In the unappetizingly titled GREASY RIDER: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future (Algonquin, paper, $15.95), Greg Melville, a Vermont-based freelance journalist, refits his 1985 Mercedes 300 TD station wagon with an engine that runs on the waste oil from restaurant deep-fat fryers. Then, seeking to prove that it’s possible to cross the continental United States without burning fossil fuel — or paying a cent — he takes to the highways with an old college buddy named Iggy. The pair’s dialogue can occasionally be irritating, and Melville’s excursions into the politics and economics of global warming are sometimes pedantic, but the book comes alive when this enterprising pair burn through their waste-oil stockpile and start cadging the stuff from fast-food restaurant managers — or foraging in Dumpsters with the aid of a not very reliable handheld pump. After a series of semi-disasters, they finally get the hang of it: “We sucked that darn barrel dry in 18 minutes, filling 8 buckets of oil in the process — enough to get us at least 800 miles — while not blowing a single pump fuse,” Melville writes halfway through the journey. “This was pure Grade A stuff. Brown gold. Heaven help us, we planned to burn it all the way to Utah.” What could have been a tedious primer on sustainable energy consumption becomes an entertaining combination of “On the Road” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Jeroen van Bergeijk’s own Mercedes — a 1988 190-D he picks up dirt cheap via a Dutch Internet site — undergoes a no less punishing ordeal, a grueling trip through the western Sahara from Mellila, a Spanish enclave on the Morrocan coast, through Dakar, the capital of Senegal, then on to Burkina Faso. In MY MERCEDES IS NOT FOR SALE: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou . . . An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara (Broadway, paper, $12.95), Bergeijk, a Dutch journalist and documentary filmmaker, navigates his way through a pack of bribe-hungry border officials and destitute con men, including a chain-smoking,Tupac-loving guide he acquires on the road to Nouackchott, the Mauritanian capital. Bergeijk also spices up his narrative (translated into English by John Antonides) with an account of France’s doomed 19th-century attempt to build a Trans-Sahara Railroad. Those Frenchmen who didn’t go AWOL or commit suicide or simply collapse and die were reduced to cannibalism; the survivors were picked off by Tuareg nomads.  Along his own way, Bergeijk gets stuck in a minefield in the no man’s land between Western Sahara and Mauritania. Less sinister is his visit to what may be the largest auto-repair yard in West Africa, near Kumasi, Ghana, a vast testament to the genius of third-world recycling: “Modern tools and machines are unknown. A welding torch run by a couple of batteries is the most advanced apparatus; a hammer, the favorite tool. The predominant color is black; the people and their clothes; the earth, from spoiled oil; even the pigs rooting for food.”  Mark Greenside, the only one of this year’s pack to rely on conventional transport — a plane, a train and a taxi — to get where he’s going, has an epiphany during a vacation in Brittany: he loves the place, despite his inability to speak French and his ignorance of local customs. Soon thereafter, he makes an impulsive purchase of an old river­front house in the hamlet of Plobien. “Two days later,” he reports in I’LL NEVER BE FRENCH (No Matter What I Do): Living in a Small Village in Brittany (Free Press, $24), “I leave France with a French checkbook I don’t know how to use, a written agreement that I can’t read to buy a house, committed to spending $85,000 that I don’t have. It doesn’t bode well for international relations.”  What follows is a charming variation on the theme popularized two decades ago by the British writer Peter Mayle in his Provence series: Anglophone city slicker resettles in French hamlet and confronts domestic mini-disasters and eccentric locals. In Greenside’s case, the problems include a wire transfer for the house purchase that’s accidentally rerouted to Corsica, a flood that destroys his newly refinished floor and a dispute with an irascible neighbor over Greenside’s sun-blocking cypress trees. Although Greenside’s struggles with French grow a bit tiresome, this slight memoir captures his blossoming Francophilia with infectious joie de vivre.  In NAPOLEON and ST. HELENA: On the Island of Exile (Haus Publishing, $19.95) the German historian and journalist Johannes Willms travels by mail boat to the remote site of Napoleon’s lonely final exile, a former victualing station for the British East India Company located 1,100 miles off the southwest coast of Africa. Approaching the speck of land where the deposed emperor spent the last six years of his life, from 1815 to 1821, Willms’s boat pushes “through the long, rolling swell of the South Atlantic. As it draws nearer, the island looms up ever more forbiddingly and menacingly before the beholder’s eye.” St. Helena, he decides, “looks like a stage set for hell.”  Willms travels around this economically moribund outpost, “a high security prison 122 square kilometers in extent,” whose inhabitants survive almost entirely off subsidies from the British government. But the travelogue, in this translation from the German by John Brownjohn, gives way to a fascinating romp through Napoleonic history. Willms discusses squabbles within Napoleon’s bedraggled court-in-exile, the plague of rats that assailed the emperor shortly after his arrival and the roughly 20-year campaign by French Bonapartists to repatriate their hero’s remains. “The Emperor’s handsome face was in perfect condition except for the nose,”a witness to the 1840 exhumation observes, in one of the many grotesqueries that pepper this curious book. It “seemed to have been somewhat misshapen by the weight of the coffin cushion resting upon it.”  Treeless chunks of rock also loom large in J. M. Synge’s ARAN ISLANDS and CONNEMARA (Mercier/Dufour, paper, $22.95), based on the playwright’s sojourns in the west of Ireland during the last years of the 19th century. Reissued this fall, Synge’s classic travel essays chronicle the harsh, dignified lives of the region’s Gaelic-speaking inhabitants, who survived — barely — by fishing the storm-tossed waters of Galway Bay. “The red dresses of the women who cluster round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern richness,” he writes from the island of Inishmaan, vividly evoking a world of poverty, isolation and endurance, “and the walls have been toned by the turf-smoke to a soft brown that blends with the gray earth-color of the floor.” Synge’s excursions in currachs — lightweight canoes piloted by fishermen whose drowned corpses all too often washed up on the islands’ beaches — capture an existence bound inextricably to nature and intimately familiar with death. “Down in this shallow trough of canvas that bent and trembled with the motion of the men,” he writes, “I had a far more intimate feeling of the glory and power of the waves than I have ever known in a steamer.”  Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. His most recent book is “Yokohama Burning.”  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR28 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Travel. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Forget planes, trains and gas-powered automobiles. This season’s travel writers seem driven not only by wanderlust but by a passion for unusual conveyances.