T H I S+W E E K Sleeping with elephants By Don Meredith Earth-shaking encounters in Kenya Sleepless in Siena By Don George, Editor The strangest place I've ever slept > Man is an island By Jan Morris The Isle of Man is the last contented jewel in Britain's imperial crown D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Corn off the cob Passages "Desiring Italy" Mary Taylor Simeti's Sicilian journal Readers' Tips and Tales My private wanderlust - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, August 12, 1997 S t .+E l v i s - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Who took the grace out of Graceland? By Cintra Wilson Our columnist goes to Memphis The King and us By Christina Boufis The world's most maniacal Elvis fans Way dead Elvis By Greil Marcus A tribute to the King proves that his posthumous legend has become equal parts sincerity and trash A full list of all Wanderlust articles

G E T T I N G +R I C H___ on the Isle of Man - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N O T E S+F R O M+A+C O N T E N T E D O U T P O S T+O F+T H E+B R I T I S H+E M P I R E . BY JAN MORRIS | DOUGLAS, Isle of Man -- i was in Hong Kong for the handover in June, and an odd feeling came over me during the immense and vulgar fireworks display by which the new Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong commemorated its emancipation from British colonial rule. Suddenly I realized, as the explosives crashed and the laser beams swept the harbor, that at this great civic function, for the first time in 150 years, no British governor was sitting somewhere in a seat of honor, attended by flunkies beneath the royal crest. This was a queer feeling, like sitting in a long-familiar room where an old picture is missing, gone to the framers perhaps, or nicked by burglars the night before. A few days later I strolled up to Government House and stood outside its gates looking at the red Chinese flag drooping in the drizzle from its staff. The policemen on guard eyed me coldly, and it crossed my mind that if I there and then fell and broke my leg upon the pavement, no longer would some charming young British aide come hastening to my comfort -- "No need to worry, we'll soon have you fixed up -- by the way, didn't we once meet at the Murray-Browns -- or was it at Oxford?" It used to be said that wherever they went in the world, the British traveled like the children of rich parents. Now Hong Kong has joined the long roster of places, Lagos to the Seychelles, Accra to Port of Spain, Calcutta to Harare, where mummy and daddy can no longer look after us. We still follow the flag, all the same. Scattered here and there around the oceans, odd small places still acknowledge British sovereignty to one degree or another, and to prove the point I came more or less direct from Hong Kong to one of the very oddest of them, the Isle of Man (220 square miles, population 70,000), which lies in the middle of the Irish Sea, some 70 miles west of Liverpool. Just as there was never any doubting that you were arriving somewhere Chinese when you stepped off a 747 into British Hong Kong, so when you step on a bright, breezy, salty, seagully day onto the Isle of Man, there is no mistaking that you have arrived somewhere near Manx. Wherever you look there flies the Manx flag, a heraldic curiosity that features armored legs joined together at the thigh, and there is a plethora of signs demonstrating the autonomy of the island -- signs advertising Manx Telecom or Manx Airlines, signs announcing the authority of the Manx Customs and Excise Service, bilingual signs to remind you that the Isle of Man has an ancient language of its own. It is a Celtic language, most closely akin to Irish Gaelic, extinct as a vernacular but still lovingly cherished. The ancient heritage of Ellan Vannin, as the island is called in Manx, is about equally indebted to the Celts and the Vikings, but long ago -- long before the Royal Navy laid its hand upon Hong Kong -- the English made the Isle of Man their own, first as an island estate of noble mainland families, then as a direct dependency of the crown. This was never an orthodox imperial colony, though, like Bermuda or Gibraltar, Jamaica or Ascension Island, and today the queen of England holds sway here specifically in her feudal capacity as Lord of Man. The island is not part of the United Kingdom, and adheres to the European Union only in an associated way, defined as membership in "the Peripheral Maritime Regions." It has its own parliament, the 1,000-year-old Tynwald, with powers over almost all domestic matters, including taxation: "The Island," as an official handbook puts it, "is immune from the rigors of the U.K. Inland Revenue." Nevertheless, the longer I wander around the island, the more piquantly I recognize it as a late relic of the British Empire, still idiosyncratically surviving out here in the sea, sustained by ships from Lancashire and several flights a day from Liverpool Airport. There is even a British governor, sent over from England and living in a pleasant country house on the outskirts of Douglas, the capital. But when I hung around its gates as I had hung around Government House in Hong Kong, vaguely hoping for some parallel sensations, not a policeman was in sight, let alone an automatic rifle. I knocked on the lodge door, just in hope of making conversation, but there was nobody home. Layers of British imperialism, in one kind and another, have been laid upon the Isle of Man down the years. First there was the arrival of the English aristocracy, who built their castles and beautiful houses across the countryside and established their estates as they established them in Ireland. Then came the money men, who found Douglas a very satisfactory location for the evasion of customs duties. In the 19th century, Lancashire discovered Man as a pleasant place for paddle-steamer holidays, and "Douglas, IoM" became for years a synonym for raucous promenade entertainment, dance halls and ice-cream stands and beauty contests. The most famous of all motorbike races, the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, which sends its competitors hurtling in marvelous peril around country lanes and into city streets, was started in 1907 and gave the island a new kind of cultural focus. And in our own time, the Isle of Man has become an Offshore Island, attracting speculation and investment from all over the world. All these increments I experienced for myself as I rambled around. At Castleton in the south, the castle of the earls of Derby, a clump of gray limestone overlooking a docile seaport, seemed to me just like a fortress of the Anglo-Normans over the water in Ireland. Many a lovely white mansion, half-visible among its woods in the lee of the hills, spoke to me of the incurable homesickness of the colonial English. Once, on a blazing blue day, I came across a small church, surrounded by toppled tombstones and within sound of the sea, which seemed to me just like one of those sweet stone churches that stand among the sugar canes of the British Carribbean. The Royal Chapel beside Hill of Tynwald, where the parliamentarians meet annually in alfresco conclave, wearing traditional buttonholes of mugwort, might well be in Anglo-India somewhere; the pubs and fish-and-chips of the old tourist parts remind me of Malta in its Royal Navy days; the plummy English voices sometimes to be heard on Radio Manx are like the echoes of pre-Mandela South Africa. And in Douglas itself, which looks like a handsome English seaside resort of the early 19th century, I felt all about me the blast of international finance, the hum of the computers, the glossy business magazines, the swish white houses with their swimming pools, the banks and investment offices one after the other along Victoria Street -- the Financial Sector, the last gift of empire, which from Jersey to the Bahamas to Hong Kong itself, has seemed to promise the benefits of British order, probity and tradition with the advantages of minimally hampered capitalism. One exuberant Douglas financier told me that every day of the working week his bank made electronic contact with 2,000 other banks around the world. There is a lot to be said for the ambiguous post-imperial condition. The Isle of Man has a reputation for reactionary conservatism, expressed most notoriously in a taste for capital punishment, but it seems to me a most obliging island. Its inhabitants (though remarkably few of them seem to be actually natives, despite the words of the Manx national anthem -- O Land Of Our Birth) are almost universally friendly. Its restaurants (though liable to be recommended in the "Daily Mirror Good Grub Guide") are welcoming. Its landscapes are gentle and unspoiled. It has a skillful and not too intrusive heritage industry and a fascinatingly functional transport system of horse trams, steam trains and electric trolleys. Its streets are clean and safe and a pleasant strain of English eccentricity spices its life: Where else could there be an amateur dramatic society whose patrons are His Excellency the Governor, the Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man, His Worshipful the Mayor of Douglas and Air Marshal the Rev. Sir Paterson Fraser, KBE, CB, AFC, MA, C Eng, FRAeS, RAF (retired)? I was told of an incipient nationalist movement arguing for complete independence from Britain, but I met nobody who wasn't more or less satisfied with the way things are. Why not? The top rate of income tax is 20 percent and there are no death duties at all. There is no pretending, of course, that the affairs of this island are fueled by the milk of human kindness -- they never were, anywhere in the British Empire. "I suppose," said I one day, noting the protective padding that hung on many walls along the route of the TT race, "that it's to prevent riders hurting themselves?" "No," said my informant frankly, "it's to prevent them hurting the property." The Isle of Man is a hard and rather brilliant place, full of rich people getting richer, but then that was what empire was all about in the first place. The speculative merchants of 17th century Douglas are the exchange-rate manipulators of today: "My forebearers were smugglers of whiskey," a merry Manx banker told me. "Now what I do is smuggle figures." In the United Kingdom, pound coins are ornamented with royal crests and patriotic symbols; in the Isle of Man, they picture a mobile telephone. No, the British Empire did not end in Hong Kong. It lives on, in style and in spirit, in these scattered small dependencies around the world -- the last overseas retreats in which wandering Britons may still feel themselves members of a well-endowed family. I happened to mention my visit to the Isle of Man to a bookseller acquaintance of mine in London, and he turned out to know the island well. His parents lived there, he told me, and he often went to stay with them. Plenty of room in their house? I asked, thinking of those enviable country retreats and opulent villas of Douglas. Well, yes, said my acquaintance, as a matter of fact, his dad was the governor. Aug. 19, 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Want to visit the Isle of Man? 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