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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
I bought this for Steve for Christmas, since a mountain walk across Europe seemed right up his street and he'd said he wanted to read it. I hadn't intended to read it myself, but I picked it up in an idle moment and got hooked.
Nicholas Crane must be a very odd person. Newly married, he decided to walk alone along the spine of Europe, from Finisterre in Spain to Constantinople. And when he says walk, he means walk; he refused to use any form of mechanised transport at any point during the trip, even when ordered to by policemen and soldiers.
He thought it would take a year; it ended up taking seventeen months. During all that time he walked largely alone, carrying his meagre possessions on his back, and bivouacking in extreme conditions with inadequate equipment; a flimsy tent for camping in the Alps in the middle of winter, for example, and initially only one set of clothes, causing serious problems when they got wet.
At first he seems rather slapdash and ignorant of the risks he is taking, but gradually you come to realise how resilient he is, and how committed to being alone in the mountains -- to the point that towards the end of his walk, he clearly regrets and almost fears the return to civilisation after seventeen months effectively living as a tramp. Perhaps inevitably, the second half of the book is more interesting than the first, as he ventures into the wilds of Eastern Europe (he did the walk in 1992, only three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall).
He is a good writer too; yes, at times he can stand comparison with Patrick Leigh Fermor. And as one of the Amazon reviewers mentioned, in contrast to Paul Theroux, who has a dark, rather misanthropic side, Crane has a basically sunny disposition and always sees the positive in even the grimmest situations and with the most hostile strangers. A recommended read.
Nicholas Crane must be a very odd person. Newly married, he decided to walk alone along the spine of Europe, from Finisterre in Spain to Constantinople. And when he says walk, he means walk; he refused to use any form of mechanised transport at any point during the trip, even when ordered to by policemen and soldiers.
He thought it would take a year; it ended up taking seventeen months. During all that time he walked largely alone, carrying his meagre possessions on his back, and bivouacking in extreme conditions with inadequate equipment; a flimsy tent for camping in the Alps in the middle of winter, for example, and initially only one set of clothes, causing serious problems when they got wet.
At first he seems rather slapdash and ignorant of the risks he is taking, but gradually you come to realise how resilient he is, and how committed to being alone in the mountains -- to the point that towards the end of his walk, he clearly regrets and almost fears the return to civilisation after seventeen months effectively living as a tramp. Perhaps inevitably, the second half of the book is more interesting than the first, as he ventures into the wilds of Eastern Europe (he did the walk in 1992, only three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall).
He is a good writer too; yes, at times he can stand comparison with Patrick Leigh Fermor. And as one of the Amazon reviewers mentioned, in contrast to Paul Theroux, who has a dark, rather misanthropic side, Crane has a basically sunny disposition and always sees the positive in even the grimmest situations and with the most hostile strangers. A recommended read.
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced