On The DL

Jim Malusa

by Tami Fertig

Sat., May 24, 6 p.m., free, Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St., 215-735-9600, robinsbookstore.com

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Jim Malusa doesn't find anything exhilarating about climbing mountains. During a trek through a snowy, wind-swept foot pass in China, the Arizona-based botanist vowed, in a moment of shivery misery, to do just the opposite: Travel to the lowest point on every continent (excluding Antarctica, whose nadir is covered by 15,000 feet of ice). Funded by the Discovery Channel, he biked alone to depressions around the world on and off for six years, chronicling his journeys on a blog and later in a book, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents (Sierra Club Books, $16.95).

"People say terrible things about deserts; they give them frightening names like Hell Hole and Satan's Armpit," he writes. "But to a man standing in a frozen mud rut, going down made perfect sense." The destinations themselves are less than thrilling: Australia's Lake Eyre (49 feet below sea level) has been reduced to a pile of salt, Russia's Caspian Sea (92 feet below sea level) is a swamp. More intriguing are Malusa's encounters with welcoming natives who feed him strange foods (roadkill kangaroo, yerba mate served in a hollowed-out bull testicle) and local insects that follow him into his tent. He manages to bike through some of the hottest parts of the planet, forgoing an adequate amount of water to carry a laptop in his pack.

Malusa has no shortage of stories, many of which he will no doubt share at Robin's on Saturday — with photographs of people and places from his travels in tow.