I've read a few accounts from Hippie Trail groups on FB and it seems that selling blood was a common cash generator... reminds me not to be too envious of the travellers of those halcyon days of the Trail. Today we are richer and have so much more information on places to visit. Also, I am from a generation which came of age exploring the Former USSR, which wasn't really open in the 70s. Swings and roundabouts...

'you think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you'

I certainly can relate to this. It was a subtle change at around 7-8 months into a 4½ year trip when I had got over that initial flurry of following a plan and relaxed a bit; let the trip dictate the pace. In fact, I think it is this feeling that is missing from even the best 2-3 month trips made subsequently during leave from my work.

Funny that you mention P.L. Fermor; in preparation for an Aegean trip earlier in the year I read his 'Mani' and have to say, as a person who will trudge through pretty much any book I start, I couldn't finish it. His absurd and uninteresting digressions and expectation of the reader to have a deep and passionate interest in Ancient Greece made it almost unreadable for me. I have his cross-Europe trilogy but can't say I'm that keen to dive in yet. He comes across as someone who did not receive a great education yet still manages to come across as a snobbish bore.

I know Newby is not everyone's cup of tea - I found 'The big red train ride' a bit dull, but 'The last grain race' and "A short walk in the Hindukush' are two of my favourite books.

Good luck with the presentation

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EurasiaOverland a memoir of one quarter of a million kilometres by road through all of the Former USSR, Western and Southern Asia.

The presentation went well - the place was 'packed' (a relative term - it wasn't that big a room) and the organisers said I'd beaten their previous attendance figure record by two!

Patrick Leight-Fermor was very much of his era and that does come across in the trilogy. I discovered him, not for those books, but for one he'd written in the 50's about traveller hospitality in monasteries. In it he'd essentially walk up the front door, knock, and ask if they'd put him up. It was a set book on my writing MA so I'd no choice but to read it, but what came across for me was not so much the monastic life insights he related but the confidence and near certainty in the outcome he had to do it in the first place. That's very much in evidence in the walking trilogy.

I almost gave up on him about ten pages into the first book because of his very much out of fashion these days 'public school' attitude, but I'm glad I persevered as, on the upside, some of the stuff is a masterclass in descriptive writing. And as he's writing about pre war Europe at essentially grass roots level it is a fascinating read. There's little of the quest for a fairer world that you get with Laurie Lee or George Orwell as they head for Spain, it's a journey almost without a point other than, in mountaineering terms, 'because it's there'. The nearest I've found in modern writing is Nicholas Crane's Clear Waters Rising, where he also walks to Istanbul but from a starting point in north west Spain.