Of walking in ice Munich-Paris, 23 November-14 December 1974

As you riffle through this spring's rucksack of enticing new travel books, seeking somewhere to go, you might give a thought to going nowhere - that is, in the Greek sense of "nowhere," to "utopia," a word Thomas More coined five centuries ago, meaning "no place." The best "nowhere" destination of all is undoubtedly Atlantis, that utopian underwater city (or subterranean city, given millenniums of earth-crust shimmies) whose rumored existence captivated Plato, around 360 B.C., and whose whereabouts continues to tantalize archaeologists, oceanographers, classicists, geographers and mythomanes. If you've traveled to a distant continent or four, it isn't inconceivable that you've already trod upon the legendary land - without knowing it. In MEET ME IN ATLANTIS: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (Dutton, $27.95), the lively, skeptical but open-minded travel writer Mark Adams goes on the hunt for sites that age-old intuition and state-of-the-art science hint may conceal that vanished realm. Possibilities abound. One is the Greek island of Santorini, whose buried Minoan village of Akrotiri (rediscovered in 1967) was destroyed in a huge volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C. that sent towering walls of water crashing across the Mediterranean at 200 miles an hour. Another putative Atlantis locale is the stony island of Malta. And then there's Doñana National Park on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia. Still other candidates include the Bolivian altiplano, the Souss-Massa plain in Morocco and even Antarctica. Adams takes readers along to four plausible sites, without quackery and with a contagious spirit of curiosity, interviewing scores of experts and fanatics, and painting pictures that will make even the most levelheaded traveler yearn to repeat his fantastic itinerary. And yet, as Adams would surely testify, it's impossible to take the same trip twice. This truth is borne out by some expressive new travelogues that reveal their authors' contrasting motivations for going on the road - and show how strongly personal priorities can shape a journey. One of the most perversely compelling of these accounts is OF WALKING IN ICE: Munich-Paris, 23 November-14 December 1974 (University of Minnesota, paper, $19.95), Werner Herzog's diary (translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg) of a three-week hike through sleet, snow and winter winds, spurred by superstitious grief. Believing that his mentor, the film historian Lotte Eisner, was dying in a French hospital, Herzog persuaded himself that if he mortified his flesh by trekking to her bedside, she would be spared. During his long march west across the Bavarian countryside, his feet blister and bleed; he breaks into vacant cottages to sleep, shivers with cold, urinates into a rubber boot. He thirsts for milk and human company, yet he doggedly perseveres. (And so does Lotte Eisner.) Herzog's account begs to be read aloud. Seeing a lone raven, "his head bowed in the rain," sitting "motionless and freezing," all "wrapped in his raven's thoughts," Herzog writes, "A brotherly feeling flashed through me, and loneliness filled my breast." Later, nearly delirious from the cold, he bleakly ruminates: "I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I headed toward a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall. It was a fire of frost, one that brings on Coldness, not Heat, one that makes water turn immediately into ice." Ice is a given during Kara Richardson Whitely's mountaineering expedition to the highest peak in Africa. In her memoir GORGE: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds (Seal Press, paper, $17), Whitely (who has a nice, doting husband; two adorable little girls; and an insatiable hunger for pumpkin doughnuts) writes accessibly and frankly about her struggles with both Kilimanjaro and her self-image. "I was the fattest hiker on the mountain," she begins. "And when I say I'm fat, I'm not being charmingly self-deprecating. Each of my legs was the width of a century-old tree. My hips were as wide as a Smart car bumper." Why has she attempted this journey not once but three times? To prove she is "not the lazy stereotype you picture when you see someone encased in a mountain of fat." At home in New Jersey, she worries that others see her as a "blob," but in Africa her fertility-goddess contours win her admirers. "If you lived here, your husband would have to guard you with a gun," someone tells her. Nonetheless, even while hiking in Tanzania, Whitely can't find proper athletic gear and has to improvise: "I was wearing hiking pants that were made from two single pairs sewn together.... Even my sleeping bag was supersized so it would zip over my hips." This detailed account of her travails will give confidence not only to hesitant would-be mountaineers but to those, like her, whose biggest hurdle is "to learn to be O.K. with who I was." A related impulse sent the North Carolina poet Michael White on an artistic treasure hunt in the wake of his "crazy and bitter and acrimonious" divorce. In TRAVELS IN VERMEER: A Memoir (Karen & Michael Braziller/ Persea, paper, $17.95), he describes the epiphany that "broke over me like a wave" in Amsterdam, where he had gone in the spring of 2004 to get distance from his imploded marriage. During a touristy stroll through the Rijksmuseum, he stumbled upon the Vermeer room. Encountering a painting called "The Milkmaid," he felt "a shiver all the way up and down my spine" and saw "stillness. Not emptiness but stillness, a great soul balanced there." Consoled, enthralled and distracted from his melancholy, he resolved to spend the next year visiting The Hague, Delft, London, Washington and New York, to take in as many of Vermeer's life-affirming tableaus as he could. "The light of Vermeer is intended for those who need it," he reflects. In the city of Delft, he recognizes "the same red bricks, tea-brown canals and high white skies that colored every moment of Vermeer's life and art." While walking along the Schie riverfront, White finds the vantage point of the artist's "View of Delft" and sees how Vermeer used distance to achieve his transporting perspective: "The artist's dream, I think, is simply to vanish into his vision." Following Vermeer grants White another kind of distance, allowing him to vanish into Vermeer's dream, then return refreshed to his own. Art is the spur to another standout book, THE PORCELAIN THIEF: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China (Crown, $27), by the American journalist Huan Hsu, who spent more than three years in China trying to unearth a buried family mystery - literally. Raised in Salt Lake City, Hsu was a reporter for The Seattle Weekly when he was assigned to cover a story at the Seattle Art Museum. Impressed with the Chinese porcelain collection, he mentioned it to his father, who remarked, offhand: "Your mother's family had some porcelain. You should ask her about it." Hsu learned that his great-great-grandfather had acquired a collection of Chinese imperial porcelain, which he had hidden underground in 1938 to protect it from the invading Japanese Army. After the end of the Sino-Japanese War, the Communist revolution prompted the family to flee to Taiwan. Hsu's grandmother sent his mother and brothers to study in America, and nobody retrieved the porcelain. What became of it? When Hsu asked his mother and then his grandmother, who had returned to China after her husband's death, he got next to no leads. Frustrated, he overcame his resistance to spending serious time in his parents' homeland (his American upbringing had made him dread "chaos, over-crowding, pollution, the absence of Western manners and sanitation, inefficiency and stomach problems") and got on a plane. Taking a job at the Shanghai semiconductor factory owned by one of his uncles, Hsu boned up on his Chinese and began digging into his family's past. As his fluency improved, he was better able to grill his relatives, but they still weren't very helpful. "How can I remember all the stuff in there?" his grandmother argued, urging him to scrap his mission to the family's ancestral village. "Don't go," she warned. "The countryside is full of people who will think you're rich and bother you for money." Undaunted, Hsu pieced together the shards he found, fixing his family's and his own place in the evolving mosaic of China's past and present. "Stories - of my family, of bygone China - don't have to die," he comes to see. "Even their fragments can be reassembled. And in China there are shards everywhere." THE BRITISH JOURNALIST Graham Holliday, an economic refugee from small-town England, landed in Asia in 1996 with less context than Hsu but with more gusto. A photo of Hanoi's opera house, glimpsed in his early 20s, had sparked a hunger for Vietnam, and when at last he stood amid the cyclos and food carts of Hanoi (where he had taken a job teaching English), the street food that sizzled at every corner fanned that hunger into an obsession, rough-and-tumble, lip-smacking memoir, EATING VIETNAM: Dispatches From a Blue Plastic Table (Anthony Bourdain/Ecco, $26.99), Holliday writes with exhilaration. "Everything I could see, smell, taste, touch and hear was completely foreign. It was as if someone had pulled back the blanket on my previous life." He was, he concludes, "beyond smitten." His culinary love affair was kicked off by a fateful bun cha (savory broth studded with pork belly and meatballs, served with noodles, lettuce and fresh herbs): "The whole sweet, salty fish sauce, pork ball, noodly, leafy, charred parcel exploded in one sensational gob-burst." Eight years later, still ravenously roving Vietnam, he started blogging about his passion for its street food. Practically overnight, he became the pre-eminent go-to guru for where to find his adopted country's best chao ga, mien luon xao, ca nuong, banh tom Ho Tay and bun oc. What are these dishes? How are they pronounced? And what do they taste like? Holliday's loving, laddish descriptions will make gonzo gourmands salivate, though timid eaters may reach for their Turns. A large dried fish - a gift from a fisherman in a sliver of Norway beyond the Arctic Circle - was the Italian journalist Paolo Rumiz's unlikely visa into Russia during a journey he took in 2008 down the "zipper" of Eurasia, from Finland to Norway, through Karelia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, all the way south to Odessa. In THE FAULT LINE: Traveling the Other Europe, From Finland to Ukraine (Rizzoli, $27.95), beautifully translated by Gregory Conti, Rumiz recalls that the Russian border agents were "dumbfounded, almost respectful. Standing before them is a 60-year-old man with a business visa and a dried cod. Nothing in their rules and regulations contemplates anything like this." Indeed, the author's self-assigned vertical route (longitudinal as opposed to latitudinal) was so extraordinary that no map existed to guide him: "I had to make my own," he writes, "on a scale of one to one million, transferring pieces of various atlases onto a single strip of paper ... folded like an accordion." Idiosyncratic, lushly observed and aglow with philosophical asides, this questing travelogue sheds light on regions you've never heard of, where traditions endure from other ages. While Rumiz doesn't shy away from reporting industrial blight, Putin-era grievances and regional resentments (he made his trip well before war broke out in Crimea and Ukraine), he rejects the lazy globalist thinking that mistakes a country's headlines for its society. "To understand which way the world is heading, you have to go to train stations, not to airports," he argues. It is on land, he believes, in remote villages, woods and lakes, among the sort of simple, ordinary people Dostoyevsky designated "Poor Folk," that the true life of nations reveals its colorful weft. Woven through his rich warp of reporting and storytelling are conversations with the people he met - reindeer herders, fishermen, peasant farmers - so artless and surprising they feel like fables. "Explain to your readers that it's a sin not to cultivate the earth," one woman adjures him, while a gregarious izba dweller on Karelia's Lake Onega declares, "Bear prints look exactly like human feet!" Rumiz's paean to "peripheral places" shows his readers that dystopian modernity isn't the only story of the present-day eastern borderlands: A fairy tale lurks between the lines, and those who have enough intuition and courage (and perhaps a Russian translator) can discover it for themselves, if they borrow his map. To spot a more easily attainable fairyland, a virtual heaven on earth, all you must do, according to a plethora of polls, is move to Scandinavia. The British journalist Michael Booth, who is married to a Dane and has lived there for more than a decade, was so convulsed by a study that proclaimed Denmark the "happiest place in the world" - with Finland, Norway and Sweden trailing close behind - that he wrote a book to debunk it (sort Of), THE ALMOST NEARLY PERFECT PEOPLE: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia (Picador, $26). Indignantly, Booth challenges the experts. "The happiest? This dark, wet, dull, flat little country," he asks. "Well, they are doing an awfully good job of hiding it." In reality, he maintains, the Danes ought to be "ranked in the bottom quarter as among the least demonstrably joyful people on earth, along with the Swedes, the Finns and the Norwegians." Booth's extremely funny character analysis of Scandinavia (which includes the adjacent Arctic-Circle floaters, Iceland and Finland) gives an incisive yet comprehensive overview of each of these reputedly lucky lands, in an attempt to correct outsiders' misperceptions about this frosty section of the globe. If everything were really so great up north, he asks, then "why wasn't everyone flocking to live here?" Despite Booth's Basil Fawlty-level outrage and wicked teasing, his chapters betray a clear affection for the icy region he calls home, and gradually allow a clearer identity for each country to emerge. Who knew that hollyhocks "spring up from between the cobbles of Christianshavn" in Copenhagen, or that on Norway's Constitution Day, May 17, many of its citizens wear traditional costumes (dirndls, knickerbockers, frock coats, capes), making them look like "escapees from Middle-earth"? And did you know about the campy, "musclebound caryatids" that flank Helsinki's Central Station? Any uncharitable Dane who mocks the Swedes as "stiff, humorless, rule-obsessed and dull" surely hasn't attended the late-summer Swedish kraftskiva revel, the "largest crayfish orgy in the world." As for Iceland, well, despite the disincentives of smoked puffin snacks, Bjork and the financial crash, its volcanoes and geothermal pools still beckon, and with luck you might see an elf. However capricious the details Booth brings out, he succeeds - despite himself - in making the happiness pollsters look as if they might be on to something. That said, in 2002, when the American novelist and poet Steven Nightingale and his wife decided they wanted to live in paradise, they headed much farther south, to the sun-drenched Spanish city of Granada, home to the Alhambra palace. In a medieval barrio called Albayzin, mazed with narrow streets "just wide enough for two walking abreast," with "walls like spillways for flowers," they bought an old house with a little tower and a hidden garden where their baby daughter could play. "I have never known a place of such concentrated joy," Nightingale writes. "It felt like something more than being in a neighborhood. It was like being in a mind, where history is musing a secret way forward." In GRANADA: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God (Counterpoint, $28), Nightingale mellifluously describes the utopia his family inhabited: "The garden and house embraced one another, took up an amorous life together, so that every room came to include air and flowers, trees and starlight, rustling water and ripening fruit. How had this unity, so easy and preternatural, come to be here in Granada?" Investigating his neighborhood's past, he learned that for nearly eight centuries, beginning in 711, Andalusia was the crown of Spain's harmonious "convivencia," when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived and worked together in peace and friendship, producing a rare flowering of art, science and commerce. And then, in 1492, all was lost. Queen Isabella's inquisitors brutalized the Albayzin, forced Muslims and Jews to convert, confiscated their property and cruelly cast them out. Over the centuries, the crumbled neighborhood endured, until, 20 years ago, Unesco declared it a World Heritage site, part of the "Patrimony of Humankind." At the time Nightingale entered the Albayzin, its strong hybrid roots were pushing forth new shoots: The hardiness of the commingled faiths that fed it had endured. His book is not only a memoir of one family's communion with a dream house, it's the unearthing of a long-buried dream of civic harmony, a reawakening. Even if you have visited Granada and walked the labyrinthine ways of the Albayzin, Nightingale makes you want to go there again, to see it with new eyes. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

In late 1974, Werner Herzog was on a mission. He believed that his friend Lotte Eisner, a film historian, would survive a serious illness if he walked from Munich to Paris, where she was convalescing. This eloquent diary recounts his journey and his fleeting thoughts while walking. He offers typical Herzogian observations of the coarse salt on pretzels and the trusting faces of sheep caught in a snowstorm. But perhaps more revealing is his mix of pensive musings about loneliness and practical concerns about his blisters and swollen Achilles tendon, the constant rain, and finding a place to sleep. Herzog's slight narrative is captivating because his experiences humanize the legendary filmmaker. He is full of curiosity and wonder. Finding cigarette packets on the roadside or a bicycle discarded in a brook stimulates his imagination. A rainbow inspires confidence, while cranes flying in formation provide a "metaphor for him who walks." Even when he meanders into strange asides, such as a story about his grandfather, Herzog remains interesting. This book is especially satisfying to imagine as a documentary narrated in Herzog's distinctive voice. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.