THE HEMISPHERE: Playtime

In Latin America, it was playtime.

In Rio, ex-King Carol of Rumania and his Madame Lupescu paraded down the mosaic sidewalks that curl along the slim half-moon of Copacabana beach. Tens of thousands of cariocas, impelled by a summer heat wave, dashed into the Atlantic’s cool, green breakers. At Argentina’s Mar del Plata, the Unzues and the Martinez de Hozes and all the other upper-crusters sunned themselves at private beach clubs, far from the madding crowd, and seldom swam (the water was too cold).

In the U.S., war-rich, free-spending “North Americans” were of a mind to join the Latin American playmakers. A Town & Country survey showed “gay,” war-passed Latin America first choice among most prospective U.S. travelers planning tours abroad. The immediate problem: how to get there? Not for some six months more would the big liners cruise to Santiago, Chile and Rio. The Pan American Highway would take automobilists no farther than Mexico (but some 200,000 would go that far in 1946). The train went only to Central America.

That left the airplane. Next week ten well-heeled vacationists will climb into a Pan American Airways DC-3, shove off on the first postwar escorted air cruise, which will take them through 15 of the 20 Latin American countries. Cost: $2,300.

Those who detest escorted tours could pick regular commercial air service: Rio, now 31 hours from Miami, $765 round trip; Chile, 29½ hours, $828 round trip; Mexico City, 18 hours from New York and 7½ hours from Dallas, $223.96 and $91.66 for the round trip. (The introduction of four-engined equipment this spring will cut flying time, reduce fares.)

Bugs & Bandits. The Latin Americans, by their own behavior, were slowly disposing of an old Yankee prejudice: that South America is a land of bugs, bandits and bloody revolution. True, revolts still occur; Latin America had four major ones in 1945, but no U.S. citizen was killed in them. As for banditry, a U.S. ambassador to Mexico’s reply to a worried prospective U.S. visitor was illuminating: “Completely safe [to come to Mexico] if you don’t stop in Chicago.” Common precautions against dysentery would circumvent “tourist tummy,” but a hypersensitive fear of native foodstuffs (“Are the oranges safe?”) would get only a sardonic answer (“No, you’d better boil them.”).

Latins, busily fashioning ways of attracting the tourist dollar, had two chief preoccupations: 1) lack of “first-class accommodations” (hotel rooms in Mexico City and Rio were as scarce as in New York); 2) irksome passport and visa requirements. Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala and Uruguay had made entry easy. Most other Latin American countries had not.

Mexico is such a lively vacation center that tourism, at $50,000,000 a year, is the country’s fourth largest industry. During the war, Mexico got a share of the fancy carriage trade which once dawdled along the Riviera. Now the prewar, wholesome, camera-slung gringo is driving down the splendid 750-mile highway from Laredo, Tex. to Mexico City, to find that spiraling inflation has changed the land of cheap living he remembered. Nightclubs charge a $6 minimum, simple lunches cost $2.50.

A “must” to four out of five who visit Mexico City is Acapulco, a boom-mad fishing village over a hundred miles from a railway, served by one good highway (ten hours from Mexico City) and a single airplane which flits back & forth to Mexico City from dawn to dusk (1¼ hrs., $13).

On the way from the million-dollar hotels ($10 a day with meals) to palm-fringed beaches, guests chase pigs from underfoot in dust-blown streets, call it “local color.”

Colombia has made a bid for a cut of tourist pie with a swanky resort at Cartagena Bay, which may turn out to be the new Acapulco. A new hotel will get into full swing as soon as its original shipment of sheets (sunk in the Caribbean by submarine) is replaced.

Chile, suffering from inflation, pays dear for food, but lodging in good hotels ($4 a day) is still reasonable. In the southern lake region, the Chilean National Railways have built hotels,.fronted by ice-blue lakes and backed by snow-covered volcanoes.

Argentina shares with Chile the Andean lake region. Traditionally sober, formal Buenos Aires offers the continent’s best hotels and restaurants at only slightly inflated prices. Handsome, stodgy, expensive Mar del Plata, the seaside resort, has small charm for North Americans.

Uruguay as a resort country is preferred even by the Argentines. Punta del Este, target of most summer tourists, is as gay and carefree as Mar del Plata is dull. The water is warm enough for shiverless swimming.

Brazil will stage the carnival in Rio this year (March 3-5) with all its prewar flamboyance. Already at night the thump of drums filters down from the hilltop shacks of the poor, and echoes through cobblestoned back streets as coffee-colored youngsters practice their dances in dozens of dirt-floored “samba schools.”

When Rio weather turns sultry, the fashionable move to mountain spas. The liveliest: Quitandinha, a $10,000,000 pink-and-lavender-decorated tourist castle plunked in the mountains of Brazil’s summer capital of Petropolis.