Free Room Service by Frank Moorhouse Page A

up a polo team to ‘ride against’ the White Sands Country Club. But it takes four people with three ponies each to play polo. We do not have horses here. The people who come to the Inter-Continental can’t ride horses. This has caused consternation.
    He says that one always plays polo in the cool of the afternoon and it was always the highlight of his stay inIndia as a cultural delegate. Vanuatu is not India. He gets around in ridiculous gear from his days in Beirut, which he gets from a company called Banana Republic Travel and Safari Clothing Company in Polk Street, San Francisco, and of which he claims to be an agent. He tries to sell orders for this stuff from a catalogue he has. He wears something he calls a bush vest, with many pockets, and a hood in the collar and a pouch at the back. He calls it a ‘walking desk’. It may have been suitable for Beirut, but it is wrong for Vanuatu. The polo thing and this selling around the pool make people very uneasy. He orders Gibsons from the pool bar, which is asking too much of the staff. Port Vila is not Acapulco.
    He is very bad with the children.
    He spoiled one little boy’s holiday by asking him about his T-shirt. The T-shirt was quite nice and said ‘Hullo from Gippsland Victoria’.
    Evidently Blase asked the boy if he was from Gippsland.
    When the boy said no, Blase asked him why he was wearing a T-shirt from Gippsland Victoria.
    The boy had replied, ‘My auntie sent it to me’.
    Blase had then said to the boy that you wear a T-shirt either because you come from the place or because you’ve been to the place, and that you didn’t wear a T-shirt because ‘your auntie lives there’.
    The boy then took the T-shirt off and was so badly sun burned that he was taken to hospital.
    When the mother remonstrated with Blase about this, Blase said, ‘What do you mean by making yourson wear clothing his auntie sent him? No one wears clothes that aunties send’.
    She then said, ‘What about the clothes you wear about the pool? They aren’t proper resort clothes’.
    Blase then said to her, ‘These clothes come from the Banana Republic Travel and Safari Clothing Company of Polk Street San Francisco’.
    She replied that she didn’t care whether the clothes came from Andres of Chifley Parade, Baulkham Hills, they weren’t resort clothes, and in future to leave her little boy alone.
    As Recreational Director I had to come between them.
    And another thing – he has been trying to sell a Mosquito Repeller device that is supposed to give off ultra-sonic waves duplicating the sound of an aggressive male mosquito. This supposedly scares away the female mosquito, which he says are the ones that sting.
    Well, although one can’t hear this thing, it is giving the staff and some of the guests ear-ache.
    If he is your magazine’s travel writer, he seems to be into all sorts of contra-deals and franchises which he is selling in your magazine’s time around the pools and bars. He has about six watches on one arm, which he sells and which are a dubious bargain.
    What I want to say is that this sort of person is bad for Vanuatu and bad for the travel industry. Why don’t you send him back to Beirut, which needs a travel writer.
    Signed, Recreation Director, Inter-Continental Hotel, Port Vila, Vanuatu.
    Â 
    Hi Chief, It’s true I’m in Vanuatu and it’s true that Port Vila is not Acapulco. I’m resting up after cultural delegating in China.
    The reaction against me here is because I joked about the plumbing. The plumbing in the Port Vila Inter-Continental is the loudest plumbing in the history of hotels. It should be mentioned as an attraction in their brochure. The velocity of the flush is so great that if you put your hand in the bowl it would be crushed. It can flatten a beer can. I kid you not. Every morning the hotel shakes to the thunder of 166 bowel movements, and the