The Incidental Tourist : Women Seem to Thrive on Travel, While Men Are Just Along for the Ride

MY ANXIETY about going to Egypt with a Music Center group next spring has been deepened by messages from two distinguished correspondents.

As I said recently, I am not an enthusiastic traveler; I am bored by airports, uneasy in airplanes, fatigued by luggage, frustrated by foreign languages and poisoned by strange foods.

My wife, on the other hand, is an energetic traveler; she would be at home in the headwaters of the Amazon or in Stone Age New Guinea. In fact, I am surprised that she has not dragged me to those two places.

It isn’t that I don’t want to see Egypt. The pyramids and the Sphinx are among the great monuments of the world. But I have heard hideous stories about the heat, the insects, the din and the congestion of Cairo. (Some say it is worse than Los Angeles.)

One of my correspondents, Charlton Heston, notes that, like my wife, his wife loves to travel. “So does my daughter, my daughter-in-law and my mother, who is somewhere in her late 80s. So does my assistant and just about all the women I know (a pretty short list, actually). Any one of them will happily whip off anywhere from Khartoum to Kennebunkport on a moment’s notice. . . .”

Being bolder than I would care to be, Heston says: “I think it’s a sexual difference. (There aren’t supposed to be any sexual differences now, but you and I know better. Women are nest-builders, they can build one anywhere. Men are territorial; they want to walk barefoot on land they’ve marked as theirs, through the seasons.”

As an actor, though, Heston makes about half his living on the road. “Most of the things I like to do and most of the people I like to see are available on the ridge we built our house across (in Coldwater Canyon). My wife, though, like yours, is tireless in her determination to explore the world.”

He encloses a travel story on Egypt written by his wife, Lydia Clarke Heston, for The Times. Despite the inconveniences she describes, the tone is romantic: “Our old haunts in Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, to our relief, were unchanged, even more romantic with magical, purple twilight and the same open, friendly faces of village people everywhere. . . .”

Heston concludes: “You should see the pyramids before they’re gone. . . . Go answer the riddle of the Sphinx.”

The distinguished Norman Cousins writes: “Your lamentations about travel are not idiosyncratic. At one time, the main concern had to be over assaults on one’s intestinal flora and the insistencies they imposed on the daily agenda. But these penalties now take second place to the ordeals of the airport--the distance from the sidewalk to the departure gate; the long line at the check-in counter; the uncertainty represented by overbooked flights; the cosmic distance to connecting planes; the delays . . .

“Worse still is the torment of the crowded freeway en route to the airport. This experience becomes particularly obnoxious when you discover on arrival that the flight was cancelled. . . .”

Cousins also discloses that his wife is devoted to travel, like my wife and Heston’s: “Like Denise, Ellen has a yen for Florence and Venice and other exotic places. Like you, my desires in these directions are not unquenchable. The most important thing we have in common, of course, is that our wives have put up with us in these and other respects for half a century.”

Ross W. Amspoker sends me a column he wrote for the Antelope Valley Press after a trip to Egypt. “I also suffered the usual miseries of overseas travel.” he says. “Lack of sleep, stomach distress, sore throat and fatigue. I am a richer man for having seen the glories of ancient Egypt, but modern Egypt just about did me in.”

Amspoker says that the Great Pyramid of Cheops turned him off, mainly because slave laborers gave their lives to its construction, and its only purpose was to serve “as a lousy tomb.”

John Kachmarik of Sherman Oaks says: “By all means, go. Don’t miss the Pyramids and the Sphinx at Giza. . . . When I walked up to them (in 1969), I truly felt as though I had walked back into time. . . .”

But how can we go to Egypt in the spring when we’re going to be remodeling our house?