Eric Newby got the travel bug from his parents, who would leave him with a housekeeper for months at a time when they went off to market their fashion "productions." But he took the habit farther afield and for far longer than anyone could have imagined, and in the process developed an audience devoted to his witty travel tales. Now in his 80s, the venerable English travel writer still pedals a cycle or bounces across a desert on a jeep whenever the opportunity presents itself, for, as he notes, it might well not recur. In this selection of short pieces, Newby focuses on his most enduring memories of departures and arrivals, beginning with his regular walks "up to the bend and back" with his mother in his childhood village of Barnes, England. With abundant detail and his trademark self-deprecating humor, he takes his readers on one of the last journeys of the Orient Express, into the world"s biggest opal field in South Australia (where miners live in the "unimaginable horror of corrugated iron huts" in 140° temperatures), and on to Tuscany for the mad two-minute horse race known as the Palio where horses and riders are regularly maimed or killed. In his 70th year alone, Newby cycled from Rotterdam to Dijon, traveled to northern Rajasthan for the full moon of Kartik, when tens of thousands of Hindus try to bathe in the sacred lake at the same time, and then to the biggest cattle fair in all of Asia, where he describes in delightful detail the twice-daily bathing of the elephants. Two years later he decided to ride his bike along the meridian two degrees west of Greenwich in bleak November weather because it was the only time of year he could stay at bed & breakfasts without advance reservations. The short essays cover lots of territory at a rapid pace and, as a result, are not as satisfying as his classics, such as A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines. But he makes up for the lack of length and depth with a brilliant selection of telling scenes and the amused irony with which he views the world and himself. During a visit to China, he irreverently describes the embalmed Chairman Mao this way: "Lying there, with only his face visible, he looked like an over-sized omelet from the McDonald"s across the way at the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square." As for himself, he"s busy being overtaken on his made-to-order touring bicycle by elderly Dutch ladies "mounted on bikes that looked like two harps welded together." With his ironic and endearing sense of humor and his willingness to go absolutely anywhere, Newby makes the perfect traveling companion. --Lesley Reed