The wandering is over – Reflections and recollections

Hello to everyone who kept up with my intermittently published blog during my wanderings over eastern Europe (1) .  I meant to complete it over the summer, but unfortunately it didn’t happen, and now I feel that I need to take the whole blog down imminently.  I begin my new job as a secondary school science teacher next week, and I do not want to have so many personal details about myself up online for all my pupils to potentially find.  I do have thoughts of possibly writing my trip up into a proper full-length book – I kept detailed daily diaries for the whole duration so even with my faulty memory it will be possible to revisit what I was thinking and feeling and experiencing each day and each country years hence.  So perhaps it is a good thing that I didn’t complete the blog, as then there would be fewer surprises for those who kept up with it, and less reason for you to purchase any book that might come out in the future 😊.

Before I do take down the blog – I wanted to finish with one more post looking back on the trip now that the dust has settled; now I have had time to process what the trip meant for me before, during and after it; and how it has irrevocably changed me and my world view.  Thank you to anyone who made it this far.  I apologise that I didn’t finish off the recording job, hope you have enjoyed the blogs I did manage to get out, and that you enjoy this one.

(1) By “eastern” here, I mean in an expansive, geographical sense of east from an imagined European North-South running centre line, and not in any geopolitical, cultural or socioeconomic sense

Arrival into Istanbul

On the 9^th May I walked the final few kms into Istanbul with my Dad by my side.  My Dad had come out to join me for the last two days of the walk, for which I was very thankful.  He was a little worried about fitness, but I assured him that they were very short days, and we shouldn’t have anything to worry about.  I wasn’t lying, on paper, when looking at the distances as the crow flies, they were indeed short days, but sometimes measured map distances can be deceptive.  When you are walking along an unknown path, using out of date maps* and hearsay as a guide, the unexpected has a habit of happening.

The route we were following on the last day took us through a swath of greenery next to the Alibey Reservoir, which would take us as close as it is possible to get to central Istanbul via countryside, before finally entering the city not far from the tip of the Golden Horn.  From study of the maps and information we had available to us, it seemed to be the best option.  In the end however, the path disappeared on multiple occasions, necessitating forging through the bush as best we could.  We came across a park in the process of bring built, where the security guard clocked us and said we couldn’t continue the way we wanted, as there was no path, and an army base lay across our route.  He directed us to a 16^th century ottoman aqueduct which crossed the reservoir and would enable us to avoid the army base.   We detoured off our route to get to it, only to find that it had a sharply pointed top, a 30m vertical drop down to the reservoir surface and was impossible to cross safely.  So, we trudged back the way we had come, and pushed into the bush in the direction of the Army Base.

By this point we were seriously behind schedule – and my dad asked what the plan B was if we couldn’t get through the Army base.  I said there was no Plan B, we were hedged in by the reservoir on one side, and a busy 3 lane motorway on the other, and the army base in front.  There were no good options.   We kept on going, and after a while realised with a start that we must be inside the base – we could see watch towers either side of us – luckily with no one in.  There was no barrier at the rear of the base facing the forest from whence we had come.    We unconsciously started talking in whispers.  I was just hoping against hope that if we were spotted we (a.) wouldn’t get shot, and (b.) would get kicked out at the front of the base towards central Istanbul.  We made it all the way through the base without seeing a soul – phew – but right there – when we were 50m from safety, was a security fence blocking our path.  Cripes!!  We walked up to the fence to inspect it, and was that – is that?  Yes!  Someone had pulled it up, we can fit underneath it.   We took off our rucksacks and pushed them through ahead of us, then crawled on our stomachs underneath it.  We emerged – victorious – into the metropolis of Istanbul – filthy, soaking wet (the heavens had opened at one point), bedraggled, late, but wonderfully relieved and happy to have a clear route to the finish ahead of us.  I was sorry to have put so much stress and discomfort on my dad, when I’d sold the last few days as a piece of cake, but on the other hand – it was good microcosm of the rest of my walk – always into the unknown, always being presented with unexpected challenges large and small needing to be surmounted.

We finally made it to the Suleymaniye Mosque, the finish-line at 1900, only 3 hours behind schedule, bringing to an end for me, a walk of 472 days, of around 6500 km, across 12 countries, of approximately 150,000m of ascent and descent, which took me up to 2925m on Musala mountain in Bulgaria, and down to -15°C in the Carpathians of Ukraine,  across parched limestone karst scenery in Croatia in temperatures up to 40°C, through the minefields and battered villages of Bosnia, in amongst the shattered peaks of the Italian Dolomites, and through the perfectly manicured and tamed valleys of the Austrian Alps.  That final day into Istanbul was busy and hectic, not giving much time to dwell on the ending of the trip.  Now that a few months have passed, I thought it appropriate to allow myself the luxury of a little reflection and recollection of what turned out to be a significant chunk of my life, and a chunk unlike any other I have experienced and possibly will experience again.

I feel it is important for me to get these thoughts down, both for the benefit of anyone who has been following along thus far, and continues to have any interest in this wander, and, for myself.  As those who know me well can testify, my memory is notably rubbish, and if I do not get these reflections and recollections down, then they will certainly be lost in time……like… tears…. In the rain…………  😊.

Reasons for setting off….

I think it is worthwhile to go right back to the start and go over the reasons I had for taking such a long time off and walking solo around Europe.  Why did I opt to walk, instead of cycle or hitch; why mostly solo; why travel for such a long time?

What was the catalyst for decision to throw in the towel at work and set off?  I think at its heart, the thing driving me to quit the comforts of the office was a finely-honed sense of romanticism bred from a steady childhood diet of western, adventure and fantasy genre books and films.  This was the primer, which filled my malleable young head with ideas of adventure, perils, and beautiful landscapes.  I reckon that a majority of solo long-distance walkers have likewise been suffused, or rather infected, with romanticism.  How else to explain a desire to travel long distances by the slowest, least comfortable, and most old-fashioned method of all?  Can you imagine Frodo Baggins on a touring bike, or Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name” getting a long-distance coach (one without horses), or the characters in Easy Rider the motorcycle film submitting themselves to the tyranny and oppression of a train time table?

No, me neither; and whilst progressing through teenage years the idea gradually coalesced in my mind that it would be cool to go on a huge adventure; one that would be relatively free from modern, rapid forms of transport, that take me through wild spaces where not many had trod, through occasionally difficult conditions, in a manner representing almost total freedom.  I felt that it would have to be a long trip, perhaps even more than a year, as how can you experience total freedom if you know that your trip will soon come to an end?  I wanted to be travelling for so long that it was difficult to conceive the end of the trip, so that my life became that of the traveller/wanderer, and not that of a person on a brief holiday from life who will shortly return to the office.

I read two accounts of long distance walking trips around the time I was at university, which probably had the greatest impact on pushing me toward long-distance walking as something which would be worthwhile and fun to do. The journeys they described appealed strongly to me; they ticked all the boxes for the kind of adventure I was looking for and seemed like the kind of thing I would enjoy.  The first was Patrick Leigh Fermor’s irrepressible and enthralling description of walking from Holland to Istanbul in the 1930s (His account of the trip forms a trilogy of books – “A Time of Gifts”, “Between the Woods and the Water” and “A Broken Road”).  He set off walking when he was 18 years old in the early 1930s, with an allowance from his father of £1 a week to live off and made it to Istanbul in just over a year.  He didn’t feel inclined to return to the dull and drear UK for over 5 years, preferring to continue travelling in the Balkan peninsula and Greece in particular.  The second account was that of Nicholas Crane, in his excellent book “Clear Waters Rising”.  In this he recounts a year and a half walk in the Mid 1990s across Europe from Cap Finisterre in Spain, to Istanbul.  He followed mountain chains the whole way, slept in a bivvy bag or tent for most of his trip, endured some phenomenally tough conditions, and, most importantly, was able to write eloquently and inspiringly about the experience.

The short term triggers for setting off I have covered before in this blog – but to summarise them – I realised I was approaching 30, I had been thinking of adventuring for all of my childhood, adolescence, and twenties, and had a growing realisation that responsibilities which might prevent me from doing the kind of adventure I had in mind would tend grow as we get older, not shrink.  At that particular moment in time aged 28 I had no responsibilities that couldn’t be shed.  I had a good job as a geologist, which  was a good fit for me, but not perfect.  I felt like I needed less time at a computer, more time interacting with human beings, less time sitting down inside, more time outside.  In my last year I started really noticing my pension statements – and seeing that they showed what my pension would be when I retired, in 450 months’ time.  I pictured that time stretching away ahead of me and questioned whether I could see my self doing what I was doing for the next 450 months……………………………. the answer was no.  I wrote my resignation letter and went to see my boss.

How did the walk turn out? 

The difficulties

In terms of the physical challenge of the walk, which many people assume to have been one of the most difficult aspects of it; it was hard in places yes, but for most of the walk really wasn’t that bad.  This might need some explanation.  When you are on a long distance walk, with absolute freedom of route planning and no tough deadlines to make – you make the walk just as easy or as hard as you want.  You decide how heavy a pack you are comfortable carrying, and you decide your route every day – how far to walk, the terrain you cross, and the altitude variation.   I quickly found out that there was no real point to putting in huge punishing days, as they would take so much out of me that I wouldn’t be able (or inclined) to do a full day the next day, or else they would lower my immune system and make me much more vulnerable to getting sick.  When walking for months at a time, you get to know your body very well.  You would know instinctively whether a planned days route would be a short, medium or a long day, and decide at the outset if that’s what you wanted and if that was what you were up to.  There were a few aches and pains during the first couple of weeks, because of the body adapting to the new strains I was putting on it, but after the body adapted – I found these disappeared.    For these reasons – I do not think that what I did was a particularly amazing physical feat at all – it certainly required some mental doggedness to keep on going day after day, but did not require me to have superhuman strength and endurance.  Almost anyone who is motivated could do the walk I did, and many people would complete the distance I completed considerably faster than me (I took really rather a lot of days off from walking – and didn’t walk all that far each day on the trail).

The hardest days, physically, were the days snowshoeing up and down mountains in fresh snow with a full pack on.  I think the heaviest my skin out weight (the weight of all gear carried and worn) got was about 25 kg when loaded with a few days food and water.  Walking any distance in fresh snow with that weight gets tiring very quickly, and you find that you make dauntingly little progress for huge amounts of effort expended (one day in the Bulgarian Rhodopi I only managed to get 13 kilometres after 11 hours of hard exertion.  At the end of the day I couldn’t believe how little distance I had managed to cover).  With temperatures potentially falling below -20 and having to be prepared to sleep out in that with all the clothing and equipment that entailed – I simply found it impossible to keep my pack weight down to more reasonable weights.  It would probably have been more sensible to come down from the mountains in winter, or to hole up in a mountain town for a few months until the worst conditions had passed before pressing on.    But I kept going through the winter months – and I’m glad I did.  I invariably had the mountains all to myself, when they were at their most beautiful – and the tougher the going got, the greater was the sense of achievement when you got over the mountain range and back down to civilisation and a warm bed in a bed and breakfast.

I found the mental challenges of the walk to be greater than the physical.  One of the chief mental challenges involved included staying rational and analytical in the face of irrational fears and in the face of the irrational fears of others.  There were countless times when I met locals on my walk who told me that I could not do the route I had planned, that it was too dangerous to walk in the mountains in winter, that the bears and wolves would attack me, that the bad people in the next door country would attack me due to their innate criminality and low character.  I was worried about these things myself but with rational reflection and researching of possible weather conditions, frequency of wild animal attacks on humans, recorded levels of crime; knowledge of my own personal level of navigation skills, of carried and worn clothing and equipment, of my level of physical fitness, was able to convince myself that what I was doing was not crazy, and, with care, need not to be more dangerous than, say, driving or being driven in a car.

Staying sure of yourself in the face of being repeatedly warned not to go on, was very difficult though.  Ultimately, however, I realised that the nature of the activity I was doing was so unusual – not very many of the people I came met on my walk liked or had any experience of walking and camping in the mountains in winter – that usually the person who knew the most about the conditions I might face, and the nature of the animal threat was, in fact, me.    In Ukraine, for example, I was regularly told that I couldn’t go over the mountains because of the snow and the weather – yet when I showed my advisers my snow shoes they didn’t recognise them.  I found out that most of the locals simply stay off the mountains once the snow depth gets above a certain level, because they have no ski’s or snow shoes which would enable them to stay (semi-) mobile in deep snow.  This repeated testing of self-reliance and objective analysis was one of the defining parts of the trip and I’m pretty sure will stay with me years after I’ve returned to normal life.

The other aspects of the mental challenge were the loneliness, and having the mental strength to keeping on going day after day, week after week, when the conditions got tough.  During the first half of my walk, up through the Balkans (Bulgaria -> Serbia -> Bosnia -> Croatia) everything was new and exciting, I met new people all the time, the level of English amongst the youth was excellent, and critically, after the first few months, the weather was getting better, and the days longer. I struggled with loneliness and mental fatigue much more during the in the second half of the trip, from Vienna/Bratislava to Istanbul via Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania, through the winter of ‘17/18.     I set off from Bratislava in the Autumn of 2017 – and with each passing day the days got shorter, the nights longer, and the temperatures lower– and I had the daunting prospect of crossing the lonely Ukrainian and Romanian Carpathians in the depths of winter.  Crossing Slovakia in autumn was actually awesome – experiencing the beautiful autumn leaves gradually changing colour and falling off the trees, feeling the chill growing in the air, and seeing the first snowflakes of winter fall innocently and softly from the sky – giving little hint of how completely and drastically they would soon change the landscape and change a walker’s mobility.  By the time I left Eastern Slovakia and entered Ukraine it was January – the nights were long – the weather terrible – I couldn’t talk to anyone as their level of English was so rudimentary, even amongst the youth.  I remember staying a few days in Uzghorod, just across the border in Ukraine, looking up at the snow-covered Carpathians on the edge of the town, and feeling very alone.  What was I doing here, why was I still pressing on, why didn’t I call it a day?  I eventually steeled myself to set off – once more into the unknown, always into the unknown – but I battled constantly in Ukraine with loneliness, alienation, and deep mental fatigue.  I had been walking a year by that stage, which is a long time, perhaps too long, to be walking by yourself.

By the time I got to Romania, the spell wasn’t lifted suddenly – but it’s more like I came to the gradual realisation that the weather would better from here on out, and that I was perhaps ¾ of the way around the walk my planned route.   Once I had come to those realisations, all thoughts of giving up left my head.  There were a few more tough times in Romania for sure – brushes with illness, fearsome weather, and lonely mountain crossings amongst ample fresh signs of hungry bears waking from hibernation – but with the end so close in sight, I didn’t flirt anymore with ideas of packing the whole thing in.

The high points, and deeper realisations

I find the freedom of the open road, especially in good weather when walking in beautiful surroundings, is hard to beat.  Waking up every day and deciding what you would do that day – whether you would press on, stay put, how far to walk is a liberating and worthwhile experiencing

The best part of the trip for me, however, and the part which had the greatest effect on me – was constantly meeting new people, and making new friends, not every single day, but most days.  Talking to people, asking them about their lives, telling them about my trip, invariably being asked to share some warming local spirit.  The population density of the mountains was much higher than I expected, and therefore I was in contact with people much more frequently than I thought I would be.  I thought I would be regularly away from civilisation for up to a week at a time and outside of mobile coverage for the majority of that.  In fact, the mobile signal was generally considerably better than in rural UK, even deep in the mountains, and there were little villages and towns tucked away everywhere in the most seemingly remote locations.  I initially resented the intrusion of all that civilisation and all those people where I had imagined there only to be empty forest, bare mountain, and savage nature – but it didn’t take long stumbling round those mountains in foul winter weather, nor many entertaining and heart-warming evenings spent in hostelries or taverns gathered close to a wood stove eating hearty food and drinking a little too much local brew chatting rubbish with locals before I came to fully appreciate all those little islands of habitation and modern comforts in the wider seas of wilderness.

I was most struck by meeting the young people in Bosnia.  This was one of the poorest countries I walked across.  The young people were hungry for a better life, and better opportunities than their own country afforded.  They were fed up with the sectarianism and division of their parents’ generation.  They were exasperated at the venal politicians who stoked continued to stoke division rather than work toward reconciliation because it helped distract voters from their gross corruption.  The political dysfunction of the country was reflected in the dire economic situation, high unemployment, and very few good jobs for young people, and what good jobs there were could only be got by paying a fat bribe – yet without being in the EU the young people had no options.  It was almost impossible for them to get a work visa to an EU country – there were vanishingly few opportunities in their own country – they were stuck.  Many of those young people asked me how I was funding my trip.  Their own wages, if they were lucky enough to have a job, were very low around 200 – 400 USD per month, and as mentioned they had precious little opportunity to escape.  The only countries they could work without a visa were Serbia, and Albania, hardly economic powerhouses.  Thinking of the opportunities I had had growing up, and the marvel of working in any country in the EU visa free, I was made aware strongly of the privilege I had unconsciously enjoyed since birth, privilege based on the pure chance of being born in a relatively wealthy, well run, peaceful, open, and outward looking country.

This made me think about just how fortunate I was to be in a physical and financial position to be able to take two years off from work and wander around the place – without a care in the world.  This realisation of my privilege made me re-examine my life so far, what I had done with it, what had I done with the huge leg ups I had benefited from throughout my childhood and adolescence.   I had used them to get a comfortable, and lucrative job in an oil company, helping to find more of the hydrocarbons that’s use drives global warming onward.  In short – I had used my privilege chiefly to benefit myself, without much more than a cursory thought for society , and for those less fortunate than me.  I also came to think more and more of the fact that the route I walked through the Balkans route followed in part one of the main routes taken my Syrian refugees fleeing their civil war, on foot, to Europe.  I couldn’t help comparing my position, taking an extended break from employment to enjoy walking in the mountains and to indulge adventure fantasies, with theirs, being forced from their homes in situations of extreme violence, able to take only what they could carry on their backs, to begin an extraordinarily dangerous journey often on foot to a highly uncertain future.

These thoughts went around and round in my head, and ultimately made me reconsider what I should do with my life in the future.  I had started out on my walk for the purely selfish reasons of wanting an adventure.  When starting out I wasn’t even raising money for charity – something I would be more than able to do, given the unusual nature of my walk.  When I reached the half way point of my walk, in Vienna, I opened up a website for charitable giving, and thanks to some humbling generosity, have managed to raise over £6800 for Medecins Sans Frontier – a charity working to provide medical help to people affected my natural and man-made disasters world-wide wherever the need is greatest.  I also decided that I would be happier in the future if my job involved helping others in some way, and feeling like I was benefiting society.  I applied for a teacher training scheme in the UK – one which sends trainees to teach in schools with a large proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  I believe strongly in the importance of high quality scientific education, and high-quality education in general for all children, regardless of their parental income and what they go on to do after school.  So hopefully my walk will lead me to making more of a positive difference to society going forward (assuming I master teaching – a challenge which currently feels like its larger and harder than walking 6500 kms around eastern Europe), than I was making before setting off.

Meeting and socialising with people in every country I walked through, people of different religions, ages, cultures, and levels of relative wealth, and often feeling of profound connection with them –made me feel closer to humanity.  It made me realise that really between all countries – us humans share so much more than we are divided by.  I saw the terrible consequences of nationalism pushed to its brutal extreme in Bosnia and encountered or heard of examples of ignorant xenophobic nationalism, sectarianism and bigotry in every country I walked across – but examples of the same can be found in every country in the world.   Given how much we share as human beings, and how recent, in many cases our national units are; given how fluid, difficult to define, and rapidly ever changing “national values and culture” are; and given how the internet and social media are bringing together people across the globe and creating a global culture such as has never existed at any point in the past – it seems to me that we really ought to be working to weaken and dissolve borders, to join ever larger numbers of people into ever larger political units.

I don’t think Brexit should merely be reversed, in an ideal world I think the EU should grip ever tighter, increasing the economic, financial, military, political, and social integration of Europe, and to continue expansion when it becomes politically feasible to include first the remaining countries in Europe, and then onwards and outwards to cover more and more of the globe – until we have truly global governance – an end to borders as we know them, and an end to inequality of opportunity within countries, and between them.  I think that’s the direction we are headed – it doesn’t seem like that at the moment – but the world is developing at a tremendous rate, global inequality is falling fast (something not many people are aware of: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality), globalisation of trade and culture is on a long-term irrepressible rise.  Against this backdrop of globalisation, I believe the current world events of Brexit, Trumps election, ascendant populist parties and the politics of division; will be seen in the fullness of time to have been a reactionary blip.

Conclusion:  Did I get what I wanted – did the itch get scratched – did I find myself?

My journey has hugely broadened my mind.  It made me happy in my own company, yet more intensely aware of the joys that the company of others can bring.  It gave me a sense of purpose and made me keenly aware of the level of privilege I have enjoyed up until this point in my life.  It helped to remind me of what to value in life: trust, humility, honesty, hospitality freely given, a clear head, diversity, access to wild spaces where we can free ourselves from the worries and concerns of modern life; and also food, water, shelter, and fire. It helped me to understand better what values I believe we should struggle against within ourselves, and be mindful of in others; hubris, entitlement, excessive nationalism, xenophobia.

Before congratulating ourselves on where we have got to in life, and perhaps taking it for granted, it is important to consider all the support we have had to get there, and what our lives might have been like if that support was not there.  I was struck repeatedly, how especially the young people, but sometimes the older generations, were just like me.  We had grown up in different countries, different cultures, and different religions (or lack thereof), and yet nonetheless had the same dreams, the same needs and wants, and often listened to the same music.  What differences there were often just reflected the different opportunities afforded to them in their country of birth.  This might sound cliched, but I genuinely came home from the trip with a much greater love for humanity, and a desire to use what skills and energy I might have for the benefit of society and not just for myself.

I am extremely thankful that I had the opportunity to do this walk.  I am thankful to everyone who supported me, either financially by donating to my appeal for MSF (the appeal is still open for any last donations: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/wanderingpaddy), or emotionally by keeping in touch with me, or physically by coming out to walk with me.  It was not all fun and frolics, but ultimately the highs outnumbered and outweighed the lows by an order of magnitude or two.  If you are lucky enough to get the opportunity for a long-distance hike, solo or in a group, and you suspect that you might have the right temperament, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  You probably won’t realise it at the time, but you will almost certainly come back a changed person – hopefully for the better 😊.