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.
In Sicily, walking is part of tradition. There are Roman roads winding through the hills, ancient pilgrimage routes that are still in use and tracks for shepherds moving flocks. (Liz Allemang for The Globe and Mail)
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“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.
And who's to say they're not? When I describe my long-distance walks to normal people, through uncelebrated backwoods landscapes that are sorely lacking in foie gras and five-star pampering, I can quickly sense that there's something missing from my narrative.
An eight-hour travel day that consists of cobbled tracks and bogs and prickly holly bushes and wild pigs, that could go badly wrong if you miscount the next turn to the right by 50 metres or fail to head off the erupting blister in time, that ends in a high-altitude place where there is a very approximate understanding of hot water at the very moment when you crave nothing else – can this really be the definition of happiness?
Yes, if you listen to Harvard happiness guru Daniel Gilbert, who believes that our good feelings at any given time are rooted less in our wealth or material goods than in our most memorable experiences – the “We'll always have Paris” argument, which prizes the enduring power of those rare moments when you feel fully alive.
In my travels, though, I have a more basic measure of euphoria: the boundless enthusiasm I feel for every single meal. People who count Michelin stars won't believe me, more's the pity, but the finest lunch I've had in recent memory was by the side of the road on the far side of a small town you have almost certainly never heard of called Isnello.
My daughter and I had been walking for three or four hours, getting lost for no more than 30 minutes, and had worked our way down from the meadows of the Madonie mountains past prickly-pear cacti and a farmer who conducted a friendly long-distance interrogation across his strawberry plantings toward a mini-piazza on the edge of town.
We stopped to get our bearings and wash off some off the upland grime just beyond the Vespas lined up at the sidewalk gas pumps, near a fountain adorned with brilliant ceramic tiles of bygone village life: donkeys carrying urns of fresh-pressed olive oil, musicians playing pipes and guitars, lush women leaning out the window to admire the passing scene.
Nostalgic, yes, but the connections to the old ways are harder to break in places like this – as we found at the Pink Panther bar just a few steps away, where we had gone through the door with some trepidation, not quite willing to bestow our faith on a Sicilian boîte that shared its name with a Henry Mancini theme song.
We emerged after the inevitable extended conversation about who we were and why we were there with two expansive squares of gleaming onion focaccia and a conical version of the usually round arancini – lightly breaded saffron-coloured rice stuffed with fresh springy mozzarella and ham.
Our short stroll up, down and through the village also took us past mobile vegetable vendors shouting their wares, garbage-truck drivers trying to back their way blind around hill-town hairpins while chatting out the window with the locals, church restorers taking coffee breaks as the church carried on with its picturesque five-century decline and, when the urban cobblestones turned into more familiar rural dirt track, barking dogs desperately proving to their placid owners that the traditional mode of security was still the best.
We walked a little farther, across a tiny bridge and up the neighbouring hill, until we had a view of Isnello stretched tightly across its hill with the mountains we had been walking through rising up behind. A ruined castle lay off to the left and sheep bells tinkled in the field next to us. We found two broad, flat rocks in the shade of an olive tree and chewed contently on our crisp focaccia crusts, while the universe unfolded as it should.
“Look at this,” I said to my daughter, pompously but truthfully. “Right now, this is the most beautiful place on Earth.”
It's all in the eye of the beholder, of course. Not to mention the ears, nose and mouth (for what vista isn't improved by hunger and a hint of anchovy on the crust). And while I'd confidently put that lunchtime scene up against any image from Under the Tuscan Sun and rank it only slightly behind the views of the Mediterranean that unfolded before us when we reached the hilltop sanctuary of Gibilmanna after our focaccia-fuelled ascent – surely there's still something magical about cresting a hill above the town of Cefalu and suddenly spotting the island home of the Greek god of the winds – I have to admit that my eye for beauty has been skewed by my love of walking.
Long-distance walking remains a minority taste, largely avoided by the young (whose understanding of pleasure resists the uphill complications that bring me so much joy), and preferred mostly by veteran travellers who no longer feel the need to tick off trophy destinations.
It takes a confident vacationer, after all, to disappear to a place no one at home has heard about, share their long days with little more than the earth and the sky, and then try to make the case that it was the experience of a lifetime.
So I will not try so hard to convince you. Here, perhaps, is a better example of why walking is the incomparable way to travel for me, if not for you. My daughter and I are standing in the brilliantly frescoed lobby of the Hotel Ventimiglia, on the cloud-covered edge of an old fortress town called Geraci Siculo (named, as my guidebook tells me, after the Greek word for the vultures that inhabited the rock above the town). We've finished our breakfast and I've made my morning run into town to buy two large rolls at the bakery, and then, led by the arm to the tiny grocery store down the block so that I don't get lost the way foreigners are presumed to do, I've had them sliced and filled with salami and cheese while I answer questions about who I am and why I'm here.
It's departure time, a little past 9 a.m., and our artist-poet host, who chatted to us about the strange success of the newly elected Silvio Berlusconi while we ate our suckling pig and rosemary roast potatoes the night before, now insists that we have a farewell tot of grappa to prepare for our cold mountain route.
“This is normal in the mountains?” I ask, the orderly urbanite in me still needing some reassurance about a.m. hooch consumption. “Completely normal,” he says, looking only slightly satanic.
Did we lose our way because of the grappa?
I don't think so, though I may have been too happily counting up the delights of the day to notice how fast the luminous views of Geraci from our hillside path turned into a cloud-covered nothingness where all landmarks ceased to exist and the evidence of the senses was no longer admissible.
We walked back and forth, back and forth, our wondrous ability to range across vast landscapes on our own two feet reduced to a tightly circumscribed haze where landmarks had ceased to exist. I prepared my mind to give up, to accept the fact that one of the best parts of travelling a piedi is that it remains unpredictable and uncertain, that a pleasure that's not for everyone is also occasionally for no one. On foot, given what you're up against, even defeat is a kind of reward.
And then, just as suddenly, the cloud started to lift and my more focused daughter quickly spotted the large cracked rock that pointed our way onward. We were back on track, content once again, perhaps even more pleased with ourselves and our surroundings in that strange way of those whose pleasure is enhanced by momentary pain.
Within an hour, we were savouring the unmatchable tastes of our salami sandwiches, looking down on the misty Mediterranean blue from our mountain-edge palisades, the happiest people in this whole wide world.
John Allemang is a feature writer with The Globe and Mail.
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