Ms. Landro writes the Journal's Finicky Traveler column (courtsey The Wall Street Journal)
1. A Moveable Feast By Ernest Hemingway Scribner, 1964
The young Ernest Hemingway hadn't yet published his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," when he moved to Paris in 1921 as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Soon he was mingling with the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and although he was barely earning enough to keep himself and his family fed and housed, "in Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing, and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries." This heady memoir of the expatriate life doubtless lured many a young romantic to travel to the City of Light in pursuit of the moveable feast at its cafés, bookshops and salons. Hemingway and wife Hadley also journeyed by train through Switzerland to the Austrian frontier, where we glimpse an era before the modern ski resort: They climbed through the Alps aided by seal skins attached to their skis. Though the trip is the beginning of the end of their idyll, as he writes, "there is never any ending to Paris." A newer edition of "A Moveable Feast" published earlier this year has sparked controversy for changes made by Hemingway's grandson; for the full picture, read it side by side with the original, published after the author's suicide in 1964.
2. Innocents Abroad By Mark Twain 1869
In 1867, Mark Twain embarked on an ambitious cruise to Europe, the Middle East and the Holy Land. His aim was to see Europe and the East with his own eyes rather than those of the guidebook writers who had gone before. The letters from the road that Twain wrote for publication back home—they are compiled in "Innocents Abroad"— presented one of the first unvarnished looks at the realities of travel. With scathing wit he mocks his fellow passengers ("We have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot onboard, and they do distress the company") and the drudgery of guided tours. Churlish after too many churches, Twain never feels so blessed as when he learns that Michelangelo is dead. After an arduous but fascinating journey on horseback through Lebanon and Syria, he is felled by cholera but recovers to swim in the Sea of Galilee, where a night sky "has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens." The curmudgeonly traveler becomes downright reverent by the time he reaches the Holy Land, "the genuine center of the earth."
3. Married Adventure By Osa Johnson Lippincott, 1940
Still in her teens when she married pioneering photographer and documentary filmmaker Martin Johnson in 1910, Osa Leighty gave up the safety of Kansas and domestic comfort for an often-perilous existence filming life in the South Seas, Africa and Borneo. Her maiden voyage, on a tramp steamer across the Pacific, starts with cockroaches nibbling at her fingernails in the night, but that was nothing compared with fleeing hostile natives in the jungle, stumbling across a hut full of shrunken heads and seeing evidence of cannibalism roasting in the embers of a campfire. Acting as her husband's helpmate, crew member and occasional protector, she trains her rifle at the rhinos charging at him in Africa while he captures them on film, but she also becomes a lover of animals, cuddling baby cheetahs and weeping after shooting an antelope. The Johnsons' documentaries inspired many to explore distant lands, and Osa's "I Married Adventure" still makes for breathtaking reading.
4. Riding the Iron Rooster By Paul Theroux Putnam's, 1988
The author of "The Great Railway Bazaar" and "The Old Patagonian Express" spent a year traveling through China by train in 1986, ending up in Tibet and witnessing along the way China's "turbulent passage" as the reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought an end to the deprivations of the Cultural Revolution. Like Twain before him, Paul Theroux is something of a misanthrope; he spends much of his time scorning and evading fellow Western travelers and gives the slip to the government minders accompanying him into the more remote parts of Inner Mongolia. He finds the Chinese he meets along the way unfailingly friendly and unsuspicious as he tries to learn "how people felt about hookers and high fashion in a country where a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits." And as he comes to understand, the Chinese "are never happier than when on a railway journey," even in the crowded compartments of cars with a designation that translates as "hard class," chattering away, smoking, slurping tea, playing cards, spitting sunflower seeds onto the floor and "watching the world go by."
5. Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need By Dave Barry Fawcett, 1991
OK, so Hemingway he's not, but Dave Barry's slim volume of irreverent riffs on modern travel is laugh-out-loud funny. Intended to help readers travel with "a minimum of unpleasantness and death," this guide by the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist notes that "most domestic locations are conveniently located right here in the United States," and he spares none of them. Atlantic City is the one seaside resort, Barry says, that could actually be improved "by the arrival of an oil slick." When traveling abroad, he advises, dispense with the notion that the French are rude—"they just happen to hate you"—but be prepared to assert yourself with helpful French phrases like "Attemptez vouz a yanquer ma chaine, boudet?" Germany, he notes, is "actually a very nice nation that used to have an unfortunate tendency to fall in with the wrong crowd and every few decades try to take over the world." As for culinary adventure, Barry has praise for "the great variety of Mexican food, which is perfectly safe as long as you never let any of it get into your digestive system."
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