Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn

by Nick Hunt

I would never know a place in the way he did. Concentrated in one environment – he had never left Sibiu county – his knowledge went deep, not broad. Compared to him I knew a little about a lot, but he knew a lot about a little. I couldn’t help being envious at his way of seeing the world.

atavistic

Fear has a transcendental effect: even if it lasts only minutes, it transports you to a different state of being, where nothing is the same.

Walking, as so often before, became less a means to an end than an end in itself. Like an act of meditation, it answered its own question.

It was a litany of displacement, a palimpsest of five thousand years of migrations and colonisations.

‘Everyone is selfish here, obsessed with money. Under Communism we were taught to obey, to let the clever people in the Party make decisions for us, not to have opinions of our own. Fifty years of being told to be stupid and small-minded made us

stupid and small-minded. So now we have democracy, but no civil society. It’s called post-Communist apathy.’

The mutri, ‘mugs’, were nouveau-riche gangsters of the shiny-suited, big-necked type, the shock troops of free- market capitalism, and in

the 1990s they had practically ruled the country.

‘When people saw the mutri getting away with things like this, they tried to copy them. This attitude trickled down through society. No one cares about anyone else, as long as they get what they want. It’s selfishness like this that makes me want to leave.’

Bulgarka National Park,

Gabrovo, at the foot of the range, had the dubious distinction of being the longest city in Bulgaria, and carried as its municipal symbol a cat with a chopped-off tail.

This passion to make money out of chance trivialities, like giving a pedestrian a lift in an empty cart, is a phenomenon I met several times in Bulgaria, but nowhere else in Europe, before or afterwards.’ I

the Bacho Kiro caves, a subterranean labyrinth riddling the gorge. In the system’s deeper tunnels Neanderthal skeletons had been found, one of the earliest traces of human habitation in Europe.

As the temperature soared, my walking pattern changed. I started packing my tent before dawn, walking until the sun was high, and then retreating under the trees until it was cool enough to emerge.

‘It was, and is, hard to capture the charm of the journey along this almost deserted coast, and its pervading atmosphere of peaceful seclusion and consolation,’

tintinnabulation

Kef was one of the many Turkish words that had drifted into Bulgarian during Ottoman occupation. ‘It means good, but it’s better than good. It’s the biggest good you can feel.’

adash.

name-twins.’

At walking speed, arrival is a process that happens only gradually, and bits of me staggered in at different times.

‘I’ve walked here from Holland.’ ‘Oh,’ he said. As an epitaph for a walk, I kind of liked it.

Increasingly, walking itself became a source of happiness, something to be enjoyed in its own right, bringing an intensity of experience and a sensual awareness of surroundings that grew more addictive by the mile.