortable as a Greyhound bus, perhaps a little more confining, but with vastly more fun at the stopovers.
Trippers who island-hopped through the turquoise Caribbean were met at San Juan by a waiter with trays of Daiquiris. At Trinidad, they heard the calypso singers and the throbbing steel bands, and found everything up-to-date: the airport was an awkward 17 miles from Port of Spain. At musty Belem, they were met by the weird sounds & sights of the jungle and, in the air-conditioned bar of Pan Am's guest house, by a more startling sight—the statue of a single-breasted Amazon.
After flying down to Rio, and running a gantlet of unhurried customs men, they sprawled on curving Copacabana Beach, drank mild guarana in the cafés, and stared at the jungled hillsides, splashed with the purple bloom of the quaresma, the "tree of Lent."
They got used to new smells—including the acrid insecticides that were sprayed through the plane before tropical stops. On the 8½-hour hop across the South Atlantic to Dakar, plane riders learned how uneventful a trip could be: in hours of staring out the window, a pair of rocks in mid-Atlantic called Peter & Paul was all there was to see below. They talked, drank cocktails, ate from trays, played gin rummy, and waited for the ocean to end at Dakar. Some flew the new air trade route south to "Jo'burg" (Johannesburg). Others went north to Lisbon where they found the almond trees blooming by day and the mournful fado echoing in the cafes at night.
The New Ocean. "The air," wrote Sir George Cayley, an 18th Century plane designer (who never got off the ground), "is an uninterrupted, navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man's door." It remained for Trippe to use the air to build an empire.