The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 3 (June 1, 1936)
Travel Clubs
Travel Clubs.
There is a romance associated with travel which reaches down from the earliest days of civilised society. The traveller returning from distant lands has always carried with him an aura of splendour and of a higher kind of knowledge than that possessed by those whom he left behind.
All literature pays tribute to the traveller, and poetry owes many of its most charming idealisations to the glamour of distant places.
Masefield's “Cargoes” is a typical example of this, in the lines:
“Quinquireme of Nineveh, from distant Ophir,
Stealing home to haven in sunny Palestine
With a cargo of ivory and apes and peacocks
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.”
The reason for this attitude towards the traveller is not far to seek. He has tales to tell of what he has seen and heard of peoples, customs and scenery elsewhere, and the human imagination delights in the contemplation of any new thing.
Travellers’ tales supply this stimulus, and as the exercise of the imagination is one of the happiest of human joys, the popularity of travellers follows in an inevitable sequence.
In recent years, travel clubs have been formed and have carried on successfully in many countries— particularly in those possessed of tourist attractions —with the specific object of gratifying in the mass this natural curiosity, this friendly interest and pleasure in the practical details as well as in the romance of travel.
Hence the recent formation of such a club in Wellington, the Capital City of New Zealand, is in line with the trend of the times and should do much to bring travellers and citizens together for their mutual pleasure and enlightenment. Already, at Auckland, the Travel Club of that centre has gained the esteem of thousands of visitors from overseas as well as the goodwill of civic authorities, travel interests, the press and the general public. The formation of travel clubs with similar objects in other centres may be expected to follow.
A chain of such clubs throughout the Dominion, with no other affiliations, but acting as helpful, friendly, social clearing-houses for visitors as they proceed on their travels, might do a service of incalculable value to the Dominion in the rapidly developing tourist traffic of the country.
It is a service, too, which cannot, in the nature of things, be given by those actually engaged in the travel industry, for with them the business element will form some part of the substratum of all transactions, and the sensitive traveller may feel that while one hand is extended in welcome the other is held out for the cash!
But a travel club is concerned solely with the social element. It collects nothing from the traveller except his experiences, and goodwill is the only exchange.
The tourist business is a traffic which cannot fail to grow with a kind of arithmetical progression as overseas visitors, returning to their own countries, tell the tale not only of the marvels of our scenic and other attractions but of the kindliness, friendliness and helpfulness of the New Zealand people.