which may well be empty and have a medieval fresco worth examining. Have a look; there’s plenty of time to do that. There’s also time to taste the cheese in a fromagerie in Provence or sample chocolates in a village shop in the Swiss Alps. Even at two miles per hour – after all, this is not a race -- the world can be so rich, so dense with history, meaning and beauty, that you may occasionally feel that you want to walk even slower. Walking is the most natural form of exercise and a walk through a land- scape is the best way to get to know a place.
It’s no coincidence that some of the best travel writers of the past century were also keen walkers. Nothing sharpens the observations of the world like a good two or three mile per hour pace. Consider the late Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked from England to Istanbul in the 1930s, and whose luminous prose is contained in “At Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water.” Or Bruce Chatwin, who was obsessed with the idea of nomadism and whose books, among them “In Patagonia,” and “The Songlines,” are about walking and migration. Or perhaps the cleverest walking book of all, “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,” by the great British travel writer Eric Newby. After training on a small mountain in Wales, Newby and a companion head off to some of the toughest and most remote mountains in the world. For humor, Newby’s work is only topped by Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” in which the author and a companion stumble along the Appalachian Trail and learn a great deal about themselves and America in the process.
4 For more details:
www.thewayfarers.com
Judi Hermann
Jane Moore
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