Michael Mewshaw’s idea of a lovely present for his 65th birthday was to travel across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco by land. "The pleasure of being where I had never been before, doing what I had never done, bound for who knew what–I found it all thrilling," he crowed to friends who saw his itinerary as crazy and dangerous. You’re only 65 once, he reassures himself as he disregards all warnings and packs his medications.

On the otherwise grueling 4,000-mile journey, Mewshaw has a few quiet moments for sidetrips to certain literary shrines. In Alexandria, it’s the home of revered poet C.F. Cavafy (now a museum); in Algiers, he wangles his way into the apartment in which Albert Camus grew up; in Tangier, he retraces the steps of Paul Bowles and reunites with Mohammed Mrabet, one of Bowles’s protégés. These visits thrill Mewshaw on a purely literary level, but, in each instance, they raise troubling questions about influences of colonialism and sexual politics in each writer’s work.

That duality between thrills and troubling political questions defines Mewshaw’s entire journey. Gorgeous or odd places exist first as themselves and then as platforms from which to consider the legacy of a colonial past and the highly politicized present. Mewshaw, for example, sees his tour as a way to learn, yet an audience member at a lecture in Alexandria challenges his traveling as being just another species of colonialism. Is his adventure at the expense of less fortunate others? Is he forever tainted by the monstrosity of others?

Mewshaw has done his homework, though. He can’t cross Libya (a country paralyzed with fear of what dictator Moamar Qaddafi will do next, but currently comparatively wealthy from oil revenues) without remembering that "Between the initial Italian invasion, in 1911, and World War II, a quarter of the country’s population had been eradicated." Thoughts of other similar atrocities haunt him in Tunisia and Algeria although he notes that each country is distinct from the others.

On his trek, he visits places of great power and beauty, including an area of Nefta, Tunisia, originally built of mud and salt, that dissolved when hit by a freak rainstorm. Look at the remains of a disaster alongside the surviving beauty of Nefta and take a deep breath. Know that the threat of terror is constant and still step forward to learn more. Mewshaw tells us that memorable travel should be an experience on the knife edge between "awful" and "awesome." By that measure, at 65 he had an incomparable trip.–John McFarland