Mark Twain enjoying a cigar on the porch.

Good sex can distract you from a relationship’s deeper problems.

The same principle applies to books. A good plot is like good sex – it can distract you from the sort of sloppy, dispassionate writing that some people refer to as “bestsellers.”

Take Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880). The book meanders alongside Twain and his “agent,” Harris, during their walking tour through Europe.

Twain and Harris explore German castles, insult fine ladies, ascend Swiss Alps, and avoid actually walking anywhere on their walking tour, instead taking carriages, trains, rafts, and even, hilariously, a glacier and a telescope.

A Tramp Abroad was a bestseller in its time, and most of its charm still translates into this century. But beware: there’s no plot to save you from the bits you won’t like. The good news is that it won’t matter.

Mark Twain: A Literary Tramp

Mark Twain was an expert at darkly sarcastic satire, an adept nature writer, and a man who knew how to wear a mustache.

Born Samuel L. Clements in Missouri when it was a slave state, in America when Rutherford B. Hayes was president, and in a time when it was normal for half of your family to drop dead before ever reaching the age of 11, it’s no wonder that Mark Twain ended up with his sense of humor.

The real wonder is that he managed to find anything funny at all. Not because the state of things was worse then than it is now, but because Twain noticed things-he had a keen eye for injustice, stupidity, and the story going on behind the velvet curtain, and he knew how to use humor to show these things to others.

Unfortunately for his readers, he was also a man who knew how to write dull, tangential passages and to get paid by the word for them. (If only we could all be so lucky.)

But Twain’s lazy alter-ego probably won’t mind if you just doze off during the inconsequential miles between witty quips and mock epics. Just make sure you wake up in good time to take in the best scenery – the funny bits, the morbid bits, and the paragraph about ants.

A Book For The Road

I recommend reading A Tramp Abroad while on the road, or after you’ve gotten home from traveling in Europe.

If you read it beforehand, most of the jokes will lose their punch, and you might end up taking his sarcasm too seriously.

The meticulous footnotes contain a lot of interesting historical information, but for the most part A Tramp Abroad is best for a good conspiratorial laugh. For the travel writer, it’s a living textbook on how to write satirically.

Heresy has it that A Tramp Abroad is Twain’s funniest work, and I heartily agree. Check out these tongue-in-cheek gems:

On Italians: “We have the notion in our country that Italians never do heavy work at all, but confine themselves to the lighter arts, like organ-grinding, operatic singing, and assassination.” (79)

On European Food: “A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe; but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.”

Read Twain’s Travel Trilogy – Online

Mark Twain also wrote two other well-known travelogues-Roughing It, which covers Twain’s journey to Nevada and subsequent life there, and The Innocents Abroad, which describes Twain’s trip through Europe and the Holy Land aboard a pleasure cruiser.

These books, along with A Tramp Abroad, are often unofficially lumped into a sort of trilogy, allowing entrepreneurial booksellers to sell them as a box set.

You, however, can download all three books for free from the Gutenberg Project.

What can traveler’s today learn from A Tramp Abroad? If you’re too busy to put in the reading effort, I’ll save you some time.

Travel slowly. Rest often. Pack your sense of humor.

And always send someone in your place if it sounds dangerous.

Have your read A Tramp Abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments!

“You’re vegan? What do you eat? Can you eat rice?”

I try to imagine a universe where rice isn’t grown, but hunted – the wild rice beast, a dangerous prey…

“Of course I eat rice. It’s a plant.”

“And ketchup? Can you eat ketchup?”

There are a lot of people in the world who have absolutely no idea what being vegetarian or vegan really means. Some people think it means you don’t eat rice or ketchup. Some people think it means you DO eat fish and chicken. And there are people who think you’re a lunatic hell-bent on starving yourself to death.

It can be difficult to be vegan on your own turf, but at least at home you know the ropes-where you can shop, which ingredients to watch out for, and which restaurants can accommodate you.

But when you travel to another country, being vegan is suddenly a lot more complicated. You have to scout out new restaurants. When you explain to impatient waiters that you don’t eat chicken or fish, you have to do so in another language.

This is an intimidating challenge, but it’s not impossible. Here are some tips for finding your food on the road:

Scour the Web

There are literally hundreds of vegan and vegetarian hotel and restaurant guides on the web. Cozy up with Google for a night or two and search for websites and blogs specific to your destination.

A good place to start is happycow.net, where you’ll find hundreds of veggie-friendly restaurant listings from all over the world. If you discover a new place on your journey, you can add it to their archive.

Get the Right Guidebook

These days, most commercial guidebooks mention whether or not their restaurant listings include vegetarian options. If this isn’t enough, vegetarianguides.co.uk puts out a line of exclusively vegetarian guidebooks. They don’t cover any exotic destinations, but they do have a few standard locations available.

Call Ahead

It’s easy to forget that a staple food you eat every day isn’t necessarily the norm elsewhere, and may not even be available. Think about your diet and ask yourself how it will translate to a foreign setting.

Call your hotel or hostel and find out if there will be anything you can eat at the continental breakfast. If you are heading somewhere where the prospect of finding a veggie-friendly restaurant is low, find out if your accommodation includes a common kitchen area.

If you are staying with a host family, warn them of your dietary restrictions in advance, and be specific.

In most major cities, finding something to eat won’t be a problem. All of the same ethnic cuisine that caters to vegetarians at home-Chinese and Indian, for example-tend to be available. And in major European cities, you are never far from falafel.

Prepare Your Own

Organic food stores are becoming more and more popular in Europe, where you’ll find everything from vegan Nutella to faux Wurst.

Ingredient lists on packaged foods are hard to decipher overseas, and without a thorough understanding of the language, you could easily miss something.

If you’re planning on doing some serious grocery shopping while away, try to shop with a native speaker or contact a local animal rights organization for an animal ingredients list in the language of your destination.

Into the Wild

The further into the countryside you go-and this is true worldwide-the harder it becomes to find vegetarian options. But there isn’t a single country in the world that doesn’t have a market with a few grains and vegetables that you can prepare.

Speak Their Language

There are a lot of people in the world who speak English, but it’s not smart, or particularly polite, to rely on it exclusively – especially when doing so could mean the difference between eating a delicious vegan pasta sauce and losing your appetite because a piece of chicken flesh found its way to your mouth.

What people understand as vegetarian and vegan varies from person to person and from culture to culture. Some people will know all about it, and some people will say “OK, no problem!” and serve you beef.

Look up a few phrases before you venture abroad. “I have a dairy allergy” and “I don’t eat meat, chicken, fish, cheese or eggs,” are good phrases to master for starters. Perhaps advanced learners can supplement their vocabulary with “No, I don’t eat any f$%$ing cheese.”

The International Vegetarian Union has a pretty extensive phrase list to get you started.

Fly Vegan

There’s one last detail to consider: your in-flight meal. Most airlines have several veggie options, but ordering a vegetarian meal when you book your flight is often not enough.

Call the airline 72 hours in advance to confirm that you will in fact require a vegan meal. Shortly after boarding, a steward or stewardess should come around to confirm your meal choice one last time.

If this doesn’t happen, find someone and make sure everything is still in order. In any case, bring snacks – lots and lots of snacks – because vegan or not, airplane food is never particularly appetizing.

There’s no country in the world that doesn’t have some kind of vegetarian options-whether it’s a handful of restaurants, a farmer’s market, or a corner falafel stand.

With enough planning and a little flexibility you won’t go hungry anywhere. Just remember to tuck a few protein bars into your suitcase in case the locals have had trouble hunting the wild rice beast this season.

Nicolette Stewart lit her computer on fire in 2005, ran screaming out of an office building, and has been marauding around Europe ever since. She specializes in vegetarian travel, underground tunnels, buried treasure, and dark, narrow alleys. You can read about her further misadventures at www.clickclackgorilla.com