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Perhaps the greatest single sight in Africa is the incredible Victoria Falls on the border of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (reachable from Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia). It is worth stopping en route just to marvel at a 350-ft.-high (and more than a mile wide) mountain of flood water shedding itself endlessly at the rate of 75 million gallons a minute. Moving on to the Union of South Africa, most travelers find it well worth stopping at Kruger National Park, 8,000 sq. mi. of game preserves and roads, where animals roam as freely as children in a playground. Bustling Johannesburg is uninspiring except for a glimpse at the gold mines and a look at the Sunday morning native dances at the mines (tourists rarely get a closeup feel of apartheid that is any different from life in the U.S. South). But Cape Town's Table Mountain, with its hovering, clothlike clouds, is an unforgettable sight. The best last look at the continent: a cableway ride up Table Mountain, from which visitors can see the sprawl of the city, its gleaming bracelet of beaches and the ink-blue Atlantic.
Asia & Beyond Landscape of Gods
In the unlikely event that one indestructible tourist had managed to survive the festivity of Tahiti, the retsina of Greece, the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and the elephants of Africa, he would still have half a world left to explore. First of all, there would be Asia, beset by war and the threat of war, but continuously fascinating to Americans with its landscapes of serene stone gods and scurrying humanity, of temples and hovels. There would be the neon-lit anthill of Tokyo and the quiet blessing bestowed by Fuji; and there would be the rustic Japanese provinces—the inns where travelers sleep on mats on clean floors, the hot sand beaches of Beppu where people by the hundreds bury themselves to the head, the mass geisha parade in Noboribetsu.
There would be India, its poverty dressed in the brightest of saris, with squalor and color, dirt and grandeur existing side by side. Along the famous "tourist triangle," made up of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, the traveler could see that greatest but most rewarding of all tourist cliches, the Taj Mahal, and the intricately erotic sculptures on the temple walls of Khajraho, traveling, if he wishes, in taxis that carry iceboxes filled with Coke.
Not far away is the Himalayan-shrouded land of Nepal and the Valley of Katmandu, glorified in Kipling's "the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu." There, at the Buddhist shrine of Boddhnath, travelers can sip Tibetan tea (flavored with yak butter and salt), and sometimes see the local lama, who wears a silk, saffron-colored Eisenhower jacket. Local taboo: treading on stones in the street that are smeared with yellow or red powder or paste (they are humble objects of worship).
There would be the ancient settlements of the Middle East: Baalbek, in the mountain ranges of Lebanon, where the 65-ft. columns of the Temple to Jupiter still stand; Jordan's Petra, "the rose-red city half as old as time," where travelers can sleep in the cave tombs of the Nabatean Kings; and Iran's Tabriz, with its 15th century blue mosaic mosque.