MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchán Magan's tales of a travel addict
WHAT DOES IT feel like to walk from Co Meath to Istanbul? Last year, my 24-year-old cousin Austin Campbell did exactly that, setting out from Julianstown, Co Meath, and heading to Dublin Port where he crossed the Irish Sea, then walked across northern England, sailed to Rotterdam, and followed the Rhine and the Danube the whole way to Constanta in Romania, and from there south along the Black Sea coastline to Istanbul.
I know this because I’ve traced it on a map, but I have no way of conceiving it – just the idea of walking for four and a half months confounds me. He was following on from his previous 1,200km trip from Arles in France to León in Spain which he did when he was 21. That’s more or less imaginable, as many people walk the Camino, but crossing 4,500km?
It’s the final step that gets me – the mental and physical hammer blow that must have hit him upon reaching the Bosphorus and looking up at the solidification in domes and minarets of millennia of Asian and European entanglement.
What must that have been like? The intensity of it – akin to childbirth? Men are never allowed equate anything to childbirth, but surely 4,500,000 footsteps must bring something rather special to term? Was he conscious of those who had preceded him – the traders, missionaries and mercenaries who had journeyed this way and the countless hungry settlers and dreamy seekers who’d passed in the opposite direction, from Celtic tribes 2,500 years ago, right back to the first Mesolithic settlers to Ireland who came by 10,000 years ago on their meander out of Africa?
I could ask Austin, but he’s a man of few words – if you cross continents you don’t need to say much. What he did say was: “Moving slowly returns a value to nature often lost in everyday life and gives time to appreciate the small things.”
It chimes with the thoughts of another great walker, John Francis from Philadelphia, who spent 22 years walking, 17 of them in silence. He hiked across America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, then across Cuba and Brazil. For him, it was a crusade, a quest to improve how humans treat each other and to highlight how we can work together to benefit the planet. An oil tanker spill off California was what sparked his walk, followed by the death of a friend. (Likewise, it was the death of Austin’s brother Francis that set him off.)
John Francis decided to give up motorised transport and began wandering. With each step he found himself falling more in love with the world, and more despairing of what we were doing to it, but as he voiced his concerns he sparked conflict with others, so on his 27th birthday he decided to offer the gift of silence to the world. The day turned into a week, a month, a year, until eventually 17 years had passed. “You can’t explain silence by saying something,” he now says.
All of this seems strange to us, and yet in India wandering sadhus have always been a natural part of life; people at various times give away their belongings to roam in contemplation for long periods.
In my 20s I considered doing the same, but opted instead for the more sedentary option of sequestering myself in a remote cabin in the Himalayas for months, slowly going to seed. I wouldn’t recommend it to others, as it tends to compromise one’s sanity, but I would recommend walking.
As Austin says: “It means no pre-ordained schedules, no traffic jams, no relying on other people. Alone with a pack on your back you can set off at anytime, anywhere and change your plans whenever you want. Through this independence can be gained a sort of knowledge and pride in yourself and in the world we live in.”
More on John Francis at planetwalk.org