Cahill’s Enduring Awe, Staying Fit With Fodor

PASS THE BUTTERWORMS: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered by Tim Cahill (Random House, $24).

In one of 30 travel essays, reports and asides in Tim Cahill’s latest collection, the author imagines meeting a 10-year-old boy. He shakes hands with the youngster and sees himself in the mirror, just as he was back in Waukesha, Wis., restless and “constantly astounded by the world.”

Refusing to grow up is no crime, and it continues to distinguish Cahill all these years later from pretenders in matters of oddball adventure travel.

As a reader, I found myself pausing at this point in his sixth travel book. I could hear echoes of Father asking, “And where are you going?” And the boy shrugging, “Messing around.” Then the screen door slams.

Those who are forever young are unburdened by solemnity or profundity and tend to display generous enthusiasm for all happenings, whether big or small, whether serious or not. So, Cahill regards with equal fatalism his own case of malaria and the imaginary sensation of being aloft in a small plane when the pilot dies. A cold snap on a secret river in Montana is as equally wondrous as riding horses a dozen abreast on the Mongolian steppe. A New Guinea tribesman catches his interest, and so does a Japanese tourist on an icebreaker bound for the North Pole.

As with his past work, this collection is drawn mainly from Cahill’s writing for Outside Magazine, where he is a founding editor. His touch is as droll and light as ever. He dwells less on the awe of places than what a youngster might call the awesome idea of going out and messing around.

FODOR’S HEALTHY ESCAPES: 244 Resorts and Retreats Where You Can Get Fit, Feel Good, Find Yourself and Get Away From It All (Fodor’s, $16, paperback).

FOREST GUIDE TO SMOKING IN LONDON: Where to Light Up (Seven Hills, $12.95, paperback).

What a dilemma.

I admit reaching for the phone. After thumbing over the listings in Fodor’s guide to feeling good and fit, I was ready to check myself in, never mind the expense. Exercise machines in a restored barn! Luffa body scrubs. Aromatherapy. All across North America: Scandinavian saunas, Turkish steam baths, Roman whirlpools, Swiss showers.

This guidebook makes you yearn for a workout, a low-fat salad, a massage, a giant thick towel and a dainty cup of herbal tea. I immediately envisioned a new me. After a week of “luxury pampering,” I would look down and actually see my belt buckle again for the first time all year.

Luckily, the British-published “Forest Guide” brought me to my senses. There, behind four wine glasses, a beautiful Eurasian woman is photographed lighting a cigar just that instant before she lifts her eyes to signal her intentions.

This volume calls itself a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind listing of where you can smoke unmolested in London. And, in the event you’re short of your own rationalizations, the book is sprinkled with them, including my favorite from (who else?) Oscar Wilde: “I couldn’t help it. I can resist anything except temptation.”

WEEKENDS FOR TWO IN THE SOUTHWEST: 50 Romantic Getaways by Bill Gleason (Chronicle Books, $16.95, paperback, photographs).

BED & CHAMPAGNE: Top Romantic Hideaways by Bradley S. O’Leary (Burson-Marsteller, $13.95, paperback).

“Weekends for Two” is half guide, half coffee-table gift book, a striking evocation of Southwest landscapes, architecture and design. You will know what to expect at all of these 50 lovely and well-chosen inns, lodges and houses. Page after page, the lure of romance beckons. The rest is up to you.

By contrast, “Bed & Champagne” raises a question: In the cluttered genre of romantic travel guides, should we soon impose a rule and cast away any book that begins with a chapter, “What Is a Romantic Interlude?” If we’re drawn to such titles to begin with, do we really need a remedial lesson in chemistry?

Still, this 40-state listing of hideaways strikes me as interesting. I wouldn’t call the Plaza Hotel in New York a “hideaway” exactly, but chartering a coach on the Sierra Hotel Railway in Chicago shows plenty of romantic ambition. And without this book, I may have forgotten the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan was married in “The Great Gatsby.”

Quick Trips

ADVENTURE GUIDE TO JAMAICA: 3rd Edition by Steve Cohen (Hunter, $15.95, paperback, photographs, maps). This book has the authoritative feel of a writer who knows his stuff. The best-tended horses on the island, beach life with and without swimsuits, walks into the hills, Mrs. Stephenson’s turtle soup at Greenwood, etc. Cohen covers a lot of ground without turning your vacation into a research project.

HEALTH INFORMATION FOR INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL 1996-’97 (U.S. Government Printing Office, $14, paperback). Going somewhere weird? This manual, available at U.S. government bookstores, allows you to double-check your doctor’s recommendations against the advice of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Either that or it’s a valuable resource to scare silly anyone in your family who suggests wandering off in Tim Cahill’s footsteps.