• InterRail

There are versions of this classic European youth rail pass for both young people and for adults. With a total of 30 coun­tries, there is a choice of a single-zone pass or multi-zone pass. The single-zone network pass is valid for 22 days and the two or three zone pass is valid for one month. Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark together, for example, form a single zone.

Offers for visitors from overseas

All the following passes and Euraii tickets are available over­seas and at the following Deutsche Bahn Travel Centres in Ger­many: Berlin Zoo, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt air­port, Hamburg, Hanover, Heidelberg, Cologne, Leipzig, Munich, Munich airport and Stuttgart.

• German Rail Pass

This special offer from Deutsche Bahn allows between four and ten days of travel within four weeks on all scheduled Deut­sche Bahn trains. The German Rail Pass and the particularly good value for money German Rail Twin Pass (for two people travelling together) are available for I^s' or 2^nd class travel. For young people there is the Germart Rail Youth Pass. The Ger­man Rail Pass is also valid for boat travel on the Rhine and Moselle (Cologne-Dusseldorf shipping line) and also offers re­ductions on the routes covered by the Deutsche Touring bus company, for instance on the “Romantic Road” and the “Ger­man Castle Road”. .

• Eurailpass

The Eurailpass is a joint offer by 17 European railways and is valid for various periods (15 or 21 days, 1, 2 or 3 months) for unlimited 1^st class travel in western, central and northern Eu­rope. The Eurail Flexipass offers this option on 10 or 15 freely selected days within a period of 2 months. For small groups (2 to 5 people) and young people there are cheaper versions of the Eurailpass and the Eurail Flexipass.

• Eurail Selectpass

Travellers who wish to visit Germany and its neighbouring countries, such as Austria, Switzerland or France, or even Italy and Spain, should buy the new Eurail Selectpass (valid on 5, 6, 8 or 10 days within a 2 month period), which offers unlimited travel in Germany and 2, 3 or 4 additional, neighbouring coun­tries. Germany’s geographical location means that it can be combined with a number of different countries. Special, cheaper versions of the Eurail Selectpass are available for small groups and young people.

• EurailTicket

The EurailTicket already includes the supplement payable on most premium trains, making travel on numerous routes with­in Europe easy and convenient. The EurailGroup ticket offers good value for group travel with reductions of 20 % for groups of 6 to 24 and 30 % for groups of 25 and more people. Chil­dren pay half price.

• Fly &Rail for travellers from Europe and overseas.

The combined air/rail ticket is valid for onward travel on the German rail network from the airport to the final destination in Germany, and for the return trip to the airport. The Fly & Rail ticket is actually part of the air ticket. Information is avail­able from airline companies.

Advice and sales

For further information and to purchase any of the offers mentioned, your European customers should contact the sales office of their national railway, one of the representative offices of Deutsche Bahn or travel agencies with a Deutsche Bahn li­cence. Overseas travellers should contact a travel agency that sells rail tickets.

■ ■■■■■■■ AIR TRAVEL ■■■■■■■■

Read and translate the text.

Answer the questions:

What is the Queen’s sewer? What is the Queen’s pipe? What are the ‘traditional goods’? What is the ‘smuggler’s eye’? Write down five tricks that smugglers use.

Exercise 1.Make a list of all the objects you might expect

to find in:

1. a businessman’s case

2. an oilman’s case

3. an ordinary traveller’s case.

Exercise 2.Change the story below into dialogue.

Customs officer: Excuse me. But could I have a word with you ?

Woman: Certainly.

The Customs officer called the woman over and asked if he could have a word with her. She agreed. He asked her where she had travelled from and she said she’d been in Paris for the week­end and asked him why he wanted to know. The Customs of­ficer explained that he was just curious and asked if she had anything to declare. She stated that she hadn’t. He requested her, very politely, to open her bag. She said she had only clothes and personal effects in her bag. The Customs officer repeated his request, but a little less politely, and she asked him why he didn’t believe her. Then the Customs officer ordered her to open her case and threatened to do it'himself if she wouldn’t. She agreed to open the case but complained that she was in a hurry. He expressed surprise at three bottles of brandy and the woman explained that only one of them was for her and the other two were for friends. He said that it didn’t really matter who they were for and that she would have to pay the duty. She said that she hadn’t got any English money and the Customs officers di­rected her to the bank where she would be able to change it. She thanked him sarcastically. He acknowledged her thanks and ex­plained that he was only doing his job.

Exercise 3.You have been given a new watch for your birthday. You arrive in England to study English for 3 months. The Customs officer accuses you of smug­gling. Construct a dialogue between you and the Cus­toms officer.

ANYTHING TO DECLARE?

Once a month a sad ritual is performed at the Queen’s Ware­house at Heathrow. Four Customs men open hundreds of bot­tles of impounded liquor, and invert them into crude wooden bottle racks. The spirit pours directly into a main drain, called the Queen’s Sewer, thus foiling anyone who might want to catch and rebottle the evil, eye-watering mixture of wines and strange spirits.

The cloying scent of alcohol is sharpened by tobacco fumes as cartons of cigarettes and cigars are burned in an incinerator known as the Queen’s Pipe.

The warehouse is a large basement in the main Customs House on the north side of the airport, conveniently close to the police station. It is stuffed with goods seized by Customs in the Queen’s name. The shelves are crammed with bottles, each tagged with the airline flight number and the name of the pas­senger it was taken from.

Some is sold off at regular auctions. But there are no buyers for the exotic, or for bottles that have export labels or airline stickers on them. It is not worth the expense of relabelling and rebottling for the home market.

So every month the doomed bottles are picked out, Yugo­slav Slivovitz, Polish blackcurrant vodka, Thai Mekong whisky, sake and tequila. Occasionally a man will pause from his work before starting a jeroboam of Moet Chandon or a two-gallon bottle of Black Label Scotch on its ignominious trip to the sew­age works.

The warehouse reflects the trends in amateur smuggling by passengers, since professionals nowadays often ‘smuggle’ goods by altering the import tax on invokes. The ‘traditional’ goods, as the Customs men call them, still stand out in pure volume. In a typical year, 1976, passengers arriving in Britain were re­lieved of 2,824 proof gallons of spirits, and 1,879 watches. More than 11,000 of them had 20,716 lb of tobacco confiscated. Most of this will pass through the warehouse, together with the ex­pected haul of cameras and photographic equipment.

The amateurs give the Customs men their biggest challenge, for least reward. The professionals, smuggling cannabis by the hundredweight and cameras by the J 100,000 worth, are often caught after tip-offs. The small-time returning holidaymaker has to be detected, and all the knowledge acquired at the Customs Training School in Southend is needed.

A good nose, or what the victim might consider sixth sense, is vital. The Customs people call it ‘smuggler’s eye’. It is inde­finable, of course, but it is the quality that makes a really good Customs man as he screens hundreds of passengers pouring past him on a six-hour shift. One man who had it was Liam Sump­tion, a legendary Irishman who pulled passengers out of the Green Channel at Heathrow for bets with his fellow officers, and is rumoured never to have challenged an innocent traveller.

Every guilty passenger has tell-tale traits. The normally tim­id become over-boisterous, the placid bite their lips, the domi­neering are ingratiating, bossy women turn sweet. The ‘eye’ is mainly a question of feeling who is acting out of type.

“A lot of people look nervous when they walk through the Green,” says a Customs man. “The art is spotting types who do not seem to be naturally nervous.” The process starts much ear­lier than most passengers realize — at the moment when they pick their luggage off the conveyor belt. It is there that the Cus­toms men weigh up attitudes. Most people who are stopped hi the Green Channel have been earmarked for inspection from the moment they first picked up their case.

Smugglers like to go through Customs in the middle of the queue. If their bag conies up first, they will often let it go round on the conveyor belt and only pfick it up after other passengers from the flight have started off through the channels. Likewise, they get agitated if the bag is late and they have to go through at the end.

Some attempts are almost as old as smuggling itself. Passen­gers are caught with a two-gallon bottle of Scotch, and say in­nocently that they thought they were allowed a single bottle duty free, irrespective of size. They put old straps on new watches and new cameras in old cases. Fur coats are picked out because they have no labels, or because the shop label that ‘proves* the coat was not brought abroad has been sewn in by hand instead of machine and is clearly older than the coat.

“I had one lady who challenged me to look at the Harrods label in her mink. It was Harrods all right — Harrods Man’s Shop,” says a Customs man.

Other smugglers show a touching belief that priests, doctors and other respectable men are not searched. A house painter ar­rived at Heathrow with 300 watches hidden in a woman’s gir­dle round his waist. He was dressed as a Roman Catholic priest with a passport to match. He was fined for the watches, and im­prisoned for smuggling when disguisedin Holy Orders. Few am­ateurs have heard of section 73 of the Customs and Excise Act. It provides that anyone either armed with an offensive weapon or in disguise whilst attempting to avoid Customs duty is liable to imprisonment.

(From Airport International by Bryan Moyahan)

Read the text. In small groups discuss the information

about général services in EgyptAir.