Walking the woods and the water
Subtitle: in Patrick Leigh Fermor's footsteps, from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn
By: Nick Hunt
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9781857886177
Subjects: Travel; Walking; Description and travel
Description: In 1933, the eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, "like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar." The books he later wrote about this walk, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumous The Broken Road are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century. Aged eighteen, Nick Hunt read A Time of Gifts and dreamed of following in Fermor's footsteps. In 2011 he began his own "great trudge"--on foot all the way to Istanbul. He walked across eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. With only Fermor's books to guide him, he trekked some 2,500 miles through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. His aim? To have an old-fashioned adventure. To slow down and linger in a world where we pass by so much, so fast. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, the mysterious, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface.
Table of contents: title: From Hook to Horn; title: West : a time of gifts. A circuit board of fields and water : the Low Countries ; Rain on the river : the Rhineland ; A great cold coming : High Germany and Bavaria ; White winter : Austria to Vienna; title: East : between the woods and the water. The yellow lands : Bratislava to Budapest ; No horizons : the great Hungarian Plain ; People have faces there : Romania ; The valley of the shadow : Transylvania and the Carpathians; title: South : the broken road. South of the river : Bulgaria ; The concrete coastline : The Black Sea ; Among tea-sippers : Turkey ; To the Golden Horn : Istanbul; title: Walking the unbroken road.