Touring With Susan Graham

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31784, 14 September 1968, Page 4

Touring With Susan Graham

Pearls and Dragons. By Susan Graham. Reed. 173 pp. Illustrated.

In her own style (which in New Zealand she has created), Susan Graham is an established success. Whatever she writes has its satisfied readers and her new book, about the tourist’s Orient, will almost certainly sell well. It has all the ingredients of a good birthday present for Auntie who has been Home and still likes to talk about her Trip. It is also the perfect bedside companion for the tourist who has made the Grand Tour of the Near North but did not bother to keep a diary. Susan Graham has written it all down, as if it were part of her service to the New Zealand groups she has guided and shepherded through foreign parts, all the while keeping them at a safe and elean distance from the back streets. Mrs Graham herself is an admirable traveller, by comparison with those who create scenes in hotels not supplying food and services exactly the same ais home. The one time she did adapt a fighting “I’m right” attitude was justified. Anyone who has suffered the slowness unhelpf illness of

officials at Bangkok airport will congratulate her on the strategy of her second arrival, and take note of her technique. It is a pity, after such a masterly victory over the only .obstacle to travel in Thailand (this airport near-hostil-ity to visitors), that she did not see something more of the country than the tourist tracks of Bangkok. Chiang Mai, for instance, would not have been too venturesome. But this is a book written for the timid tourist, who wants to be sure of safe drinking water, good shopping and nice coloured slides. For this kind of traveller it is a reliable guidebook, writen by a fellow New Zealander who knows the ropes. As a visitor, Susan Graham is always polite, always finding the pleasant thing to say about a country or city. So, her chapter on Indonesia makes travel-writing history. Not a word about the ugliness of Djkarta. Instead, she tells of the heavenly hotel pool (presumably the Hotel Indonesia) and the spacious, gracious homes where she was entertained and informed. She writes of “Indonesia” from thia viewpaint, but although

she visited only the capital and met representatives of only a tiny, privileged minority, she did discover the characteristic of all Indonesia: open hospitality and frank friendship. However, for all the good times she had on her several visits “up north”—to the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Bangkok, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia —Susan Graham, like most tourists, has much still to see in these countries. Thanks to the emperor himself, as she puts it, she and her party at least once relished the illusion of sharing more fully than at any other time in the true Japanese way of life. This was because, with the emperor in town, their hotel reservations were cancelled and they found themselves, instead, in Japanese-style inns for the night. This one sentence reveals what the guided tourist misses: the real life of the country. But for those who have already travelled tins way or hope to, Susan Graham’s “Pearls and Dragoons” is an excellent book. The photographs include many at the parties she has guided. / i