Perusing Peru

AGUIRRE; THE RE-CREATION OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY JOURNEY ACROSS SOUTH AMERICA by Stephen Minta (Henry Holt & Co., $20 hardcover).

Lope de Aguirre was a murderous Basque-born adventurer who blazed a bloody trail across Peru and down the Amazon in the mid-16th Century. He stole and cheated, killed Indians and his fellow Spaniards alike, razed villages. (His misdeeds were vividly depicted in the 1972 Werner Herzog film “Aguirre, Wrath of God.”) “No one who knew Aguirre,” Stephen Minta tells us in this volume, “ever wrote a good word about him.” That fact didn’t deter Minta, a senior lecturer in comparative literature at the University of York, in England, and the author of a scholarly work on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from following in Aguirre’s footsteps--the physical, not the metaphorical--on a journey of his own through the upper portions of South America.

Inspired, he says, by both the beauty he saw and the cruelty he felt in the Peruvian city of Cuzco, whence Aguirre himself had set out, Minta and a childhood friend (identified only as Jane) travel across Peru, into Brazil and then to Venezuela. Along the way, Minta crosses not only rivers and borders but timelines, weaving past and present together with surprising grace. The result is a work that seems neither history nor travel book, but rather a kind of portrait of a region through time, well-written and often riveting. (I also like the epigraph with which Minta begins his acknowledgments: “Contrary to popular belief, those who travel are more dependent than those who stay at home, and they incur more obligations.”)

GUIDE TO RETREAT CENTER GUEST HOUSES by John and Mary Jensen (CTS Publications, $15.95 paper) and GUIDE TO VACATION RENTALS IN EUROPE by Michael and Laura Murphy (The Globe Pequot Press, $14.95 paper).

There’s something enormously appealing about the idea of renting a villa or a cottage or even an apartment in Europe. Not only are such rentals almost always less expensive than hotel stays for comparable periods, but they allow us at least the all-too-fleeting illusion that we’re actually living somewhere else, somewhere exotic and/or romantic--that we somehow belong in Italy or France or Portugal or wherever, at least for a week or two, and aren’t just passing through like all those tourist types. There are a number of source guides available for potential vacation-renters, but this one is unusually detailed, and has the great advantage that the authors have personally inspected each type of accommodation they list (though not each available example). Sample prices and transportation information are included.

And there’s something enormously appealing about the idea of really getting away from it all--getting away from the world and its travails, and from tourists and villa-renters alike. The Jensens’ guide is a directory of retreats--religious facilities, including monasteries and convents, as well as centers built specifically for this function--in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia and New Zealand. Many of these are Roman Catholic, though none are limited to adherents of the denomination in question. Typically, according to this volume, the retreats are located in rural areas, forbid smoking and drinking, offer ample opportunity for solitude and spiritual meditation, as well as for light physical exercise--and are reasonably priced ($30-$40 a day including all meals, seems about average). There is one curious omission here: Spain, which has a large network of beautiful monasteries open to the public on a retreat basis, isn’t even mentioned.

Quick trips:

CALIFORNIA HIKING; THE COMPLETE GUIDE, 1994-95 edition, by Tom Stienstra & Michael Hodgson (Foghorn Press, $17.95 paper). This hefty 827-page volume (you might not want to stick it in your backpack) is an encyclopedic listing of hiking trails and routes all over the state. Details on lengths of hikes, permits required and maps are included, as are brief descriptions of flora, fauna and topography.

TAKING THE KIDS TO THE GREAT AMERICAN SOUTHWEST; TAKING THE KIDS TO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA and TAKING THE KIDS TO SUNNY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, all by Eileen Ogintz (all HarperCollins West, $9.95 paper). These large-type, easy-to-use volumes, which will be of great interest to anyone who has occasion to travel with children within the regions covered, are based on Eileen Ogintz’s column, “Taking the Kids,” which appears regularly in this section.

AWAY FOR THE WEEKEND; NEW YORK, fourth revised edition, by Eleanor Berman (Crown, $15 paper). The latest update in Eleanor Berman’s “Away for the Weekend” series, this well-researched, readable guidebook outlines 52 mini-vacations, two to four days in length, within easy striking distance of New York City. Arranged seasonally, the getaways should be of interest to visitors to Manhattan as well as to residents.

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