My aim in travelling is to see as little as possible.
I prefer to walk, trading quantity for quality simply by trusting the limitations of my own two feet. The best way to approach the world, as far as I'm concerned, is at human speed – which means that when I first glimpsed the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean from the rough paths of Sicily's interior, I knew I was still two days away from dipping my toes into the waves.
In a good week of self-propulsion – though they always turn out to be great weeks – I might cover 120 kilometres, or about an hour of cruise-controlled highway driving. I am the very model of modern inefficiency, moving through the landscape at a pace somewhere between that of a docile cow and a 12th-century pilgrim, and I couldn't be happier.
Evelyne Dufau, whose tour company Experience Authentique specializes in the northern Basque region, describes this as the see-less, feel-more approach to travel.
“It's a North American reflex,” she observes, “to want to cover huge amounts of geography in order to experience a wide variety of landscapes and cultures. I coach my clients to minimize the mileage, to be available to breathe the pace.”
Which isn't to say, according to that other, more puritanical, North American reflex, that a walking holiday has to be a no-frills, no-fun communion with nature.
I, too, used to carry heavy packs along middle-of-nowhere trails, sleep on the ground and eat dinners that shared in the spirit of noble suffering. But a few years' studying in Britain, where the definition of wilderness is much more user-friendly and even the desolate moors have pubs, convinced me that self-denial is overrated. And in places where long-distance walking is a part of tradition – Sicily offers Roman roads, ancient pilgrimage routes that remain in use and tracks where shepherds still lead their flocks to upland pastures – it's hard to see much virtue in turning your back on centuries of well-trod civilization.
Since then, in fact, wandering my way to chateaux in the Loire Valley, scrambling through bogs in Donegal and even climbing up rocky creek-beds in Quebec's Mount Orford park, I've allowed myself more of the walker's well-deserved rewards – good food and drink, cultural eye candy where available, opportunities to mangle other languages, the unpredictable delights of daily human contact.
Of course, in this conscience-ridden era, an off-road, independent hiker like me could probably claim some credit for travelling green. If, that is, I soft-pedal my latest flights from Toronto to Catania and the various bus and car rides that enabled my daughter and me to start putting one foot in front of the other north of the ancient city of Enna.
Or, just to sound ostentatiously truthful, I suppose I could go on and on about the fitness benefits of a calorie-burning week of up-and-down climbs. I had ham and cheese for breakfast after sugary cornetti and bread slathered with homemade peach jam, lunched off salami-and-aged-pecorino sandwiches, made room for pumpkin-filled pasta at dinner and still lost weight.
But why do we need outside motives to justify our more basic and immediate pleasures? It can't be denied that walking has many benefits for those who need to feel altruistic or self-sacrificing – take on the vaunted Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, as more and more North Americans are doing, and you can even claim spiritual superiority.
And yet this misses the main reason why anyone would cross the planet to range through a necessarily small amount of Europe a piedi: there is no better way to experience the sum total of what's available to the traveller who chooses to move to the rhythm of the senses.
“You're totally engaged and noticing things all the time,” says Sarah Wright, whose company Silver Green runs personalized walking trips. “At a walking pace, you slow down and hear the kind of subtle sounds – sheep bells, crickets, wind in the trees – that you're too busy to hear in your normal routine.”
Walking is definitely a form of heightened awareness, a slow-travel alternative to the overstressed norm. There are no modernity-imposed barriers between you and the smells of the orange blossoms. Your brain enters a rapid-response state that can instantly sort out the driest route across a boggy path while sensing the guest appearance of a wild boar. And the hours of hard movement tilt your consciousness toward the giddy end of the scale, where the porcini mushrooms in your dinnertime pasta taste like the food of the gods.
