Molvania is an Eastern European country so obscure that, in fact, it doesn’t exist, except in the minds of its creators, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch. In all other respects “Molvania” is a standard travel guide with detailed maps, hints for tourists, and cultural sidebars.

The Molvanian language, according to the U.S. State Department, tends to the difficult end of the spectrum — at least 16 years to fluency — but this helpful guide provides the interested traveler with useful phrases. For instance, when inquiring after the safety of drinking, one might ask “Erkjo ne szlepp statsik ne var ne vladrobzko nefi” which, literally translated, means “Is it not that the water is not not undrinkablefi,” the triple negative being a common form of speech in Molvanian. Plus, who knew that Molvania is a well-known center for automobile production, its national car, the Stumpka, having never failed a crash-test (mostly because it could never get going fast enough to crash)fi Whatever shape your world is in, you can only benefit from a quick trip to a land even worse off than yours — Molvania.

Lots of adventures in the modern world take place in Tibet, but most of them go up. In Peter Heller’s new book, “Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River,” the adventure is precipitously downhill. The Tsangpo River is the highest major river in the world, at an average elevation of 13,000 feet above sea level. As the river makes its way downhill through a largely unexplored river gorge, it falls two vertical miles.

A Japanese kayaking team attempted to run the river in 1993, but lost a member near Namche Barwa. A National Geographic team attempted the run in 1998 but turned back after a team member drowned within the first 10 miles of embarking. Peter Heller’s book describes a 2002 expedition sponsored by Outside magazine. Though Heller himself is an accomplished kayaker, he was asked to be part of the ground support team, and write the account of the expedition. “Hell or High Water” describes the interesting mix of heroism, childishness, derring-do and rancor that marked the time these men spent together. The men on the river resented Heller because he was commissioned to tell what they considered to be their story.

He resented them for resenting him, and was ashamed of it. The porters hired to carry food and equipment resented their wages and mutinied on the subject partway down the gorge. And the reader may feel somewhat resentful that these young men’s gifts have served them up a life of what seems like goofing off (even though it is in a potentially fatal and profoundly skilled way). But beyond all this is the adventure itself and the most extraordinary scenery in one of the most remote and exotic places on earth. When Heller writes of the prayer flags whipping in the chill, thin air, and the tree-size rhododendrons in the gorge that is warmed by the Indian monsoon, it is as though one were there.

Descriptions of the kayaking itself are heart-stopping. One might only have wished that Heller had been on the river himself so the action could have been first-hand. “Hell or High Water” is a fine adventure story — the kind of adventure perhaps best enjoyed by the fireplace drinking hot chocolate. (See also Todd Balf’s “The Last River” for the story of the ill-fated 1998 expedition).

Laura Wadley is a librarian with the Provo City Library. E-mail her at lauraw@provo.lib.ut.us.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page F27.