Travel: Call of the World

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INDIA too is expecting an enormous turnout of tourists this year. And if they ever get beyond haggling with the marketplace throngs of Delhi and Calcutta, visitors can luxuriate in the Shangri-lalike valleys of Kashmir, where they can rent a houseboat for as little as $49 a week and drift about the placid, clear mountain lakes. For the more rugged visitor, Nepal has the Tigertops Hotel, which offers its guests an elephant-back excursion through the jungles. For the athletic, there is a $300-a-week hiking trip through tiny Buddhist villages, across flower-carpeted Himalayan meadows and on up to the level of mountain climbers' base camps (16,000 ft.) on Mount Everest.

If all that is not far enough out, there is still the excitement of hunting whales in a wooden boat off the Azores (for $35 a day), or sitting on a deck chair aboard a "boatel" on Brazil's Araguaia River munching roasted piranhas ($1,600 for three weeks), or a six-week explorer's trip through Mongolia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the diet includes sheep's eyeballs and cooked lamb's head ($3,650). As for the $5,000, five-week trip to Antarctica, the boat does not leave from the tip of Chile until January 1968—summertime at the South Pole.