Stops Along the Royal Road

Ernest Beyl, author of Stops along the Royal Road, is an inveterate reader of travel books, but no armchair traveler or couch potato. In Stops along the Royal Road he pays tribute to writers who have given him an uncontrollable itch to move about the globe. ese include Richard Halliburton who wrote e Royal Road to Romance that Beyl long ago decided to emulate. In this book his improbable adventures range around the Orient, Southeast Asia, Australasia, South America, Europe, and, of course, the United States. Some chapters are dramatic, personal ep- isodes: visiting Shanghai before it fell to the Chinese communists, photographing Ja- pan s Emperor Hirohito, climbing an Andes peak overlooking the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, watching as famous matador Anto- nio Ordonez is gored in the bullring. Others are comic adventures: partying with Ernest Hemingway and Gary Coo- per at Sun Valley, drinking tequila shot- for-shot with Elizabeth Taylor and Rich- ard Burton in Puerto Vallarta, attending a swank party at the colonial Hong Kong governor s residence with his date dressed fashionably as a gorilla. Here then is our wide-eyed author fol- lowing the footsteps of his idols. Reading about his adventures will surely cause that uncontrollable itch to travel an urge to take o by train, plane, or on foot, the way he does.