TRAVELING IN STYLE : EXCELLENT ADVENTURES : Climb every mountain. : Cruise every waterway. : Eat every snake.

I KNEW A GUY IN SPAIN ONCE who climbed mountains. I don’t mean strenuous hikes or rock-climbing parties with friends. I mean scrambling up too far, too high, too fast, and he knew it. It was a test for him--sort of a physical essay on the theme, “Just exactly how much can I take?” He thought it told him something about himself. He didn’t climb mountains because they were there; he climbed them because he wasn’t sure where he was.

I haven’t talked to him for a while, but I’ve heard that he’s stopped climbing. Nothing terrible happened. He just stopped. Maybe he figured he had finally graduated.

But I’ll bet he still does something daring, something to test his courage and his strength--white-water rafting, maybe, or para-sailing, or maybe just going out to seedy bars looking for fights. And I’ll bet he’d think it was pretty silly if he heard that some travel magazine in Los Angeles had done an issue on adventure travel and then gone and included articles about posh Australian wilderness resorts and Oregon ski lodges and barge trips down canals in the South of France.

What people who have adventures on the mountainous scale sometimes forget, I think, is that for the rest of us almost anything can be adventurous--anything that challenges us or scares us or makes us say, “Hey, wait a minute! What was that ?” Adventure is an attitude. It’s going out and doing something and not knowing how it’s going to end up--playing it by ear.

Adventure implies the unexpected, and the unexpected doesn’t phone ahead. Renting a car in a language you don’t speak or wandering through a flea market with open eyes and an open mind is as much an opportunity for an excellent adventure as swimming the River Kwai or eating cobra in Ho Chi Minh City.