How would someone financially do something like this in that era? Carry a lot of currency with you (seems dangerous?) or rely on lines of credit (how?) or...?
I assume they need some way to pay for food and lodging along the way.
I read the excellent A Time Of Gifts, in which the author as a young man walked across 1930s Europe. While he relied on money sent from home in the form of postal orders in advance to European capitals, which would not be available to Stewart, this occasionally ran out. So he also relied a lot on being a guest of people he met, often with letters of introduction from a previous host. Or staying for free in Orthodox Greek monasteries. Where that failed he had to come up with moneymaking schemes such as being a portrait sketch artist in Vienna, or just foraging and wild camping.
Think about it. Late 1700s in the Middle East, predating the telegraph, train, postal, radio, or television era. All entertainment is local, all news is oral. Someone from England, a place so far away and storied that it might as well be Mars, turns up in the town. Is it really possible that nobody invites him to dinner? In a culture where hospitality is a supreme virtue?
You can still find that attitude in some places, but like a lot of natural resources it's been eroded by the very tourists that came to see it.
(Edit: I would strongly encourage anyone who is the least bit romantic about travel to read A Time Of Gifts, although you will need to keep diving out to wikipedia every five minutes to keep up with the author's historical and literary references. What's remarkable is the number of times he just turns up somewhere and lands on his feet - several times he simply comes to the end of the day, knocks on the door of the first house he comes to, joins the family for their meal, sleeps on their floor, and if he risks making an offer of payment it is sternly refused. This works with Bavarian woodcutters, nomadic herders in Bulgaria, but also German aristocracy. In return he offers his immense personal charm. It helps that he has a classical education; the peak of this is later, during the war, when on a peak of Cyprus he exchanges Horace quotes with the German general he has just captured.)
Fine book. However, one needs to be cautious about taking <i>A Time of Gifts</i> and <i>Between the Woods and the Water</i> as transcriptions of fact. In interviews Fermor admitted to conflating characters, fiddling with other details, and so on. He was also working with very little documentation for events that had occurred many years ago.
IIRC, he was 18 at the time and had a flute, a sleeping bag, and less than 60 GBP to his name, and this might happened in the late 90s/early 2000s. Though I suspect he spent less time actually walking than Stewart.
Every now and then I see something like this pop up in the news, though usually its fundraising, or someone's blogging/instagramming their journey. Probably the biggest impediment to this style of travel is gradually increasing border protection in the wake of 9/11.
There's Sylvain Tesson, who crossed Himalaya with a friend on foot East to West in 1997, with barely any money, mostly for one guide and travel permits/visas. From what I read, they relied on people's charity for food and shelter.
They wrote a book, La Marche dans le ciel : 5 000 km à pied à travers l'Himalaya, which, AFAIK, isn't translated in English.
By offering your services in return - physical labour, or someone like Stewart could have offered to read, write, teach - or even just entertain, by telling stories of his travels.
He's walking from Ethiopia to the Southern tip of America and is currently in Eastern India. It's pretty interesting but he still has a long way ahead of him
Short, but interesting, article. I can at least relate to this notion of 'materialistic pantheism'... interesting to describe what seems to be essentially a mystic perspective as 'materialistic'.
“materialism” has a more specific meaning in philosophy jargon. iirc it is something like: matter is fundamental and everything arises from it (including things like consciousness), without requiring any metaphysical component (heaven, gods, etc).
Just to state a counter hypothesis: there are people, such as the scientist Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans-Peter Dürr who claim that actually first there was the mind and only then matter followed.
Another prominent walker is Rory Stewart MP, for the time being International Development Secretary of the UK.
Among his prominent walks is his hike across Afghanistan in 2002, part of a longer walk through Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. As an MP he walked all across his constituency. Recently he campaigned (unsuccessful) for Leader of the Conservative Party (and as such Prime Minister) and did that by walking and talking with strangers across British cities and tweeting the resulting videos. He is expected to resign or be sacked when the next prime minister takes over and has already announced to walk some more.
(And that's not even the most interesting part of his biography. Tutor to the princes, representative to Montenegro, Iraq War provincial deputy governor, and a very persistent MI6 rumour.)
Yes, Rory Stewart's book "The Places In Between" is a great read. His recounting, for example, of visiting the impossibly remote Minaret of Jam (built in the 12th century!) is fascinating.
http://theworldwalk.com/
I think this is his most recent AMA:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6pgo2n/i_am_tom_turci...