Travelling Is Adventure

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 162, 5 April 1938, Page 5

Travelling Is Adventure

THE voyage itself was an .exciting experience. With nothing but sea and sky around and above, the ship seemed like a small world in which there were many discoveries to be made—new people to meet and new things to do. Land was first sighted after nearly a fortnight at sea and there was great excitement among the passengers who rushed the deck rails to see the barren island of Malpalo. This is a tiny uninhabitable strip of land and its name is the Spanish for “bald head." The island did indeed look bald, with an occasional weather-beaten shrub growing like the carefully guarded tresses of a man who is making a last stand against the inroads of Mme. The first opportunity to land came at Panama, where sight-seeing can be done in taxis, driven by negroes who have, or profess to have, great difficulty in dealing with English money. Panama was found to be a very colourful place with groves of palms and almond trees bordering the roads on either side. Plantations of bananas, coconuts, mangoes and pineapples are hedged with bright scarlet hibiscus and everywhere are splashes of red, purple and yellow bouganvillia. The houses look as though they had been bull! on stilts, and underneath them the people

A New Zealander Goes Sight-Seeing in Panama And Europe A s a ship, drawing out from the wharf, breaks the streamers which are the last tangible link between those on board and those on the shore, a new adventure begins for hundreds of travellers. Many people experience the thrill of this adventure but for many more it remains an unrealised dream. In this article a New Zealand traveller tells a little of what befell her after the streamers broke when she sailed out of the Wellington harbour on the Rangitiki some months ago.

keep their motor-cars and hang their washing out to dry. In the ruins of a Spanish church in Old Panama there is an altar made entirely of gold. The people of Panama are mainly Spaniards and negroes and many of them come down to the boat selling fruit, silks and ornaments, which they spread on rugs on the ground. They stay until their wares are disposed of, even if they have to sit up all night. Sailing through the canal itself is the most amazing experience on the journey. In the Miraflores locks the ship is raised in two stages to the level of the Miraflores Lake, which is 58 feet above the Pacific Ocean. This process continues through the Pedro Miguel locks and the Gillard Cut which is nine miles long and where crocodiles bask on the bank. In the Gatun Lake which is 20 miles long, there are tiny green islands which before the country was inundated, were the tops of hills. Panama To England. Prom L’anama to Southampton there are no stopping places, but the ship passes islands on which cultivated slopes, windmills and lighthouses can be quite clearly seen.

Loudon itself is the apex of the adventure. There are so many places that New Zealanders have heard of

that it seems like the fulfilment of a dream to see them in reality. In Brighton the traveller discovered a delightful place called "Potter’s Museum," which contains the life work of a Mr. Potter, who depicted nursery rhymes by making little figures and dressing them in beautifully-made garments. The animals and birds he had made out of real skins and feathers. From England she went with a friend to Holland, that lovely land of tulips, hyacinths and windmills. It seemed to be a hikers’ paradise and cyclists crowded the roads.

The day before they arrived had been Princess Julianna’s birthday and there had been a Bloemenfeest or feast of flowers. Every where and everybody was bedecke,d with tulips. There were even designs in flowers on the billsides awl in the parks. It. was sad to leave Holland for it meant the beginning of the end of the great adventure of travelling, when every day brings something new and unexpected.—M..l