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The cluster of green, sugarloaf islands huddles close to the China coast. As the jet airliner glides in, sunlight reflects from the rippled sea, the brown batwing sails of Chinese junks turn in the wind. The travelers look down on rocky hills with terraced fields, deeply indented coves alive with sampans, a wide harbor carrying a honking traffic of freighters, tugs, barges and ferries.
The jet swoops past the great city rising from the water's edge toward the towering Peak—shipyards, smoking factories, villas drowned in gardens, balconied tenements, squatters' huts clinging to bare rock, bright new skyscrapers still wrapped in bamboo scaffolding. Coming in low over rooftops fluttering with blue and white laundry, the jet roars down upon the 8,000-foot runway of Kai Tak Airport. Thus, last week, another planeload of tourists landed amid the sights, sounds, smells and bracing excitement of Hong Kong.
Danger Zones. The jet age has narrowed the vast Pacific Ocean to a sleeper jump. Bustling Hong Kong, served by 1,000 flights a month, is 14 hours from San Francisco, only 18½ hours over the North Pole from New York City. The Far East used to be the domain of the reckless adventurer or the traveler who could afford the money and leisure for a two-month cruise. Now Tokyo, Bangkok and Hong Kong are as accessible as Paris, Rome or London. Ten thousand tourists a week pour into the Orient, and many, traveling economy class, pay as little as $1,500 round trip.
Travel in Europe follows well-worn paths in and out of cathedrals, galleries, great museums and famous restaurants. The U.S. visitor is culturally never very far from home. But the Far East is a plunge into the strange and unfamiliar. Music suddenly becomes an atonal screeching; men bow instead of shaking hands, sit cross-legged on the floor to eat dinner and mostly wear twisted cloths or even skirts instead of trousers. The straight lines of Western architecture are replaced by curlicues and curves; landscapes become shrouded in Oriental mist; night sounds have an uneasy difference. And poverty is not a shabby destitution but something as stark, as cruel and as immediate as death.
Different Faces. The Far East has nearly as many different faces as it has gods. Some tourists try to capture its flavor by slipping into Japanese kimonos and sleeping on the tatami floors of Kyoto inns, where Kannon, the goddess of mercy, dreams among the maple trees. They go as pilgrims to the Great Buddha of Nakamura or, if they get as far as Southeast Asia, stand in awed silence at Angkor, whose 40 square miles of ruins in the Cambodian jungle are about all that remain of the ancient 8th to 11th century Khmer civilization.