When Australian-born travel writer Tony Perrottet came across the world's oldest surviving visitors' guide, the Description of Greece, in the New York Public Library, he reflected that, while he and his girlfriend had traveled around the world in pursuit of novel adventures and extreme sports, they had never "done" the Mediterranean.

As the first civilization with an intricate series of high-quality roads and the assurance of peaceful travel across (reasonably) wide swaths of the planet, ancient Romans had all the right luxuries in place to become the original tourists. Carrying a backpack of ancient texts and a highway map printed on a 20-foot scroll, Perrotet and his pregnant girlfriend set off to follow in the sandal-prints of Romans on holiday — before children would alter their own lives dramatically. Originally published as Route 66 AD, Perrottet's Pagan Holiday follows the author and his girlfriend from Rome down through Italy, around the Mediterranean, and down the Nile to end their journey at Philae — the Nile island that was sacred to Isis and that was the last civilized post in the Roman Empire.

This attempt to re-create an itinerary from a thousand years ago runs obvious risks. While portions of the journey are still very relevant and popular, others turn out to be either dangerous and barbaric or simply banal: Rome is still a beautiful city overrun with tourists seeking eternal experiences, the pyramids at Giza are awash in enough amenities to ensure a Disney World-like experience, but in a scene reminiscent of Sheltering Sky, the author gets stuck at an alcohol-fueled, three-day Nubian wedding in the Egyptian wilderness. And many more sites are simply irrelevant today: Alexandria, the capital of ancient Egypt, sees few tourists these days because the ancient portions of the city are underwater.

Perrottet provides a peculiar fusion of the historic grand tour as practiced by foppish 18th-century aristocrats and the extreme vacations taken by Americans who share the author's age and interests. As the author compares his trip to both the ancient journey and to contemporary tourism, the reader gets the sense that it's not the vacation spot so much as the act of packing up and hitting the road — the timeless attempt to break with the ordinary — that matters.

-Daniel Luzer