Mauling Moscow’s Mall Leaves Shoppers at Loss

Police recently cleared away street peddlers and souvenir hawkers from Moscow’s famous Arbat pedestrian mall--long known as a good place for tourists to shop--and the vendors are accusing City Hall of stripping Moscow of its soul and the sellers of their livelihood. “Paris has only one Montmartre, and Moscow has only one Arbat,” said Vitaly Mosgalin, an artist who used to earn hundreds of dollars on a good day selling hand-painted lacquer boxes to tourists along the several-blocks-long mall north of the Kremlin. A spokesman for the mayor’s office said city officials took the action last month so that the area could be cleaned. But the Arbat may be closed for good. “We cannot turn one of Moscow’s main streets into a bazaar,” Vitaly Usov, head of Moscow’s Central Prefecture, told the English-language Moscow Times daily last week. Although the vendors’ tables are all gone, some are trying to work discreetly, selling their wares out of shopping bags. And some have moved on to Ismailovsky Park in northwest Moscow, where there is a huge crafts fair on the weekends.

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Travel Quiz: Name three large bodies of saltwater in which colors are part of the name and give their locations.

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Buckingham to Open in August: Visitors will be allowed inside Buckingham Palace this summer for the first time ever, and officials recently announced approximate dates when the official London home of Queen Elizabeth II will be open. It is expected that admission to the palace will fund 70% of the cost of rebuilding another royal residence, Windsor Castle, which was extensively damaged by a November fire--an estimated $60-million restoration tab. The Palace will be open daily, beginning the second week of August, for about eight weeks, and each late summer/early fall season for the next five years. Visitors will be able to view the ballroom, state dining room, throne room, three drawing rooms, music room and the 120-foot-long picture gallery, which contains masterpieces by Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Rubens. The areas to be opened are considered to have the richest late-Georgian and early Victorian decorative schemes in existence. Admission will be about $12.

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Frontier Spirit-ed Away: When the Frontier Spirit arrives in Singapore from Bali Sept. 1, it will be the last sailing for the small, 164-passenger ship--and the last day of business for the company under whose banner it has cruised. The imminent closure of SeaQuest Cruises was announced in unusual trade publication ads that pondered the future of a cruise industry that, the ads said, appears to be leaning away from smaller vessels on which “the level of comfort is consistent with the price” in favor of mega-ships that “sacrifice adventure for glamour and . . . have become an attraction and less of a true travel experience.” The disbanding of SeaQuest is said to be in response to shareholder wishes, which are to return to their “primary business concerns,” according to a SeaQuest spokesman.

Passengers booked on Frontier Spirit cruises scheduled to depart after the company is disbanded can transfer to any voyage prior to the Aug. 31 itinerary and sail at 50% cruise-only (not including hotel and air-fare costs) discounts. Or they can transfer to selected sailings on Abercrombie & Kent’s Explorer, Seabourn Cruise Line’s Seabourn Spirit (Asia sailings only) or Orient Lines’ Marco Polo. Or they can opt for full refunds. For information: (800) 223-5688.

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Quick Fact: The average age of a business traveler in 1991, the most recent year for which statistics are available: 39. The annual median household income of the business traveler: $40,000-$50,000. (U.S. Travel Data Center.)

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Tunnel Trouble: The Channel Tunnel, long envisioned as a vital undersea link between England and France, faces further delays as operators and contractors wrangle over cost overruns that will almost double the original budget at completion. Among the issues: Transmanche-Link, the group of 10 main contractors working on the tunnel, has asked Eurotunnel for $2.22 billion, nearly twice the amount the British-French company earlier said it was willing to pay for some additional work. For the first time, Eurotunnel executives acknowledge they have no target date for opening the tunnel, although they hope to be in business within a year--pushing back their most recent goal of December, 1993. The 31-mile “Chunnel,” 80-150 feet below the ocean floor, links Folkestone in southern England with Calais in northern France, and was originally supposed to open next month--a date long ago abandoned.

The Channel Tunnel will offer two modes of transportation: Eurostar, a high-speed passenger train that will make 30 round trips per day, and Le Shuttle, a train running every 15 minutes that will ferry cars, charter buses, taxis and motorcycles and their passengers. The tunnel will have the daily capacity to carry thousands of travelers who now cross the English Channel by ferry or plane. Total cost of the project, being financed by a worldwide syndicate of more than 200 banks, is expected to exceed $13 billion.

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Comparatively Speaking: Airlines that carried the most travelers out of LAX in 1992, to New York: American (35%). San Francisco: United (52%). Phoenix: Southwest (70%). Las Vegas: Southwest (33%). Oakland: Southwest (62%). Chicago: United (49%). Honolulu: United (25%). (Source: Avitas Aviation.)

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Is Merida Ready for the Pope? The Merida, Mexico, area lacks accommodations for the hundreds of thousands of Catholics expected there for the August visit of Pope John Paul II, according to the state tourism director. The government agency Notimex quoted Oscar Peniche Coldwell, tourism director for the state of Yucatan, as saying that more than 500,000 people may pour into the area for the Aug. 11-12 visit. The Catholic Church has asked Merida residents to open their homes to visitors, and tourism officials say the state has 143 hotels with about 5,000 rooms and some 600 restaurants. But an estimated 400,000 pilgrims visited the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco when the Pope visited there in 1990.

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Quiz Answer: The Red Sea, an inland sea between the Arabian Peninsula and northeast Africa; the Black Sea, between Ukraine, Bulgaria and Turkey; the Yellow Sea, between China and North and South Korea.