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Before I started, I didn’t have a strictly rational answer. I didn’t have to do this; I did it because I had arranged things so that I could, thanks in part to the support of my partner Aisling, friends and family.
On the way, I came to the realisation that I was doing it to demonstrate to people that the world is a safer place than you’re often led to believe. The further from home I travelled, the warmer the welcomes I received.
In outline, I walked from Dublin to Rosslare, took the ferry to Cherbourg and walked across northern France, southern Germany and into Austria. I crossed the Alps at Salzburg into Slovenia. I walked East through Croatia and South through Serbia to get to Bulgaria and then walked on into Turkey, finishing my journey in Istanbul.
I completed the walk in 237 days; that’s one week short of eight months.
Nick Hunt took seven months to cover Patrick Leigh Fermor’s tracks; Paddy himself wandered for thirteen months; Nicholas Crane spent seventeen months clambering along a serpentine route through Europe’s mountains.
Nope. The walk was not about aspirational brands or lifestyle products. It was about the opposite: being in the world and experiencing it, unmediated.
No, not directly. I’d like to influence how charitably you relate to other people in the world who are unlike you.
See my answer to the previous question.
Because I’m a cheapskate. There’s only so much money you can save before you have to hit the road.
Yes, but not enough to stop me.
Yes, I suppose I did. For the two-and-a-half years before I set out, my commute to and from work was a two-hour walk, which, if Google Fit is to believed, made me more active than 95% of the other people in Dublin who had Google Fit switched on at the time. On the walk, I walked six to seven hours a day and took a rest day every four or five days. It wasn’t a race.
As little as possible. The idea is to carry no more than 10% of your body weight. I tweaked what was in my bag constantly. Here’s what I typically had on my back:
Andrew Skurka’s book Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide provided useful advice on choosing gear.
I’m a natve English speaker, which is of course the de facto world language these days. I speak half-decent but not very grammatical German and I can understand a small amount of French, but I can’t speak it beyond a few words of school French. I don’t speak any of the Slavic languages, nor Turkish, apart form a handful of words. Still, you’d be amazed how far you can get with just a few words. For more fulfilling conversations, though, it really helps to have a language in common in which both participants are reasonably fluent.
Well, my mum Tineke Klaasen, of course, who grew to adulthood in a time and place of war and occupation. Having been so heavily constrained in her teenage years, she maintained a lifelong curiosity for and delight in that which lay over the next hill, at every scale from the curlicues of the tiniest lichen on a tree to the striations in time-tortured rock strata. She was an avid reader of books on classic 20th century exploration: Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki and Ra expeditions, Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, and of course Edmund Hillary’s first ascent of Chomolungma, then known as Mount Everest.
Current professional adventurer Alastair Humphreys has been a huge influence on me over the past few years, psychologically and practically. Hat tip to my partner Aisling for introducing him to me. Alastair’s concept of microadventures has allowed me to consider a trip like this one.
Around the same time that Alastair appeared on my radar I discovered Nick Hunt’s book Walking the Woods and the Water, in which he follows in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s footsteps, walking from London to Istanbul. During 2016 I read Fermor’s florid but fascinating trilogy documenting his journey to Istanbul during 1934.
I think the seed was originally planted by Nicholas Crane’s 1992-1993 journey on foot through the mountains of Europe, from Cape Finisterre in Spain to Istanbul, documented in Clear Waters Rising: a book originally lent to me by my mum, which I read, loved and then promptly forgot, but which has been germinating in my unconscious.
“White guy walks safely across Europe and comes to no harm”? We’ll see. I think writing the book of the walk, hunching over a laptop for hours at a time, would be more daunting than the walk itself! Certainly that task is the polar opposite of striding towards the horizon with an empty mind.
If you have two sturdy legs, you can. What’s holding you back is your head. You’ll need to give yourself permission to do this. Arrange things in your life so that you can get out there and do it! Give yourself a deadline. You need less gear than you think.
Getting through a walk like this requires a strange blend of neophilia (a love for the new) and a tolerance for mundane routine. Almost every day you’re forced into new situations in new landscapes with new people speaking new languages. Yet there’s also the daily grind of walking alone for hours, setting up and tearing down your camp, keeping track of every single object in your bag, maintaining yourself and your kit (staying fed, healthy and reasonably clean, washing socks and clothes…).
All that said, walking across a continent is fundamentally an easy thing to do. Dave Snowden, originator and populariser of the Cynefin framework, recognises five socio-technical domains, each of which require different approaches to problem-solving. These are the simple domain, the complicated domain, the complex domain, the chaotic domain and the disordered domain. Everything about walking across a continent is in the simple domain: Keep progressing towards your destination. Stay found. Stay healthy. Stay out of danger. Maintain your gear. If things stray into the complicated domain (visa drama comes to mind), at worst, you’re going to burn a bit of time and money. Things are unlikely to get complex unless you get into some kind of personal relationship on the way; if things get chaotic or disordered (maybe you get hit by a car), well, then you’ve lost control of your mission, lost sight of your goal, and are highly unlikely to complete it in the way you orignally envisioned. It’s not hard to keep things in the simple domain. Any of the adventurers I named above, while their planning may have involved complication and complexity, strove to stay in the simple domain while actually executing on their dream, whether that be crossing an ocean on a reed boat or cycling around the world.