Picturing Hong Kong and Surviving in Russia

HONG KONG: HERE BE DRAGONS, edited by Rick Browne and James Marshall, essay by Simon Winchester(Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $40). Most coffee-table travel books are photographic fairy tales, collections of romantic visual fables with the smokestacks cropped out, the dull skies brightened. The observing eyes in these cases may be acute, but they are rarely jaundiced, or even mildly critical. Thus, though the resulting photographs might well be evocative, they aren’t always evocative of what a place is really like. This is not the case with this photographic portrait of mysterious, beautiful, banal, ugly Hong Kong in the early 1990s. The work of 11 international photojournalists (including the two editors, who shot these images over a single 10-day period in January, 1991), this is a beautiful book, but it is not always a pretty one. If we see palatial hotels, quaint temples, savory-looking food, fresh-faced Boy Scouts and ballet dancers, glittering skylines, and exquisite misty seascapes, we also see sweatshops, construction sites, drug addicts, the homeless, the bloated plutocrat and the garishly made-up socialite. This is nobody’s fairy tale. Yet somehow the Hong Kong that emerges here, through the photos and through the snappy, authoritative, broad-stroke supportive essay by Simon Winchester (Asia-Pacific editor of Conde Nast Traveler), is an attractive one, diverse and vital and irresistably strange. Perhaps that’s why the Hong Kong Tourist Assn. itself is among the nine American and Hong Kong corporate sponsors of the book (AT&T;, DHL, Kodak and Mobil are among the others) that are prominently acknowledged, complete with color logos down one side of a striking photograph just after the contents page. Business as usual, I suppose.

RUSSIA BUSINESS SURVIVAL GUIDE (third edition), edited by Paul E. Richardson (Russian Information Services, $24.50 paper); WHERE IN MOSCOW (second edition), edited by Paul E. Richardson (Russian Information Services, $13.50 paper) , and WHERE IN ST. PETERSBURG, edited by Paul E. Richardson (Russian Information Services, $13.50 paper). Recent visitors to Moscow and St. Petersburg bring back tales of Russia as a traveler’s hell of canceled flights, late trains, vanished reservations, inedible dinners (at something rapidly approaching Paris prices) and famous attractions that shut up tight. Clearly, Russia is no place for the amateur tourist today, so the amateur needs professional help. That is what’s offered by these three publications, all from a Vermont-based organization specializing in up-to-date practical information for the Russia-bound business traveler. “Russia Business Survival Guide,” “written by and for people doing business in Russia,” includes sections on Russian business law, business customs and other subjects that will not much interest the average sightseer. But it’s also a treasure house of what I suspect would be indispensible intelligence for any person visiting either of the two great Russian capitals for any reason whatsoever. For example, there’s a glossary of Russian place-name changes (the city of Zagorsk, for instance, is now Sergiev-Posad, and spy novel aficionados will appreciate learning that the Dzerzhinskaya metro station has taken back its old name, Lubyanka), a guide to placing long-distance calls and a list of what to take to Russia with you (among other things, a universal flat bathtub stopper for doing laundry in your sink, and, for restaurants, a clean cotton handkerchief to serve as a restroom towel and to wipe off greasy silverware). And even among the business-specific information, there is much that could be of use to the general traveler: notes on the Russian sense of time and the so-called “cult of largesse,” for example. There are also detailed maps and an extensive business telephone directory, white and yellow pages both. The “Where In” titles, slimmer and intended as an aid for the “independent” traveler, are excerpted from the Business Survival Guide, and include only the telephone directories and maps. I’d rather have the whole pirozhok.

RUSSIAWALKS by David and Valeria Matlock (Henry Holt & Co., $12.95 paper). If the aforementioned Russian Information Services books are full of hard facts, this volume, by an American art critic and his Russian wife (she a former Soviet tour operator), is full of soft ones--soft not in the sense of being fuzzy or incorrect, but in the sense that they are offered in an amiable, sometimes almost chatty tone, with plenty of colorful asides (“Nancy Reagan’s hairdresser was arrested on the Arbat using U.S. cash to buy a souvenir”). Part of Holt’s highly usable (and widely imitated) “Walks” series, this volume was published last year; thus, the two cities it deals with are Moscow and . . . Leningrad--which now, of course, is called St. Petersburg. There are probably some other slightly out-dated bits of information here and there by now, too, but the book’s well-planned, detail-packed walking tours should still work quite well.

USSR by John Noble and John King (Lonely Planet, $21.95). And this book, one of the admirable Lonely Planet company’s “travel survival kits,” is rich with hard data and soft lore alike. Never mind the anachronistic title; the authors acknowledge in an introductory “post-coup stop press” that as their guidebook was being published, neither the name nor the composition of the nation(s) replacing the former USSR was known, so they had little choice but to stick with the old terminology--and, anyway, the book includes not just Moscow and Len, er, St. Petersburg, but also all the rest of the former Soviet Union (though with considerably more attention paid, say, to the Baltic Republics than to Tadjikistan). As is usual with the Lonely Planet titles, this one is authoritative, readable and succinct--if indeed that last adjective can be applied to a work that runs 832 pages. (Lonely Planet, whose basic travel philosophy is “Don’t worry about whether your trip will work out. Just go!”, donates a portion of its profits to Greenpeace, Amnesty International and other such organizations.)

CATALONIA, A SELF-PORTRAIT, edited and translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer (Indiana University Press, $22.95 hardcover, $12.95 paper). If you can stand to hear about one more book on Spain, and specifically one more book on the corner of that country called Catalonia, whose capital city, Barcelona, is about to host the you-know-whats . . . well, this collection of essays by Catalans, about themselves and their culture and geography, isn’t quite a travel book--including, as it does, essays on Picasso, Gaudi and the poet Joan Maragall, and even one on Catalans deported by Franco to Nazi concentration camps--but it is a fascinating self-portrait of a fascinating region, and ought to be of great interest to the literary- and/or historically minded visitor to northeastern Spain. Oh, and novelist/playwright Carles Soldevilla’s enchanting little piece, “The Art of Showing Barcelona,” written as a pamphlet for the 1929 International Exposition in that city, is as good a mini-introduction to the Catalan capital as I can imagine.

NOTES FROM NEW ZEALAND; A Book of Travel and Natural History by Edward Kanze (Henry Holt, $24.95). “New Zealand is a place of striking contrasts,” writes author Kanze. Oh dear. And that, unfortunately, is frequently the level of his insights. Kanze’s subject matter is fascinating--this beautiful, immensely varied island nation and its wealth of ancient, sometimes bizarre flora and fauna--and he is obviously an adventurous traveler and an experienced naturalist. As a writer, too, he has a pleasantly chatty tone, and can write pieces of evocative description (“The sea was a radiant indigo blue, except along the fringes of the smaller islands, where the waves beat the water to a frothy cream”)--but his traveling companion seems often to be the cliche. “The jungle was cool, dark, and mysterious,” he writes at one point, or, of his toil with a surveying team on the island of Tawhiti Rahi: “At night our work is wearying and the clock moves slowly.” A place of striking contrasts deserves better.