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GREECE is expecting to top the 1,000,000 mark in tourists for the first time, and a big attraction, as usual, will be Athens and the islands in the Aegean Sea. For the first time, tourists will have an alternative to bumping from site to site by bus. Instead, ruin viewers can sail the wine-dark sea in comfort on a scenic three-day cruise (for from $75 to $160) aboard the Meltemi, which stops at ports near Delphi, Epidaurus and Corinth.
EASTERN EUROPE is at last beginning to grab its share of the tourist business. Budapest's reputation as a swinging capital has penetrated the Iron Curtain. Czechoslovakia offers a Mozart festival, and of late has become downright comradely toward tourists. Says Harvard Square Travel Agent Vladimir Kazan, a Czech-born American citizen who was once jailed in Prague: "From my cellmates, I understand the country is cultivating good restaurants, picturesque cities and reasonably good hotels. I hear they're really catering to Americans." Despite his own unhappy experience, Kazan heartily recommends a visit. Soviet Russia, this year celebrating the 50th anniversary of its revolution, expects 2,000,000 visitors (about 40,000 of them Americans), and is laying on 140 special trains and extra Aeroflot flights.
YUGOSLAVIA today is the best bargain in Europe. For the past six years, tourism has been increasing at the staggering rate of 25% a year: 15 million visited there last year, and in 1967 there will be even more, largely because Yugoslavia has flung open its borders with a no-visa-required policy for everyone. Excellent hotels have sprung up along the Dalmatian coast, especially at Split and Dubrovnik. Rates remain low ($14 a day, including meals), and additional private-enterprise restaurants are being encouraged. To speed tourists in and out, there are direct flights from Rome and a new, two-lane asphalt highway. Only drawback: in rushing the new road to completion, no guard rails were installed along nearly 400 miles of highway that winds hundreds of feet above the Adriatic.
AFRICA looms big, beautiful and relatively inexpensive for voyagers who hanker for some spoon-fed adventure. In Nairobi, a visitor can step off an airplane and, within ten minutes by car, be in the wilds of the Dark Continent, watching an entire Bronx Zoo on the loose. Tourists can travel 8,500 ft. up Mount Kenya to the bamboo-jungle-surrounded Secret Valley Game Lodge, a two-story building set on tree-trunk stilts, rent a room for $15 a day (including meals) and gaze in perfect safety at leopards that slink out of the night to feed on baited venison beneath a battery of floodlights. In the "other Africa"—to the north—the scenes and the accommodations are considerably different. Algeria has fallen far behind in tourist facilities. But in Morocco, there are hundreds of miles of beaches in the Blue Country, where the Sahara Desert touches the Atlantic and the sun shines at least 300 days a year. The capital city of Rabat now has a luxurious new Hilton Hotel (up to $18 a day), a swinging night life, and a high-powered crowd of jet-set visitors, who include Princess Lee Radziwill, Mick Jagger and Paul Getty Jr. (who recently bought a Marrakesh palace).