Volleyball with the Cuna Indians: And Other Gay Travel Adventures - Hardcover

Ebensten, Hanns

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670849936 ISBN 13: 9780670849932

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1993

Synopsis

A pioneer in the field of gay group travel traverses the globe in a series of travel vignettes about such locales as Paris, Italy, the Middle East, Beijing, and the San Blas Islands off Panama.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Miss Manners rewrites a gay Baedeker in a sometimes amusing, sometimes offensive, mix of dress tips and travelogue. Ebensten is a German-born gay travel agent who's spent most of his life circling the globe--though, here, he mentions trips made mainly between 1934 and 1992 to Europe, North Africa, South America, and Easter Island, on his own and as a tour leader. He waxes poetic about well-toned, ``easygoing'' natives and local architecture, and includes vignettes about his fellow travelers. Some of the anecdotes are amusing and vividly rendered--e.g., the reaction of a horrified Ecuadoran cruise director when he realizes that he has to take 68 gay men to the Gal pagos. Ebensten obviously enjoys traveling in style, and he's contemptuous of tourists who mock local dress codes and customs--including his gay charges, and particularly those who wear revealing outfits in mosques or churches. But he also comes across as grumpy and fussy, and sometimes falls prey to the poor manners he decries, as in his venomous attack on China (``And the food!''). Throughout, Ebensten travels like a denizen of the 19th-century upper class, seemingly more interested in ruins and buildings than in the local people; moreover, his use of certain terms (``Negroes''; ``colored people'') undoubtedly will offend many readers. A feisty travelogue informed by admiration for diverse countries and cultures past--but marred by poorly chosen language and a gallery of shallow and vulgar characters. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Key West tour operator Ebensten has been escorting travelers on imaginative expeditions for 40 years. In his early days, his appetite for off-beat adventure took him around the world as he lived in private castles or YMCAs, went beachcombing, or sybaritically covered himself with hot mud in the ancient stone troughs of Italy's Lacco Ameno. He enjoyed a wild night in a dormitory with 98 armed and priapic motorcycle cops and accepted the casual hospitality of the rich or famous, partying with Lady Diana Cooper and tutoring Bertrand Russell's granddaughters. As a tour operator, Ebensten attracted a clientele of artists, scholars, playboys, gays and the more intrepid of the general run of travelers. Under his guidance they tended either to rough it or to live high. In Peru, for example, while others might have satisfied themselves with the standard visit to Machu Picchu, his groups trekked to Vilcabamba, the true Inca capital; in Greece they not only viewed sacred Mount Olympus but climbed it. Stylish, cultivated, witty and frankly gay, Ebensten draws often hilarious portraits of travelers whom readers would not otherwise meet, and places rarely visited.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0670849936
• ISBN 13: 9780670849932
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352