Travel is often a means of escape, and this year's travel books offer plenty of it. Failed relationships, dead-end jobs and other disappointments infest the current crop like bedbugs in a youth hostel, driving their authors around the globe in search of transformation. The seekers range from bored young drifters to anxiety-stricken middle-agers, motivated by the quixotic hope that cutting loose will stimulate the mind and heal the soul. “I was ready for Paris,” Bryce Corbett announces at the beginning of ‘A Town Like Paris: Falling in Love in the City of Light'. “Ready for a change of scene and the shedding of some emotional baggage.” After a breakup with a longtime partner, the 28-year-old Australian quits his job at Sky News in London and boards the Eurostar for a new life. What follows is a refreshing variation on a shopworn theme: the Anglophone at large in the French capital, coping with the language barrier, inaccessible Gallic women and bad plumbing. Corbett finds a job he isn't “qualified for, much less interested in,” lands a hideously furnished flat in the Marais and joins a circle of partygoing fellow expatriates, whom he annoyingly calls the “Paris Posse.” It's not quite “A Moveable Feast,” and the tone can be smugly self-satisfied, but Corbett's sharp observations lend the tale a dash of élan. Lamenting the decline of Shakespeare and Company into a Left Bank tourist trap, he notes that its “literary credibility” has “long since been replaced by the distinct aroma of upper-middle-class America — a mixture of Snapple Ice Tea, sweaty Teva sandals and Tommy Hilfiger cologne.” When Corbett abandons his quest for a French girlfriend and falls in love with an Australian girl he calls “the Showgirl,” you can't help wishing him bonne chance. ‘Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre', the collapse of his marriage sends the British journalist Richard Grant on a journey into Mexico's infamous cordillera, a no man's land of marijuana-growing peasants, feuding drug barons and blood-soaked history. Grant's book is a reportorial tour de force, filled with characters straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. He follows the trail of a band of Apaches who found refuge from the United States Army in the Sierra Madre's canyons, embarks on an obligatory treasure hunt and frequents desolate towns where “shiny pickup trucks with tinted windows” drive “around and around the bleak little plaza, blasting narcocorridos and bouncing up and down through the potholes.” A climactic encounter with a pair of coked-up outlaws leaves Grant stripped of any sense of romance about the Sierra. “The mean hillbillies who lived up there,” he concludes, “could all feud themselves into extinction and burn in hell.” An ordeal of a different sort awaits Fran Sandham in ‘Traversa: A Solo Walk Across Africa From the Skeleton Coast to the Indian Ocean'. Inspired by the 19th-century Scotsman David Livingstone, Sandham leaves his drafty London flat and his job at a West End bookshop and embarks on an open-ended journey on foot from the Namibian desert to Tanzania. Along the way, he collapses from heat exhaustion, runs out of plasters to soothe his agonizing blisters, swats away clouds of tsetse flies and endures the constant stares of astonished locals. At first annoyed by the attention, Sandham begins to look at himself through African eyes: “Here I am, a white guy, plodding along with an enormous pack, my trekking poles giving me the appearance of skiing down the road, the bandanna wrapped around my head making me look like something from ‘The Pirates of Penzance.' Sometimes I forget I look rather singular.” Sandham's self-deprecation and affectionate attitude toward the people he encounters lift this book high above the vast pile of African-adventure travelogues. ‘Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents' starts with a novel conceit: Jim Malusa, a Tucson-based writer and adventurer, decides to travel to the lowest-altitude points on six continents to make an online documentary series for the Discovery Channel. Over the next six years, he pedals his bicycle through Patagonia, the Australian desert, the Dead Sea basin, the shores of the Caspian Sea, Death Valley and the Lac Assal region of Djibouti. Malusa's human encounters are mostly pedestrian, and he spends too much time recounting preparations for each of his journeys, including several days of negotiation to retrieve his satellite phone, seized by customs officials in Cairo. But his descriptions of desert landscapes can be extraordinary. Lac Assal, in East Africa, is “a bull's-eye of deepest blue ringed with purest white, sunk far below in a black spill of lavas from the volcano.” On the empty track to Lake Eyre in the Australian outback, deposits of stone and gravel “glow like burnished copper.” Poking through them “are skeletons of saltbush, quivering in the wind. I push on, chattering across the rocks, plowing through the sand, crossing a basin of dried mud aglitter with half-buried gypsum crystals.” You can almost feel the dry gusts turning Malusa's lips into cracked leather. In 2001 Scott Huler, a National Public Radio contributor, gave up on Joyce's “Ulysses” and devoted himself to Homer's “Odyssey,” which inspired him to leave his pregnant wife behind and retrace the steps of the Greek hero Odysseus. The result is ‘No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through ‘The Odyssey'', an account of Huler's wanderings through the eastern Mediterranean. Too much of his journey finds him battling hordes of tourists in Capri and other resorts, and his attempts to make Odysseus' adventures accessible can be awkward. He likens the Greek sailors to the “disposable crew members in ‘Star Trek' who had the job of going down to check out some new planet, only to be killed, thereby allowing Captain Kirk to defeat the bad guy.” Still, it's fun following Huler as he tracks down possible real locations for Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops' cave, and his insights into Odysseus' character — and his own — seem dead-on. By the time Huler comes home to his loving wife, just in time for the birth of their son — an echo of Odysseus' return to Penelope — Huler's real-life epiphanies outweigh his sometimes wince-inducing turns of phrase. J. Maarten Troost has few such epiphanies in ‘Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation; Or, How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid'. Troost, a veteran travel writer, stumbles through pollution-befouled urban China, knowing only a few words of Mandarin, spinning from meetings with pimps and prostitutes to inedible meals of accidentally ordered sheep's brains to train-station mob scenes. For the most part, Troost's book is a by-the-numbers journey to Mao's tomb, the Great Wall, the Shanghai Bund and the casinos of Macao, along with more out-of-the-way excursions to Lhasa and the Three Gorges on the Yangtzee River. But there are moments of humor and poignancy: an unsettling dalliance with an English translator called Meow Meow and an encounter with child beggars camped beneath a JumboTron screen in Qingdao that's broadcasting an N.B.A. playoff game: “They were all smaller than my 4-year-old son, and as I regarded them, dusty and hungry, I wished that one day they'd grow to be giants, tall and soaring, as big as Yao Ming.” - NYT __
