Exploring Mongolia on Horseback

IN SEARCH OF GENGHIS KHAN by Tim Severin (Atheneum, $25). If travel broadens, Severin must be as wide as the globe and as deep as recorded history. This remarkable explorer and geographic historian has, in past years and past books, piloted a leather boat across the Atlantic in emulation of the legendary St. Brendan the Navigator, the 6th-Century Irish monk who supposedly sailed as far as Greenland, or even Florida; followed the course of the First Crusade from Belgium to Jerusalem; pursued the ghost of Marco Polo overland to China (but by motorcycle), and more. In his fearlessness and indefatigability, he is a sort of Lawrence of Everywhere, forever leaping on the camel (or into the leather boat), riding (or sailing) off not just into the distance but into the very warp and spirit of another time and place.

Then he comes home to Ireland and writes about his experiences exquisitely. His latest book takes him across the vast expanses of Mongolia on horseback, in the company of Mongols, on the trail of the great conquerer. Along the way, his greatest adversary turns out to be not the considerable physical demands of the adventure, but a Mongolian functionary named Ariunbold, who takes charge of the trip, changes its course, alienates guides, insults nomadic herdsmen, and just generally acts like a smug Central Asian jerk. The wonders of the ride more than compensate for Ariunbold’s behavior, though. Consider this brief passage: “Thunderclouds drifted across the sky, and whenever the shafts of sunlight broke through, the flocks of sheep glowed a bright white against the green pasture . . . . (The) ride was exciting and spectacular. There was the constant rumble of 100 sets of hooves, the shouts of the herdsmen, the mob of horses surging forward, the flow of animals shifting and changing their positions, and the sheer exhilaration of riding at a fast pace across an unspoiled countryside.” This isn’t armchair travel writing. This is a damned good book, as lively, well-plotted and rich with characters as a novel.

TRAVEL GUIDE TO EUROPE 1492 by Lorenzo Camusso (An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, $35). The bluntly titled paperback chronicles journeys of a very different sort. A dense, attractive volume, full of sidebars and asides and richly illustrated with 15th-Century block prints, paintings and other art, follows 10 itineraries that were or might have been traveled by practitioners of different trades in the 1400s (not specifically in 1492, the book’s title notwithstanding).

Thus, for instance, we follow Florentine banker Gerozzo di Jacopo de’ Pigli, one of Cosimo de’ Medici’s lieutenants, on a journey from Florence to Brugge (via Geneva and Nancy, among other cities) in 1446--a journey he really did make, though details of his route (and his perceptions along the way) are mostly the author’s informed speculation. In another itinerary, we sail with a hypothetical fur merchant from Lubeck to Riga, and then travel with him overland to Novgorod through dire Russian poverty. (“The country is described as abounding in wheat and rye, with rivers rich in fish, and much wildlife . . . .,” writes Camusso. “The peasants . . . . were ruthlessly exploited and lived in conditions barely above slavery, wearing shoes of lime bark, eating wheat mixed with rye flour.”) Then we follow the well-worn pilgrim’s path from Vezelay in Burgundy to Santiago de Compostela in far northwestern Spain, one of the holiest shrines of medieval Christendom. Along the way, we are treated to extravagant historical and cultural detail, but disappointingly little colorful description. Still, the lengthy general introductory section, devoted to such subjects as the mechanics of travel by horse and boat, the nature of the medieval inn and the logistics of currency exchange in the 15th Century, is fascinating--and the intrepid voyager with a bent toward history and the arts might well profit from taking the book along on his or her next journey from, say, Genoa to Istanbul, or Nuremberg to Venice.

FESTIVAL EUROPE! FAIRS & CELEBRATIONS THROUGHOUT EUROPE by Margaret M. Johnson (Mustang Publishing Co., paperback, $10.95). Sounds like a great idea for a book: A guide to that continent’s many regular festive events to aid travelers who either want to make sure they show up at the right time and place for, say, the Glasgow Folk Festival or Oktoberfest in Munich (which takes place, incidentally, in September), or who want to avoid big, usually drunken public parties like the plague. Indeed, there’s plenty of good information here--but Johnson concentrates on events taking place only between May and October, on the theory that that’s when most Americans go overseas (not the savviest travelers; and anyway, many of Europe’s best festivals are held in wintertime); and, once you get past practical matters, she is hardly an illuminating cicerone. “For England’s William Shakespeare,” she writes in one passage, for example, “all the world was a stage.” Oh, and Oktoberfest, you might be interested to learn, is “the most famous and fun-filled 16 days on earth.”

LET’S BLOW THRU EUROPE by Thomas Neenan and Greg Hancock (Mustang Publishing Co., paperback, $10.95). This revised and expanded edition, described as “part parody of the popular ‘Let’s Go’ series, part humorous commentary on ‘The Grand Tour,’ and part honest, practical guidebook,” is toothless parody and sophomoric humor and, as a guidebook, it reveals little that can’t be found in more conventional guides. It isn’t very well-written, either, with failed wit often meeting muddled syntax--”(F)resh pike from the lake . . . . tastes as good as a pin cushion soaked in the juice from a can of tuna fish could” (could under what circumstances?); or, “We bought a few copies off a big pile of dandy little Czechoslovakian-Mongolian Phrase Books one year, and darned if the pile hadn’t gone down very much when we returned a year later” (meaning it had gone down or not?). In addition to all the usual European destinations, incidentally, “Let’s Blow” includes a chapter on Cancun. But that’s not Europe, you say? Right. It’s just one more stab at humor.

FODOR’S BUDAPEST and FODOR’S CZECHOSLOVAKIA (both Fodor’s Travel Publications, Inc., paperbacks, $11 and $12, respectively). On a considerably more serious note, the old-pro guidebook publisher’s series has added two timely new titles. As is usual with Fodor’s, both are authoritative, jampacked with facts, peppered with bits of color (“The hall beneath the cupola is an explosion of glitter like a display of fireworks.”) and--perhaps most important of all for these two rapidly changing destinations--up-to-date. The Czechoslovakia guide includes detailed walking tours of Prague; the Budapest volume adds side trips to the resorts of Lake Balaton and to medieval towns along the Danube.