Experience the rugged beauty, ancient legends, and captivating history of Scotland with Andy the Highlander. From standing stones and whirlpools to myths and famous battles, Andy shares stories that bring the Scottish landscape alive. Discover why Scotland is more than tartans and bagpipes in this fascinating discussion about culture, heritage, and a passion for storytelling.

In the introduction, I talk about my personal connection to Scotland (I am a quarter Scottish!), and how it inspired my monster horror, Catacomb, as well as featuring in Day of the Vikings, and the anatomical connection to Desecration.

Andy the Highlander is the bestselling author of Lochs and Legends, A Scotland Man’s Guide to the Heart of Scotland, as well as an actor and tour guide.

Show notes:

You can find Andy at Highlander Tours and Lochs and Legends in all the usual places, or here on Amazon.

Jo: Hello everyone. I am thriller author J.F. Penn, and this is the Books and Travel Podcast. And today I’m here with Andy the Highlander, the bestselling author of Lochs and Legends, A Scotland Man’s Guide to the Heart of Scotland, as well as an actor and tour guide. So welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy: Thank you for having me.

Oh, it’s great to have you here. So first up —

Andy: I became Andy the Highlander back in 2015. I was fortunate enough to film on the hit US TV drama Outlander. I was one of Jamie Fraser’s men back in 2015. I filmed about 35 days on the show, and I then did a video in my garden demonstrating how to wear the plaid, the Filmore—the Great Kilt—and it got 5.3 million views in the first 30 days.

So that’s really where this journey of Andy the Highlander began. At the time I started investing in the swords, 18th-century clothing. My wife Anna thought I had lost the plot, and we had no idea this was going to become a business, but also very much who I am. I’m now more Andy the Highlander than I am old Andy. I don’t even know who he is anymore, to be honest. So yeah, it’s been some journey.

Jo: Yeah, ’cause you have a tour guide company as well, right?

That’s right. I run Highlander Tours, and I’m one of the busiest tour guides in the country, taking people from all over the world around Scotland. So that’s a very incredible job. Scotland is my office, and you know what they say: if you find something you love, then you’ll never work another day in your life.

Jo: That is true. So I guess on this show, I’d like to do things that maybe people don’t know, that are a bit less obvious, and you definitely have some of those in this book. So many people listening—maybe a lot of Americans, for example—have family connection to Scotland, even if that’s generations ago and maybe they haven’t even visited, but —

Well, one of the more well-known ones is Culloden, the last pitched battle fought on British soil, but not far from there you’ve got Clava Cairns.

These are 4,000-year-old burial chambers and standing stones, and they actually line up with the low-setting winter solstice on the 21st of December, and the sun’s rays go inside the chamber. This technology that people had 4,000 years ago—it’s quite an incredible feat of engineering. Like looking at the pyramids and stuff like that, it’s like, how did they know how to do this so perfectly?

I think today we still don’t understand how they cut these stones so precisely. So that’s a magical place. Scotland is absolutely full of gems like that, and they carry deep historical significance.

Jo: Mm. Well, the Highlander series starts in standing stones, doesn’t it?

Andy: That’s right. So Outlander—Diana Gabaldon is from Flagstaff, Arizona originally. She lives in Scottsdale now, but she wrote the first books in the 1990s. It’s quite an interesting story actually.

Diana watched an episode of Doctor Who, and there was a young, handsome Highlander called Jamie McCrimmon in the show, played by English actor Frazer Hines, who’s a friend of mine. So Diana sees this young, handsome Highlander—a man in a kilt—and she thinks, “Oh my, I like that.”

So that’s what gave her the inspiration to go on and write Outlander. It’s historical fiction. Claire is a nurse during World War II and goes back to 1743, then touches these standing stones and goes back to the 18th century, and then they try and stop the Battle of Culloden happening. So it’s a fantastic story and, as we call it, the Outlander Effect. It’s a huge global audience.

Jo: Oh yeah, I’ve read several of the books. There’s some good romance in there. But on rocks as well—’cause my brother actually lives in Edinburgh and did a short film, STONE HUNTERS, about lifting these rocks, sort of as a Scottish tradition of going around lifting stones instead of lifting other weights. Is that something you—oh, it just came up as you were talking about stones there.

Andy: That’s quite interesting. So we say in Scotland, “Only leave your footsteps.

What we don’t want is people lifting and building the little cairns, but what you’re talking about is something different and it’s really cool. There’s a big weightlifting community in Scotland.

You’ve got the Dinnie Stones, for example, and this strongman Donald Dinnie carried these massive stones across the Potarch Bridge and back. I can’t remember the combined weight, but there’s a whole community in Scotland. I’ve actually got a friend—I think he calls himself “The Highland Granddad” or something on Instagram—but he goes around and sets up maybe four or five different-size stones, obviously starting with the lightest one and then finishing with the heaviest one. So I’m all for that. That’s pretty cool.

Jo: So obviously the book is Lochs and Legends, so let’s talk about legends first. You mentioned kelpies, which I think is a fascinating one. So yeah, tell us about—oh, here we go, Kelpies. There you go.

Andy: So yeah, the Kelpies are one of my favorite myths, favorite legends. These ones here are actually the world’s largest equine sculptures. They’re 30 meters high—approximately a hundred feet—and they were done by Scottish artist Andy Scott.

I was actually lucky enough to attend the 10-year anniversary last year. They represent two different things: it’s a mixture of Scotland’s industrial past—our Industrial Revolution here was 1760 to 1830—and the Clydesdale horses would pull the wagons and the barges along the canals. These big, heavy horses mixed with Flemish warhorses.

So it’s a mixture of an industrial past, but also our folklore. Kelpies were mythical, shape-shifting horse spirits that would lure you to the water’s edge and drown you. This was a very real way to keep your children away from the water’s edge.

Jo: It seems odd though to have horses and water drawing you into the water, right? Shouldn’t they be mermaids or something?

Andy: That’s right. Yeah.

Andy: You’ve got the Corryvreckan, which is a legendary whirlpool. My brother Ian used to do a lot of diving off the west coast of Scotland, so this whirlpool is between the Isle of Jura and Scarba, and it’s one of the most dangerous tidal whirlpools in the world.

But there are also dark tales of the Celtic warrior Fingal, and you’ve got Fingal’s Cave as well. In the book, you’ve obviously got the Kelpies, but there are so many other legends in there as well: the Blue Men of the Minch, stories about cannibals and body snatchers as well. Oh yeah, loads of that.

Jo: Well, let’s talk about the body snatchers, because if you go to Edinburgh, you’re gonna do the body snatcher thing, right? Or at least people like me want to do the body snatcher tour. Tell us about that.

Andy: Yeah, Edinburgh was once one of the foremost cities for anatomy, and people like Burke and Hare—as I’m sure you know—would initially sell fresh corpses to Robert Knox for his anatomy lectures, but that was too time-consuming and not profitable enough, so they thought, “Well, let’s just murder people instead.”

I’ve got a fascination with visiting these old cemeteries, places like the Canongate Kirkyard or Greyfriars Kirkyard. I’ve had a couple of chilling experiences there—goosebumps on my arms.

Jo: Well, I did one of those ghost tours around that area, and people take the equipment to try and sense things. So tell us what you felt there.

Andy: Well, I did a tour a few years ago, and I was standing in front of George Mackenzie’s mausoleum. He was the man responsible for the persecution of the Covenanters—those who rose up against the signing of the covenant after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. I’m standing in front of his mausoleum, and a few photos were taken. The first one was completely normal, but the second one had this green glow behind my head, and I will never ever stand there again. I was told later that green is a healing energy, but no.

Andy: I think one of the most chilling places—one of the most special places—in Scotland is the town of Culross, which is actually, I think, the first chapter of the book. It’s spelt R-O-S-S, but it’s pronounced “Coo-russ.” This was featured in Outlander as Cranesmuir, but it dates back to the sixth century.

It was the birthplace of Saint Mungo, who’s the patron saint of Glasgow, and it was founded by Saint Serf. So in Culross you have the town hall, which dates back to 1626, and then a clock and the bell tower were added in 1783. But in Culross alone, during—for example—the witch trials, there were over 30 men and women tried for witchcraft in this town, and it’s said to be one of the most haunted towns in Scotland. I’ve got goosebumps right now talking about it again. I get goosebumps every single time I visit that place.

And in the book I mention one particular story I’ll tell you quickly. It was about 15 years ago now: a mum and dad and their little girl visit Culross Palace, which dates back to 1597. The mum and dad are in the laird’s bedroom, and the little girl sneaks under the rope and into the strong room. Back then they never had banks; they had strong rooms to keep the important documents and the money inside the coffers, inside the safes.

Anyway, the mum hears the little girl talking to someone. “Who are you talking to, sweetie?” “The man, Mummy.” Goosebumps again, right? She’s like, “What man?” I’ve got goosebumps all over. The mum looks in the strong room and there’s nobody there, and she says, “Come on, let’s go upstairs.” So they go upstairs into the Painted Chamber. As soon as they walk in, the little girl looks up at the wall to the painting of George Bruce with a funny collar, and she says, “That’s the man there, Mummy. That’s who I was talking to downstairs.”

So that’s the first part of the story. I visited about five years ago with an Australian couple, and it was the day before Halloween, the day before the palace closed for the season.

The staff had bay leaves stuck on the wall to ward off the evil spirits, ward off the witches. And the very second we walked up to the room and I said, “That’s George Bruce there, the man with a funny collar,” the bay leaves that the staff had pinned to the wall fell on the floor, and there was a little chair with a mannequin doll—white linen gown and a white linen hat. The hat flew across the room to the other side of the room. I’m standing looking at my clients, and the wife was like, “You guys did that?” I was like, “No, we didn’t.”

So I ran downstairs to tell my friend Linda, one of the employees of the palace. Things like that…and since then I’ve had numerous things happen to me in that place. So yeah, I definitely recommend if you get a chance, you have to visit there.

Jo: I haven’t been there. And well, I wondered—what do you think? I mean, obviously this is not a religious show or a particularly spiritual show, but I do wonder sometimes when these violent things happen—I mean, obviously I’m English, you’re Scottish, we’ve got some bloody history between our countries —

Yeah, I think I definitely believe in something.

They say when you visit these ancient places frequently, as I do—I visit old castles, old cemeteries, old graveyards late at night—they say these entities, these energies, follow you around.

I have loads of different people on tour. I’ve been given pyrite, I’ve been given black obsidian. I’ve got so many little things in my wardrobe to protect me. So many people are interested in the same thing. But I do have a fascination, and of course there might be an explanation, as you know, for something like that hat flying across the room. I mean, there’s no explanation for that—it might be a creaky floorboard, or you know, there’s something. There’s definitely something there, I think.

Jo: So in the book, you also mention a summer solstice at Callanish I—or maybe you pronounce that differently—and you said it was a spiritual feeling and a connection to the land, which sounds different to the stuff you’ve been talking about.

So Callanish standing stones are similar to Clava Cairns near Culloden, but they’re even older. They say they’re older than the pyramids of Egypt, so we’re talking 5,000 years old, and it’s just a very historical place. I was there on the summer solstice as the sun started to set, and it’s a kind of outer-body experience.

There were people playing music, there were drummers there playing the drums slowly—boom, boom, boom—as the sun set. I felt so privileged to be there in this ancient site. We’re not sure why they built these places, but it’s just fascinating to me. I absolutely love visiting places like that.

Jo: Well, what’s interesting—you mentioned there the drums, and of course in terms of sounds and music, people think about the bagpipes when they think of Scotland, and I wondered —

Andy: Well, they were classed as a weapon of war until fairly recently. Imagine you were the enemy, and in the distance you hear this drone of the bagpipe. It really stirs up the blood.

But whether they came from Scotland or not is widely debated—some say China, some claim other countries—but it’s our sense of nationalism here, isn’t it? The sound of the bagpipes gives me goosebumps every single time, and even if you’re not from here, I have a lot of clients who come on tour and they don’t know why either. It just hits them, and they start crying and get very emotional. Lovely.

Jo: Yeah, there’s definitely something about music that does that. I’ve been to the Edinburgh Tattoo, which is lots of pipes and bands and marching around, which is pretty good. But I wanted to come back to water. I mean, obviously the book is Lochs and Legends, so we’d better talk about some lochs. There are quite a few.

Andy: Yeah, on the front cover of the book you can see behind me—that’s actually Urquhart Castle, and the legends on Loch Ness date back to the sixth century.

This is when St. Columba settled at Glen Urquhart, not far from where the castle is, and it’s the first record of the Loch Ness Monster. The first written record is from the seventh century. It’s obviously on a fault line as well—a very deep fault line. There’s more water in Loch Ness than all of the lakes in England and Wales combined, including the Lake District. So who knows what’s in there, if there’s a Nessie or not.

But one of my favorites is probably Loch Lomond—the “Bonnie, Bonnie Banks” of Loch Lomond, like the song. My mom and dad, before they got married, spent a lot of time hill walking, and they joined the Youth Hostel Association. They didn’t have a lot of money back then, but Loch Lomond isn’t far from Glasgow at all.

In fact, we are actually doing the West Highland Way with some friends in May, which is 97 miles approximately, from Glasgow right up to Fort William. We’re going to camp the whole way. My mom and dad, as I say, spent time there. My sister got married in the beautiful little town of Luss, so that’s a very special place close to my heart.

Jo: And I guess staying with water—I mean, you mentioned the island of Jura. I’ve written about Iona.

Andy: The west coast of Scotland is just ruggedly beautiful. I’ve been lucky enough to see it from a boat. We used to have a lovely big Broom–type powerboat, 43 feet long. We could go anywhere. W

e’ve been to Ireland on it, we’ve been to Fingal’s Cave, we’ve been to Staffa, Rum, Iona, Jura—absolutely stunning beauty. Some of these places you can’t access with a vehicle, so they’re just beautiful. You can anchor the boat and take the small tender to these isolated, remote beaches—truly special, steeped in legends, steeped in history, with the most outstanding scenery. Islands like Islay, for example—it’s often mispronounced. People say “EYE-lee,” but it’s “ILL-uh.” That’s obviously one of the main whisky areas in Scotland as well. If you like peaty, smoky whiskies, that’s the island for you.

Jo Yes. We hadn’t even mentioned whisky, so you mentioned one there, but —

Andy: So remember, our whisky doesn’t have an “e” at the end of it—there’s no “e” in Scottish whisky. It’s very unique.

Every whisky is different, whether it’s a blended whisky or whether it’s a single malt. There are different regions of Scotland: you’ve got Highland whisky, Lowland whisky, you’ve got Campbeltown— which is a whole separate region—you’ve got Skye, you’ve got whisky from the Isle of Skye as well, Speyside. There are smoky, peaty whiskies from Islay, or a nice Highland whisky, or a Speyside—it’s more of a caramel, vanilla, maybe citrusy, fruity flavor. So people often ask me what my favorite whisky is, and there is no definitive answer for that. It just depends what mood I’m in at the time.

Jo: Yeah, I mean, I must say I’m not particularly a whisky person, but my husband is, so nice—he would enjoy those. In terms of—obviously you’ve mentioned the West Highland Way, and when…maybe just give people a sense of the size of things.

So a lot of people might fly into Edinburgh or Glasgow, and then you say ‘the Highlands,’ and they might think, ‘Oh, I could just do a day trip,’ or whatever. So maybe just talk a bit about that, about the scale and what’s up there, up in the Highlands.

Andy: Yeah, there are a lot of areas that are really unspoiled. The population of Scotland is only about 5.3 million people, so we’re a small country, but to give you an idea, many people will fly into Glasgow or Edinburgh. To get to the Highlands, you’re talking three or four hours.

If you are coming, I’d recommend you plan your routes and make sure you spend at least a decent amount of time in each area. I mean, Edinburgh is the capital city, but Glasgow is actually the biggest population.

As soon as you start heading towards the Highlands, you could arrive at one of these secluded Highland beaches, and it really looks like you could be anywhere in the world—you could be in the Caribbean until you dip your toes into the water. Then you know you’re not in the Caribbean. But sometimes you can arrive at these places and there’s nobody there.

You know, the Three Sisters mountains in Glencoe were formed about 480 million years ago when the two continents Avalonia and Laurentia collided. They say they used to be four times the height they are today, and the valley of Glencoe was carved during the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago.

You’ve got the legends up there, you’ve got the Massacre of Glencoe—the 13th of February, 1692—the MacDonalds and the Campbells. There’s just so much history and just beautiful scenery.

Jo: Yes, there’s still rivalry, isn’t there, in Scotland? Maybe talk a bit about—I made the mistake once: I flew into Glasgow, and I was in a taxi and I made the mistake of mentioning the wrong team.

Andy: I mean, there’s clan rivalry, particularly between the MacDonalds and the Campbells. So I always, of course, stay neutral on these subjects, but I have people coming from Canada or from the States, and they get in the car and they’re like, “Listen, we are Campbells, we’re sorry.”

And I’m like, “Listen, it’s more complicated than that. It wasn’t just the Campbells—that’s a very short, small part of the story.” So we’ve got that kind of banter. In fact, if you visit the Clachaig Inn in Glencoe, if you walk through the front door, there’s actually a sign at reception that says, “No Campbells or hawkers, no salesmen.” So take that with a pinch of salt.

Then of course you’ve got the soccer rivalry, the football rivalry. You’ve got teams like Celtic and Rangers, and that’s to do with religion, and it is deep-rooted. But then we have the banter of rugby games, for example—I used to play rugby for Scotland under-18, and I just love going to a Scotland–England game of rugby. It’s very different; it’s very different from football, right? If you go to a football game, they want to hate each other, they want to kill each other, but rugby—you can be together and have a dram of whisky; it’s a gentleman’s sport. So yeah, it’s that old rivalry.

Jo: Yeah, exactly. I mean, yes, we are watching on Netflix the Six Nations rugby thing, and of course Scotland and England always play each other. But let’s just come to Glasgow, because I feel like, again, Edinburgh—people go to Edinburgh and then they forget Glasgow. It was the European City of Culture a few years back, wasn’t it? And there’s lots of really interesting stuff in Glasgow.

Andy: Yeah, Glasgow is often overlooked, but there are so many things you can do there, and a lot of them are free as well. I actually like to do the Glasgow Mural Trail.

It’s a stunning art installation which starts at George Square—some of them have been knocked down since, and they update it quite often—but it takes you on a full tour of the city. It can take maybe four hours to do the whole thing. It takes you up past Strathclyde University, and there’s a big mural of a lady: she’s been crying, her nose is red, and she’s holding a little baby. That’s Mungo as a baby with his mother carrying him.

Then you walk up to Glasgow Cathedral, which dates back to the 12th century, so it predates the whole city by hundreds of years. Across the road, you’ve got the oldest house in Glasgow. You’ve then got the Glasgow Necropolis up on the hill with some beautiful old gravestones. You’ve got the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Glasgow Transport Museum—there are so many things to do. You’ve got Pollok House, Pollok Country Park, the Burrell Collection. It’s a very cool city.

Jo: Isn’t it Rennie Mackintosh as well? Maybe explain that to people.

Yeah, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The House for an Art Lover—that’s very beautiful if you like your Rennie Mackintosh. It was actually a friend of mine who lives in Kilmacolm who wrote a book about it. He was the guy in charge of designing The House for an Art Lover—Graham Roxburgh, his name is. One of the last times Lily, my co-writer, was in Scotland, I managed to get a little private tour with Graham, and he gave us both an autographed copy of his book. So really cool.

Oh, cool. Yeah, people—a lot of people will recognize the Rennie Mackintosh types of designs, you see them on lots of things.

One of my favorites has to be Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that’s one of my old favorites—I reread that fairly often. There’s one that I see in many of the gift shops here called Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales—that’s a good one. That’s by Gordon Jarvie, I think his name is.

There’s another one called Beneath the Surface—that’s by Fiona Neill, and that’s a mystery set in the Highlands. I read that one recently as well. There are loads of great short stories you can get if you go around the bookshops, the Historic Environment Scotland sites, or the National Trust sites.

Jo: I’m sure people can find your book all over the place, but I do also want to say, what is your favorite movie, since that would seem appropriate?

Andy: Well, yes, I think it probably has to be Highlander. I don’t know if you know—they’re actually making a remake with Henry Cavill.

Jo: No! They are? Oh my goodness, I didn’t know that.

Andy: They are! It was my absolute favorite film growing up, with Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery, so maybe I’ve kind of morphed this whole Andy the Highlander thing from watching Highlander. You know:

“From the dawn of time we came, moving silently down through the centuries, leading many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the Gathering, where the few who remain will battle to the last,”

you know? Absolutely brilliant. I always loved open spaces—mountains, rivers, waterfalls, beaches.

Jo: Yes, so that’s fantastic. And of course there can be only one Andy the Highlander! There you go.

Andy: So the book has just been released in North America. You’ll find it in Barnes & Noble, and you’ll find it at Walmart and Target online. You’ll find it on Amazon. I’ve also done an audiobook as well, which you can get on Amazon. That was a no-brainer. HarperCollins asked me if I would like to do the audiobook, and it had to be me—it couldn’t be anybody else, you know? Some of the comments I have: “We can really hear your voice telling the story,” first of all through the book, but they love hearing the voice in the audiobook.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Andy. That was great.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

The post Lochs And Legends. Scotland With Andy The Highlander appeared first on Books And Travel.

What are the fascinating — and also dangerous — aspects of Death Valley National Park? How does visiting a stark desert landscape give us perspective about our place in the world?

Steve Hall is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and a seasoned adventure hiker renowned for his extensive explorations of Death Valley National Park.

You can find Steve’s hiking videos of Death Valley and other places at YouTube.com/stevehallDV. The Death Valley National Park website has lots more info.

You can find pictures and notes, as well as book recommendations on Death Valley here.

You can find Death Valley, A Thriller, by J.F. Penn, here.

Jo: Hello travelers. I’m thriller author, J.F. Penn, and today I’m here with Steve Hall. Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi Jo. It’s great to be talking to you today.

Jo: Yes, just a little introduction. Steve is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and a seasoned adventure hiker renowned for his extensive explorations of Death Valley National Park, which we’re talking about today. Let’s start with the basics.

Steve: Great questions. You know, it’s great to be talking with you about Death Valley National Park—of course, my favorite national park to visit. Death Valley is part of the Northern Mojave Desert, and it’s located right along the California–Nevada border.

It’s kind of situated in between Las Vegas to the east and the Sierra Nevada mountains off to the west. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states. It actually has the great size of 3.4 million million acres, and it’s 140 miles in length, going from the bottom of the park all the way up to the top in the north. So it’s quite expansive.

Well, it kind of started for me back in 1997 when I was with a group of friends on the way to the Grand Canyon. As we finished up our trip there, we had a couple of extra days on our way home. So I noticed on a map all these kind of scary-sounding names within Death Valley—locations such as the Devil’s Golf Course, the Devil’s Cornfield, the Funeral Mountains, Badwater—kind of all scary, foreboding-sounding places. I told my friends, “Why don’t we stop there? We have a little extra time and see what Death Valley is all about.” And that’s what we did.

We drove through the park and actually had a kind of scary experience right when we first crossed the park boundaries. My very first memory of crossing into the park was seeing an injured motorcyclist on the dirt just off the road. I guess he had taken a turn too fast or something, but he flew off his bike and was injured, and paramedics were attending to him. So that was my introduction to the park—seeing somebody badly injured.

But on that first trip, I visited some of the famous tourist destinations such as Badwater, Artist Palette, Zabriskie Point, and Devil’s Golf Course. So that kind of gave me a little taster or teaser of the park. Those are the same kinds of destinations that first-time park visitors are sent to.

Let’s just get a bit into what it looks like because you mentioned a few things there, like the Devil’s Golf Course. I went to Badwater. I went to the Artist Palette in my day trip when I visited. You also mentioned the Grand Canyon. So I feel like even Americans or anyone in the world who knows a little bit about America has heard of the Grand Canyon, has seen pictures of the Grand Canyon. In their minds, when they say “National Park in America,” that’s kind of what people have in their mind, I think, because that’s the most famous one.

Steve: Well, anytime somebody thinks about American national parks—like what you mentioned—they might think about the big famous ones such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone. Those have sights that are just so famous.

When you walk out to the Grand Canyon for the first time and look at that sweeping vista, it’s so overwhelming and it’s captured well in photographs. The same thing with Yosemite, with the majestic waterfalls and Half Dome. When it comes to Death Valley, people might think of a bleak, lifeless desert, so it might not be the first destination that comes to their mind when they’re thinking about visiting a US national park.

Steve: Well, that is a very interesting and neat place to check out and explore.

It’s along a place that’s known as Artist Drive, which is a one-way loop road that comes off of Badwater Road. Artist Palette itself has some very colorful hills. It is basically what the name implies. You drive up to it, you get out and take a look, and you’re surrounded by these colorful badlands. Some of the minerals and different forces have created a variety of colors on display. It really does have just about every color you can imagine.

You look out and there are all these little canyons going in different directions, and there are hills that you can scramble up. Of course, it’s a photographer’s dream. Artist Palette has been featured in, for instance, a music video by the group Oasis—their video “Who Feels Love?” was filmed partly in Death Valley, and Artist Palette was one of the locations that they chose. It’s a very famous spot.

Jo: Yeah, and really beautiful in different lights. I imagine you’ve obviously visited at different times of day. I feel like I was only there for about 10 minutes, but even then you can get all kinds of different shades in the rocks, as you said.

Talk about those salt flats down there, and I guess why it’s also called Death Valley, because the day I was there, it was winter—it was November—and it was still damn hot.

Steve: Yeah, so Badwater itself is probably Death Valley’s most famous destination.

Around the Badwater Basin, there are some 200 square miles of salt flats. What makes it very special is that it’s the lowest spot in North America at minus 282 feet—282 feet below sea level. Badwater actually got its name because there was a surveyor in past times who brought his mule out and was in the area and led his mule up to the Badwater pool, which is a spring-fed little pool of water on the ground. The mule rejected it and refused to drink the salty water. So that’s why it got the name Badwater.

Visiting it is a unique experience, especially for first-timers, because you can go out there and stand at that special spot, get your picture next to the sign, and you can also look up at the hillside nearby and see a sea level sign. You can visualize in your mind just how far underneath the ocean you would be if you were at sea level right there. There’s also an endemic snail that lives only at that location at Badwater, so that’s really special too.

And if you look across the salt flats, across the valley, you can see the Panamint Range. The highest summit there in the Panamints, as well as all of Death Valley, is Telescope Peak at 11,049 feet. That’s quite a contrast—standing at minus 282 and looking up at 11,049 feet.

Another aspect to Badwater is that sometimes during flooding, that salt basin fills with water. This happened just a year ago and forms Lake Manly, and then you’ll find, as it goes viral, people out there kayaking and floating on the lake.

Steve: Yes. In thinking about wildflowers in Death Valley, you need several distinct rain events.

If you just get one light period of rain—and keep in mind Death Valley is the hottest, driest, and lowest, meaning it gets less than two inches of annual rainfall—you’re not going to get a good wildflower season.

But if you get several periods of rain spread out among several months, then you’re going to get a good bloom. In fact, you could get a “super bloom.” I remember being there for the last big super bloom in 2016, and I think before that it was 2005. We just had vast fields of desert gold covering the landscape—an overwhelming amount of flowers, beauty beyond what you could imagine.

Jo: Yes. I mean, I only went for a day trip, so you only get a certain glimpse in a day. Of course, you’ve been hiking there for years.

But let’s get into why also, I guess, it’s so dangerous. There are tourist trips—it doesn’t have to be a dangerous place to visit—but —

Steve: There’s really a lot of dangers in Death Valley. In fact, I received an email from a hiker one time, and he mentioned that Death Valley is one of the most dangerous places on Earth to hike. I would definitely agree with that. It’s so important to be prepared and to know what you’re getting into out there.

The first thing that people often think about when it comes to dangers is the heat.

Sure enough, in the springtime, especially in the summer but also lingering into the fall, you have the extreme hot days. You have days when you shouldn’t even be out there hiking, but if the heat seems to be at a manageable level, it’s all about bringing enough water with you, enough sunscreen, knowing your body’s limitations, hiking early in the morning before it gets too hot—things like that.

Other dangers include flash floods. There are occasional flash floods that will sweep down canyons and wipe out park roads, which creates a whole different hazard. And then the wind can even be a hazard. There can be severe windstorms that come up. In fact, the wind can sometimes kick up really bad dust storms and sandstorms into the air. That’s caused by strong winds picking up the dust and sand off the ground and pushing it forward like a wall toward people.

I had a couple of experiences not too long ago where I was coming out of a hike to a place called The Crack. I looked off to my right, to the northwest, and saw what looked like a wall of dust coming toward me. It was scary. Fortunately, we were just getting back to my truck, so I said, “We better get there quickly and get in.” Right as we got to the truck, it swept over us. The wind came first, then all the dust, and we lost our visibility. I was glad we were inside, so our clothes and my eyes weren’t filled with dust.

Another experience: My parents own an RV or trailer, and they were parked at the Stovepipe Wells campground one day. My dad looked out the window of the trailer and could see a giant wall of dust and sand heading toward Stovepipe Wells. My parents got out and went to hide near the general store, and sure enough, the dust storm came through, rattled the trailer, and wreaked havoc on that whole area. He said afterward it took him a whole year to get all of the dust and sand out of the trailer and for it to work normally again—for the windows to be able to pop out and slide like they’re supposed to. It was quite a crazy situation.

Jo: Wow. You are reading my novel Death Valley, and I put in this big dust storm. When I wrote it, I read about these storms and I thought, “Is this really—could this really happen?” I know it’s terrible, but I’m grateful that you’ve said this is actually possible. And these storms, like you say, can just take everything out in their path, right?

Steve: Yeah, and in fact—obviously we can’t get into spoilers—but I love how you brought the storm into your novel. It reminded me that with climate change, scary things like that could actually happen. Climate change has already had a bad impact upon the park. Again, hopefully nothing like what I’ve been reading in your novel actually happens, but there certainly is the potential for that.

We’ve seen an increase in flash flooding that has caused road closure for many months at a time, with sections of the park closed off. We’ve also seen trees dying off, such as bristlecone pines, because they’re not getting the moisture and they’re getting too much heat. We’ve seen an increase in long, hot summers and higher temperatures going through the park, which makes it hard on wildlife that are already on the edge of survival, pushing them even further.

Well then, with all this danger, how come you have this film Last Chance Solo, where you went off on your own and solo? What draws you to this kind of solo adventure? We are definitely not recommending anyone do this, but you obviously love it. So talk a bit about solo adventure.

Steve: Yeah, so solo hiking and backpacking is not really my favorite thing to do. I have a core group of friends who I enjoy backpacking and hiking with out in Death Valley—such as Michelle, who’s one of my best friends—but not everyone is always available. A majority of my friends here at home, outside of the park, are not interested in the great challenges that are presented. So that’s what can lead me to go solo.

But going solo does create some difficult challenges. For one thing, you’re out there all alone, so if you get injured or hurt, it’s going to be more difficult to get out of there, to get help, and to make it through. Also, it can just be lonely out there, going for days on end hiking. It’s definitely not as fun.

You referenced my film Last Chance Solo, which was the very first feature film I ever attempted to do in Death Valley. It documents me doing six days of solo backpacking and hiking in the Last Chance Range. I believe when I started that out, I had to carry five and a half gallons of water because water sources are not always available in Death Valley. You’re not always going to find a spring or a source of water, so to do some of these routes, you’re going to need to do heavy water carries and bring them with you.

As far as why it can be difficult to get others to hike with you in Death Valley—well, it’s hard. There are very few trails in the park. You’re mostly creating your own routes as you go through peaks and canyons. There’s not a lot of established trails or routes. And of course, not a lot of people want to carry a lot of water. Then there’s terrain obstacles that you have to deal with—like rock climbs.

I had one friend named Curtis who, every five years, comes with me to the park to do hiking. But he tells me then, after he goes, “Well, you fooled me again. Maybe I’ll come back with you in another five years when I forget how difficult this is.”

Jo: Yes, I mean, I’ve done multi-day solo backpacking, but where I’ve stayed somewhere reasonable at night with shelter, and there’ve been shops on the way. That is not what happens in Death Valley. I mean, there is a little—it’s not a town, is it? Like you said, there’s a campground, there’s the visitor center, but it’s not like you can stop off and find water anywhere. You do have to go a ways.

So another thing about the visitor center when I got there was I noticed there’s a plaque saying this is a Dark Skies area. Tell us about that.

Steve: It’s quite amazing. Dark Sky International certified Death Valley National Park as the third official Dark Sky National Park in the United States. A lot of work went into helping that happen. Actually, they were given the Gold Tier, which is the highest standard, the highest rating you can get for a national park. So it truly is a Dark Sky Park.

How that comes about and what it’s all about is negating as much light pollution as possible. You think about light pollution coming in from nearby cities, such as Las Vegas—it’s the closest one to Death Valley. You can’t really do anything about that, but Death Valley is far enough away that city light doesn’t have much of an impact, especially the farther north you go.

That’s just where you start—how far away the park is from cities. Then you have to think about the artificial lighting that is on buildings, on signs, shining around the villages you referenced, which are Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells. A lot of work had to go into changing out all those lights that were just shining indiscriminately—brightening up the area. Instead, new lights were installed that used less electricity and were angled downward to light up a path so people could walk safely, or to light up signs or buildings but without blinding people’s eyes. That’s what made it a successful Dark Sky Park—putting all the effort into that and getting certified.

You mentioned the Dark Sky Festival, which actually took place last week. I was there in Death Valley for the Dark Sky Festival, actually working at the Farm Creek Visitor Center, and then I hosted a telescope in the evening at what was known as the Star Party, where we had 25 to 30 telescopes out. We took in—I think it was 2,300 visitors—over the course of two days, who could look through our telescopes and hear a ranger-guided program.

The Dark Sky Festival is a very special event. There’s so much going on. There were auditorium programs, there was an exploration fair with booths for learning about things related to the sky and the stars, with scientists sharing information and things you could learn from. There were astrophotography meetups. There’s an incredibly talented photographer named Stephanie Lamar that lives and works in Death Valley and actually does wedding, engagement, and family photos, but she volunteered her time to lead groups out to the Mesquite flats—or to the Mesquite sand dunes and Harmony Borax—to help them learn astrophotography.

Then there were talks going on by scientists out at park locations such as Ubehebe Crater, Badwater, Golden Canyon, various spots to teach people things. And then, of course, the grand finale was the Star Party, which I mentioned, where we had all the telescopes out. On Friday night, I shared the Andromeda Galaxy with everybody, and on Saturday night, the Orion Nebula. It was just a fantastic event, organized and put together by my friend Matt, who works there in the park.

Jo: Mm, amazing. If people haven’t been to any of these dark-sky locations—they are around the world—but as you said, how much you can see the stars compared to what you see if you’re in the city is just totally different, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve been in a place in Western Australia, and I’ll never forget it. It was like, this is a completely different experience to living in a city and looking up at the sky.

Steve: Yeah, it’s totally different. There’s just no comparison. Just seeing the awe and wonder on some of the visitors’ faces as they look up at the sky—at one point there was a ranger looking at some of the constellations with a laser pointer and even reading poetry out there under the stars. It is just a totally different experience compared to going out where I live here in Sonoma, in California, and trying to look up. When I go out to Death Valley, I feel like I can see ten to a hundred times more stars.

Steve: Yeah, you know, there’s this interesting story I came across. I do a lot of hiking and backpacking into undocumented areas of Death Valley to try to make discoveries. Of course, when I say “make discoveries,” I don’t mean I’m the first person to ever find these things, because we have Native Americans, miners, and who knows who else hiking off the grid, but I just try to go out into areas that people haven’t seen or heard of before and share things.

I went into this place called Trellis Canyon, which was just mentioned in passing in a guidebook, but there was only one sentence—no other information about it—just to see what was there. I hiked in there, went home, and published a report about my hike and shared photos, because I did have the largest website on Death Valley hiking in the world, which is now only available to park staff. That’s where I was sharing my hiking adventures at that time.

I started getting emails from people who identified themselves as a group of lawyers, doctors, adventure and thrill seekers who wanted more information about Trellis Canyon. As I gathered more details, I found out that this group believes there is a lost city of gold underneath the Panamint Mountains, and that the access point to get into the lost city of gold—where there’s supposedly tons of treasure, gold artifacts, as well as giant mummies preserved in underground caverns—they believe the entrance is through a cave in Trellis Canyon.

The interesting thing was they had spotted some “scorpions” on Google Earth above Trellis Canyon. Sure enough, I went on Google Earth, and I could see these two matching scorpions that were covering the landscape. As you’re following along on Google Earth, you see these two scorpions, and they do look out of place, admittedly. Anyway, the scorpions later disappeared from Google Earth, and this group felt that was a conspiracy to hide the entrance to the lost city of gold. Sure enough, I pushed the date back and it basically showed the satellite imagery had updated, and that’s why the scorpions were still visible but only at an earlier version of Google Earth.

So anyway, these people went out, backpacked, and some of them had never done it before. They tried to get into the lost city, but they never did find it. I do hear of them going back from time to time to continue searching for it.

Jo: I love it. I think that’s brilliant. Now, that might be a myth, but there is evidence, as you said, of mining, and also you mentioned the Native American people.

Steve: Well, yeah, that’s a good thing to talk about because when we look at human history, we can say it starts with the Timbisha Shoshone. They’ve inhabited the Death Valley region for some 1,000-plus years, so they’ve been there a long time. Then, of course, in modern times, miners came in and tourists came in, and the Timbisha Shoshone found themselves displaced. They seemed to have endured quite a bit of mistreatment and loss of the areas they wanted to live in for about 65 years. But then, in the year 2000, there was the Timbisha Homeland Act that was signed into law, and that gave them back a portion of their ancestral homeland and some of their rights. Hopefully things continue to move positively for them.

Then, of course, we might think about mining in Death Valley. That got started in the late 1850s, as far as records can show, and picked up in the successive decades. There was gold, there was silver, there was borax, talc, salt—those were some of the things that were mined in Death Valley. Some good examples of that: Keane Wonder Mine is a really neat place to visit—that’s where you might find that gold was mined. There’s Panamint City, which was famous for the silver that was mined there. There’s Harmony Borax, which is where what’s called “white gold” was mined, and white gold is borax.

That proved to be a very successful mining operation and brought a lot of Death Valley history with 20-mule-team wagons hauling out refined borax from 1883 to 1889 on a journey that went over 165 miles to get that borax hauled out of Death Valley. Modern tourism, of course, got started as people began taking an interest in the valley. It was established as a national monument in 1933, and then a national park in 1994.

Jo: Mm, yeah. I guess with the indigenous people there, there’s climate change, but you also want people to visit, you want people to appreciate the beauty, and also bring their tourist dollars. So where’s the balance?

Steve: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s so important for visitors to be aware as they come into Death Valley National Park. I think it kind of starts just as you come in, to make sure to pay your entrance fees to provide that financial support to the park and not try to dodge it.

Also, just becoming familiar with basic park regulations—which I like to call common-sense things—such as not driving off park roads. For instance, if somebody drives off a park road onto a playa or lake bed or the salt flats, that leaves tire tracks that won’t be worn away for decades, and it also damages the habitat, the life in that soil. So there’s that.

It’s just basic things like camping only where you’re supposed to, in designated sites, not leaving graffiti, not picking wildflowers, not collecting rocks or artifacts and taking them home, but leaving them in place for future visitors. Leaving no trace when you’re hiking or backpacking—so not leaving any garbage or anything behind. Also not feeding the wild animals or birds. We haven’t touched on those very much, but protecting them by leaving them to care for themselves naturally.

There’s something kind of important going on right now nationally where park employees in Death Valley, as well as other national parks, are being fired for no reason. There’s a downsizing effort underway, and this isn’t coming from within Death Valley but from higher sources. That’s something we really can’t have. In my opinion, we’re underfunded and understaffed in Death Valley, and it hurts the park now and in the long term to not have enough people to properly take care of it. That’s something people can hopefully counteract by writing letters and making phone calls. But yeah, we definitely need our park employees.

Jo: Hmm, absolutely.

Steve: Starting in about the year 2020, I shifted gears from doing written hiking reports on my website to actually filming my adventures because I found it more interesting. I have a couple of Death Valley series on my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/steveHallDV.

I have my Death Valley Adventure films, which I’ve currently filmed six of. Those are basically three-plus-day backpacking adventures into locations that very few people have ever been to or seen—really super special places that park visitors don’t usually go to. Those often involve heavy water carries for those three days, because there’s often not water available. Those are quite exciting. It’s quite a privilege to be able to showcase some of these amazing spots that people don’t get to see.

Then I have my Death Valley Discovery series, which currently stands at 20 episodes, where I’m going out to places that I, park staff, other hikers, or friends discovered. Again, using the term “discovery” a little lightly, because we don’t claim to be the first people to ever walk through these areas, but we’re the first to publish reports and document them. So that’s what those two series of videos cover. I also hike in places such as the South Pacific and the Arctic on my channel.

Jo: Yeah, and it’s a fantastic resource, so go and check that out everyone. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. That was great.

Steve: Yeah, it was really nice talking with you. I really enjoyed talking with you about Death Valley, and I’ve enjoyed reading your novel, and I’m sure so many people are going to love that.

The post Desert Storms and Superblooms: Death Valley With Steve Hall appeared first on Books And Travel.

Welcome back to the Books and Travel Podcast! In this episode, I explore why I’m restarting the show, how travel has shaped my writing, and the deeper reasons we journey—both physically and through books.

From revisiting my first episode to discussing reinvention, curiosity, and the meaning of travel, this is a fresh start filled with inspiration for readers, writers, and adventurers alike.

You can find my books at JFPennBooks.com and see more of my photos on Instagram @jfpennauthor

Hello travelers, I’m Jo Frances Penn and yes, the podcast is back!

I’ve missed talking to other writers about travel and the places that inspire us and many of you have told me that you enjoy the show — so I’m excited to be back, and I already have lots of new guests lined up for interviews about fascinating places as well as the deeper side of travel, and of course, book recommendations!

As this is the first episode for a while, I’m doing a solo episode with some clips from other guests where I’ll go through why I originally started this podcast and why I’m now restarting the show, thoughts on why we travel, reinvention, curiosity, different perspectives on places, especially when we are outsiders, as well as finding beauty closer to home, and of course, memento mori.

I would love to know your thoughts on the show, or about a particular episode, and I would love to see photos of where you’re listening. Right, let’s get into it.

Six years ago, in February 2019, I released the first episode of this podcast in a solo show entitled Lake Malawi, Jerusalem, and Blue Water Sailing to Vanuatu. The Three Trips That Changed My Life — and I’m going to play the opening clip as it relates to why I am restarting the show again now.

When I think about what I want to do with my life for the next 10 years — I like to think about the 10 year span because if we commit to doing things for 10 years, amazing stuff happens that we may never have expected.

So when I think about my life, the main thing that stays the same is books and travel. These are the things I come back to again and again. The things I truly, truly love.

I’m also fascinated by the inner and outer journeys that both books and travel can bring — a change in perspective, an empathy. Perhaps an entirely new direction in your life because of something you’ve read or somewhere you’ve been or something you’ve experienced. If you know what I mean, then I hope that you are going to enjoy this podcast.

I’m also going to write two books from this material over time. I have been thinking about a travel memoir for many years, and also I’ve talked about what is a working title, The Shadow Book, which is very much about creating from the dark side of ourselves.

I’ve wanted to write these books for many years. They’ve been bubbling away, and yet I have not made time for those to emerge. So partly this podcast is me giving time to these books. I don’t know what the memoir is or what the Shadow book is at the moment, but I know that by creating this material this way, I will be able to tap into things that I have not tapped into before, and that in itself is quite exciting.

I’m also a little scared because it will mean being very transparent, being open about things I haven’t shared necessarily before. I might have written about in a fictionalised way, but you might never know what’s true and what’s not true. So I will be talking about those things on this show over time.”

Click here to listen or read the whole episode with pictures

It’s fascinating to revisit that first episode now because I feel like —

As this goes out, I am about to turn 50. I’ve been a professional full-time author since 2011, I’ve written almost fifty books and short stories across multiple genres as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn, and I finally feel like I have the creative confidence to step in a new direction.

The two books I mentioned that I wanted to write in that clip are now out in the world. Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways is my midlife travel memoir, written mostly over the pandemic years when I did multi-day walks that kept me sane and helped me find my way again in difficult times.

It was also my first Kickstarter campaign and my first beautiful hardback book with color photos of my travels. You can find several episodes about pilgrimage in the backlist including my thoughts from the Camino de Santiago and an excerpt from the audiobook, which I narrated.

My Shadow book came soon after, the full title is Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words — as by writing the memoir, I was able to tap into the more personal side of my writing.

That process released a lot of blocks for me, so if you’re writing a memoir, then I hope you persist, as it’s one of the hardest and also one of the most rewarding genres to write.

Both of those books scared me in the writing process, and both of them contain vulnerabilities I haven’t shared anywhere else — they changed my writing, taking it into deeper waters, which is part of my aim with conversations in this show.

Which brings me back to the metaphor of the ocean which I use on the podcast logo and which characterises the content of the podcast and also the articles I post on BooksAndTravel.page. Here’s another snippet from that first episode which expands on this, From Lake Malawi, Jerusalem, and Blue Water Sailing to Vanuatu. The Three Trips That Changed My Life.

But I want to do two aspects in this show.

First of all, the dappled light of turquoise shallows, and I want you to picture that in your mind. You are safe. You are maybe just paddling. You’ve got your feet in, you’re in the sun, you’ve got a cocktail in your hand or a fruit juice or whatever you like to drink, and sparkling water, wine. You are enjoying the simple joys of a new place.

And so I will be talking about my travels and also interviewing authors around the places that inspire our writing, and we will talk about food and drink and the lighter side of travel, which, will help you explore.

We’ll also be looking at what books you might like to read about places, so that will be the lighter side of travel, but I also want to explore what I’m calling the dark midnight depths, and that to me is —

That edge of challenge and a pull to the deep, and some mystery, and the things that are a little bit darker around travel.

It’s not all sweetness and light. It’s not all cocktails and tapas. We go to travel and we go to books for that challenge, for a change, for deeper meaning.

So I want to explore, perhaps what is the most important exploration of all, which is the inner transformation, the inner journey.”

***

So why do we travel, whether it’s in person or in our minds through books and listening to people on podcasts like this, and in movies and films and photos and social media?

In an interview on the meaning of travel, philosopher Emily Thomas gave her thoughts:

It’s all about going to places that are new and unfamiliar and trying to figure out how to make sense of them, how to map them onto the world that you do know.

My best travel experiences have actually been ones where I have gone to some place where I haven’t understood anything around me, not the language, not what’s going on in the street, not the social cues, and I have very slowly, by reading and talking to people, let it come to put the pieces together and come to understand the place.”

***

It certainly drives me in terms of research around the books I want to write and the stories I want to tell. So much so that I want to write a book on curiosity at some point, so I hope that will spill out of this show in some way, as Pilgrimage and the Shadow book did last time.

In an interview on Curiosity, Wonder, and Serendipity, I talked to Steve Brock about Hidden Travel, and I asked him how can people tap into their curiosity?

“Well, it starts with knowing what it is that you actually love, and believe it or not, most human beings don’t know what it is that they really deeply, truly love. We are so keyed into distractions that we don’t really know what our deep passions are.

I talked to one person who has a friend she loves rollercoasters, and so she plans all of her trips around amusement parks around the world. And you think, okay, well that’s a nice little hobby. But the fun thing about that is that she has connected now with this entire community of rollercoaster aficionados, and she has found her tribe, if you will.

And so part of it has led to not just new places and destinations, but that curiosity has grown into relationships that she really treasures, and she has some great friends as a result of that.

One thing I think it’s important for people to remember is that curiosity is not the same for everybody, nor is any single person curious about everything. I may be curious about, for example, history type of things, as you are, you’re curious about cemeteries.

Know what it is that you’re curious about.

I may take a cooking class on a trip that I would never take at home, or I may explore a new type of physical activity like kayaking on a trip that I just wouldn’t do at home.

Use the freedom that you have there from the routine to not only spark that curiosity, but to pursue that curiosity.”

***

I certainly pursue my curiosity for the seeds of my stories and all my books as J.F. Penn have been inspired by my travels or places I’ve read about.

My ARKANE thrillers are truly international in scope from the burning ghats of Varanasi, India in the first scene in my first thriller, Stone of Fire, to Vienna, Nuremberg and Washington DC in Spear of Destiny, the most recent adventure.

My Mapwalker fantasy adventures were inspired by an antique map shop here in my city of Bath when I wondered what might happen if I could walk through the ancient map into a world off the edge of our own — might I find the places written off our maps somehow, and the people and the creatures that end up there?

My Brooke & Daniel crime thrillers are based in modern day London and resonate with the history of the city.

My standalone stories are all over the shop — from Death Valley set in California, to Seahenge on the Norfolk coast, to New Zealand for Risen Gods, and the biodynamic vineyards of Somerset for Blood Vintage.

Everywhere I go I find places and people and artifacts and myths that spark story, and part of this show is about talking to authors who also experience the same thing.

In Catnip for a Novelist, I talked to thriller and fantasy author Layton Green about how he uses his travels in book research.

I love talking to Layton as his Dominic Grey thrillers are similar to my ARKANE stories, and we’ve written about some of the same places, even though we are very different people.

“I will plan my books around where I want to travel, but of course if the narrative takes me elsewhere, I’ll follow the narrative. But usually they intertwine really closely and you can always work a place into the plot that you haven’t been before that you want to go.

But a lot of my novels, as I’m getting into the plot and writing the story, things will come up or places will come up that I want to visit and I’ll just decide, okay, it’s on. That’s gonna be where I’m going and that’s part of the story.

I’ve found that for me the best way is to take notes. As I travel, I take some pictures, but I never look at them for writing. I will take my little Moleskine notebook and my pen and definitely the best part of my job is, I’ll just go to a place and I’ll walk around and I’ll record my thoughts and impressions, and that I have found leads to my best writing.

I think a hallmark of my writing is that I try to stay as true as possible, especially when it comes to setting. And the only caveat to that is the old parable of the blind men touching an elephant, where they’ll each touch a different part of the elephant, so they’ll come away with a vastly different conception of what an elephant is. I think it’s a little bit like that with travel.

Take Zimbabwe for example. I’ve been very pleased to know that people from Zimbabwe have liked my book and the descriptions of it. But it’s probably written more for people that have not been to Zimbabwe or have only been a little bit. I’ve had plenty of books where I’ve had locals tell me that isn’t how this place is, and I’m thinking, actually it is.

It was just my perception of it.

***

I love that phrase — “what I wrote about was true in its own way.”

This applies to both fiction and memoir and anything that is fixed in time, because everything changes and we change, too. That’s part of why I love these conversations, because everyone has a different perspective and we get to dip in and just for a little while, try to experience something in a different way.

In a conversation with literary fiction author Roz Morris about Travels without Sense of Direction, she talks about how she didn’t even know how much place affected her stories until writing her memoir.

“I hadn’t realized how much actually until I wrote Not Quite Lost because I went back through a diary that I’d kept and —

I actually wrote the novels and I hadn’t realized how far those experiences and, and the impressions they’d given me. I hadn’t realized how far they’d stayed with me and so that’s quite a revelation.

I found that my novel Life Form Three, which is set in an unspecified time in the future. All the countryside has gone except there is one country estate that’s been preserved because it belonged to somebody and it has trees and valleys and hills and a ruined house in a wood, and there’s nowhere else left like that in the entire country. And that came from the travels I’d written about in that diary and had forgotten about, so environment really inspires me.

When you’re with horses, they make you very aware of the environment. I noticed the different colors of grass changing all the time and leaf buds and things like that. And a horse makes you very aware of it because a horse experiences the environment in a very different way. It can hear things you don’t even know are there. It notices smells and sounds that you don’t know are there. It makes you very aware of your environment.

And I thought one day as I was riding on an old path and I thought under this path are probably the footprints of other people and other people on horses maybe. And it just made me feel there was a huge story about buried things and things that had gone and it was the horse that made me realize that we have this connection to nature. And then I thought, what if you wrote about a place where all that had nearly gone, and horses are like a conduit back to it.”

***

I love that Roz talks there about being on a horse as a different way to experience a place. I’m allergic to horses, so I am never going to write from that perspective, but it’s good to consider how you can have an experience of travel without having to cross the world to some far off place.

You can always see places near you with new eyes, which we all learned about in the pandemic when we couldn’t go so far.

In an interview with Brianna Madia we talked about The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life and she talked about —

“I think that we get comfortable, and especially now with social media, we look online and we think that travel has to be a week holiday in a tropical place, or you have to be taking a selfie on an airplane in order to be traveling.

And there were so many beautiful places that I could have easily gotten to over the weekend, back back in Connecticut. And I’m embarrassed at how little I explored where I actually grew up. And I think a lot of people feel that way. You just tend to fall into this routine of like, oh, I’ve probably seen it all.

I think that that’s another reason that I’ve fallen so in love with the desert is I just know it’s such a classic example of a landscape where it’s impossible to have seen it all. You can always look and find something new and I wish I had applied that thinking to the place that I grew up because I believe there’s beautiful things everywhere.”

***

We all find different things beautiful, and —

— gothic architecture, graveyards, ossuaries, crypts, dark travel, ruins. I am basically like Wednesday from The Addams Family, except I don’t dress that way. I’m a vanilla goth.

But while some people think these interests are morbid, others see memento mori — remember you will die — as a way to live harder, to live more in the present, and to make the most of every day.

In my interview with Loren Rhoads about cemeteries and graveyards, we discussed being Life Obsessed, and talked about our favourite places to visit —

“I don’t think it’s morbid at all. Somebody will accuse me of being death obsessed and for me, it’s the opposite. I am life obsessed. I know we’ve just got a certain number of days, so why wouldn’t you spend it out in the sunshine? Listening to birdsong and looking at beautiful art. What have you got to do with your life that’s better than that?

I don’t know. I just don’t see cemeteries as morbid at all. I think it’s beautiful that we remember people. There are all these amazing stories in the cemetery that you can learn with a tour guide is the best way. But even just walking around and looking at the stones and reading the lovely old names and trying to make guesses about the iconography and their days of birth and death. It’s a way of connecting with the past that looking at architecture doesn’t do for me. Don’t let a day pass because you have a gift to bring to the world.”

***

I love that attitude of being life-obsessed, and part of what I love about life is traveling and reading, which brings me back to why I am rebooting this show, and why I already have interviews planned with different guests and also some solo episodes coming too.

I’m planning to release a new episode every second week, and you can also have a listen to the backlist. There are 92 episodes, most interviews around a book or a place or a mode of travel, or a philosophy, and others are solo shows where I talk about places I’ve lived and the places that have inspired my books.

Every episode is evergreen so you can listen at any time, there’s nothing time-sensitive. I hope that you can escape virtually and enjoy traveling away even in your mind, and of course, there are book recommendations in every episode. There’s a transcript and photos and links for each episode all linked at BooksAndTravel.page/listen

You can find my books and short stories at JFPennBooks.com and also on the usual stores. I also narrate some of my stories now, and most are available in audio format on all the major platforms.

I’d love to hear what you think about the show, as well as any questions or book recommendations or ideas for future episodes, and send me pictures of where you’re listening and you can also follow me on Instagram @jfpennauthor.

Happy travels — and I’ll see you next time!

The post Curiosity, Reinvention, And Inspiration: The Return Of Books and Travel appeared first on Books And Travel.

Why is resilience such an important part of pilgrimage? How can embracing the challenge of the way help in daily life? Why do we need to heed the call to pilgrimage before it’s too late?

I’m Jo Frances Penn and in this episode, I share some clips from podcast interviews I’ve done around my new book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. Thanks to Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bassetti, Into the Woods with Holly Worton, and Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue, podcasts you will enjoy as listeners to this show.

As this goes out, Pilgrimage is available now in a special limited edition signed hardback, as well as a paperback, ebook, audiobook narrated by me, large print edition, and a workbook.

In this episode, I talk about: 

In this first clip from the Travel Writing World podcast with Jeremy Bassetti, I talk about the specific pilgrimages I walked and why they’re interesting, even if you’re not religious. 

Jeremy Bassetti: The book is called Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Jo Frances Penn: So, I did the Pilgrims’ Way first, which is from Southwark Cathedral in London to Canterbury Cathedral in the southeast of England. And that’s the route of The Canterbury Tales, which I’m sure people have heard of, medieval tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and it was about visiting the shrine of Thomas Becket who was martyred under Henry II.

And it was the pandemic and it was also the 850-year anniversary of the Becket martyrdom. So that kind of helped me decide to do that one. I couldn’t go and do the Camino during the pandemic because of course we couldn’t travel. And also, I’d highly recommend it as an easy route for a first multi-day solo.

Then the second one was the St Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose in Scotland to Lindisfarne, Holy Island on the northeast coast of England. And St. Cuthbert was a medieval monk and a bishop. And, I wrote about Lindisfarne in my thriller Day of the Vikings, so I really wanted to do that and that was a spectacular route. I highly recommend the Cuthbert’s.

Then finally there was the Camino, a goal I’ve had for several decades, and I did the Camino de Santiago Portuguese Coastal route from Porto in Portugal, up to Santiago De Compostela. I feel like the Camino is quite mythical for many people and certainly for me.

And when I had COVID the year before, in 2021, and I was really sick and I realized that maybe one day I would not be able to walk — obviously at some point none of us will be able to walk, right, we will be dead! — and I thought, well, if I don’t do this now, maybe I’ll never do it. And I have said I wanted to do it for many years and now I’ve got to do it.

So I committed and I’m so glad I did that route finally, and it really enabled me to finish the book, but yes, those were the three. 

Jeremy Bassetti: So I mean, these three pilgrimage routes that you mentioned here, that you went on, all have religious connotations, but you mentioned in the book that you are more secular-minded. 

Jo Frances Penn: Well, I am not a Christian, although I have a chapter in the book about my faith history. Many of us have this faith history by midlife, you know, an experience of finding God and losing him again or whatever that means to the individual. 

But I’m certainly spiritual. I consider myself spiritual and I mean, you talk about genius loci, the spirit of the place. And I absolutely have had moments of connection with whatever we want to call it, the universe or God if you want, in different places. And certainly did on these routes too. 

So while I am secular — as in I don’t adhere to a particular religion — I absolutely respect people of faith. I have a master’s degree in Theology, and pretty much all my fiction is based on religion and I love religious places. 

What is wonderful about these pilgrimage routes, these ancient ways, is that people have walked these particular routes in Europe for a thousand years, and that’s what gives them a lot of resonance.

It also means they’re packed full of amazing churches and cathedrals and beautiful architecture. And I love architecture. I’m a super fan of architecture. So I guess the pilgrimage aspect is both the walking from here to here, the historical side of it, and the beautiful places along the way.

My discussion with Jeremy continues into why walking is healing and why pilgrimage in particular can heal deeper wounds of the soul, how the gifts of pilgrimage come with hindsight, why we travel, and how to figure out what kind of travel book to write. 

You can listen to the rest of the episode on Travel Writing World on your favorite podcast app. Jeremy also has interviews with travel writers like Pico Iyer, Colin Thubron, and many more on his show, or check out his website TravelWritingWorld.com 

In this next section, I’m interviewed by Holly Worton on her Into The Woods Podcast, which is fantastic for solo adventures, pushing your comfort zone in the outdoors and in life, and generally has lots of interviews with people about all kinds of travel. 

In this clip, we talk about what I learned from pilgrimage including the aspect of memento mori, and then the three types of energy involved in a pilgrimage. 

***

Holly Worton:

Because I know you’d said that you walked them during very challenging times, which of course the entire world was going through

Jo Frances Penn: Yes, well, I think the biggest thing was resilience. And again, I mean, you talk about this with the solo adventures and or anything that pushes your comfort zone. 

So, for example, I’ve done a lot of walking holidays with tour companies like Exodus, and I’m reasonably fit. So the walking aspect is one thing, but doing it alone is difficult. And in fact, you recommended the NNAS navigation course. 

Holly: Yes, of course. 

Jo: I went on one of those. Because I was like, ‘I don’t know how to read a map.’ Well, I did in Girl Guides, but you know, it’s been a long time. So I re-skilled. 

And then it was facing up to the fears around being alone or getting lost, which I did — and getting sick. I didn’t get sick on the walks but of course, the fear of sickness while walking during the beginning of the pandemic, particularly when none of us had got it yet. We were very afraid, even though now we know there was hardly any round at that time, but it kind of emerged. 

Walking in pain was a challenge. So on the Camino, I had pretty bad blisters the second week and you have to get up every morning and you’re like, ‘I really don’t want to walk on these feet,’ but I’m going to do it anyway.

So yes, I think this gift of structure, the boundaries, the resilience of learning new things. Just the escape from daily life is also really important and that perspective that we talked about. And then the other thing that I always think about a lot is the memento mori idea of, “remember, you will die,” but in a positive way, as in life is short, so make the most of it.

I think it’s much more obvious on pilgrimage routes because for example, if you go to Southwark Cathedral in London, at the start of the Pilgrim’s Way, that has been a church for a thousand years, and then you get to Canterbury and again, it’s been there since medieval times. You walk through these places and you realize how many other people have been here or the people who built those sculptures.

And what’s interesting at Southwark and Canterbury, and you rarely see such things, but there are these two cadaver tombs. That’s what they’re called. The tombs have a cadaver on. Normally if you see a medieval tomb or any kind of tomb, there’s maybe a knight lying on the top in full armor or a noble person with all their robes, and they look like a living human lying down on a bed or something.

But both Southwark and Canterbury have these cadaver tombs where the figure on the top is a dead body. And this is very rare. In Canterbury it’s even more unusual because it’s like bunk beds. The Archbishop built this while he was alive, so he could look at it every time he preached.

On the bottom level is him as a cadaver naked except for a little shroud. Then on the bunk bed above is him dressed in his full archbishop’s finery. Obviously, it’s meant to teach you that it doesn’t matter what you are in life. One day you will just be this dead body and you will turn to dust.

And I find this invigorating and it helps me live every day better because I know I’m going to die. And it was weird on the Camino because it was the second or third day of my Camino when Queen Elizabeth II died. 

And so I walked the route, and that whole week the TVs were full of her life. So often we look at ourselves in the mirror and we might see a picture of us as younger people and be like, oh, you know, I’m getting old, or whatever. But there are pictures of the Queen her entire life, and they were all on TV, so you could actually see this woman’s life from child to middle age to death.

And it was that memento mori idea again that we remember as we walk and to make the most of these things while we’re alive. Because one day I will not be able to walk the Camino or another pilgrimage. So do the things you want to do while you still can — but in a positive way!

Holly Worton:

Jo Frances Penn: The first one is starting energy, which is turning it from a dream into a goal.

So it took me like 20 years to actually book the Camino, 25 years or whatever. So it’s the organization, it’s booking time off, it’s training, it’s getting past those fears and obstacles. It’s figuring out all the practical stuff because you think, oh yes, I’ll just be walking and I’ll have my spiritual moments, but there’s a hell of a lot of practical stuff to actually get it going. 

So starting energy is everything up to the night before and then pushing through energy is once you are actually on the route. It’s ‘I really want to give up because I’m in pain’ or I’m actually injured, or I’m really, really bored with wearing the same clothes and washing them every day and the same food, the same bread, you know, whatever.

Holly: It’s the other challenges along the way, like the Camino you mentioned being busy —

Jo: Yes, those last few days are busy and I was annoyed at other pilgrims, I was like, I am so annoyed that this pilgrim is playing music. Or I’m annoyed that there are literally a hundred pilgrims ahead of me. I can see them all on the path, and I do not like this. 

And that was a challenge in itself because whereas the Cuthbert’s, for example, I was alone on a hill in a storm. And that’s a completely different challenge. But that pushing through energy is, “I am going to finish. I can do this, I will get through this. I just need to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.”

So that’s the pushing through energy that gets you to the end. And then the finishing energy is that return, and the reflection and learning the lessons. Maybe it’s printing the pictures that you did or taking your journal and turning it into something else, facing the questions that you thought of while you were on the walk.

Because when you get home, what happens is you put your clothes in the wash. That’s like one of the first things that you do. You get all the crap out of your backpack and you give your partner a cuddle and you cuddle your pets and then you log onto your email and you start all the backlog of stuff you need to catch up on and paying bills, and it’s very easy to just get back and get on with life. 

But you need that finishing energy to review what happened because the gifts of pilgrimage take some time. 

It’s so weird because I thought I would write three guidebooks like you have your guidebooks, your reflective books, and yet this book, it just wouldn’t come. I couldn’t figure it out. 

And then when I finished my Camino, I finally understood what the pattern was and what I learned from all three routes. So the subtitle is Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. And I almost feel like I couldn’t have learned those lessons without all three of them.

And I say in the book, if you don’t feel that there are any gifts from your pilgrimage, then perhaps you haven’t walked enough. Maybe you need to go on another pilgrimage. I thought I could change my life with a weekend walk but no, it took longer than I expected.

***

You can listen to the rest of the episode on the Into The Woods Podcast on your favorite podcast app — and Holly and I talk about why pilgrimage is different to other long-distance walks, some of the interesting historical and spiritual aspects, how we both remember reading Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage book back in the 90s, how we both enjoy the feeling of insignificance, why we have to revisit the memories of our trips or they fade away, and much more. 

Holly’s show is one I personally listen to and I think you’ll enjoy the range of her interviews. She also has guidebooks to solo walking routes like The Ridgeway and more, and she has been on this podcast before in episode 42 about solo walking — In fact, my discussions with Holly about her adventures and her books helped inspire my own, so definitely check out her show.

In this final clip, I talk to Kevin Donahue on the Sacred Steps Podcast which is all about pilgrimage, and Kevin has had some fantastic guests on to talk about lots of different routes, and he’s also been on this show in episode 86 talking about his pilgrimages. We almost met in person as we crossed the sands to Lindisfarne just days apart, but we never quite made it, so it was lovely to talk again. You can listen as a podcast or watch the interview on YouTube.

In this segment, we talk about how pilgrimage reminds us we are animals, and how it gives a much-needed perspective on life.

***

Kevin:

Jo Frances Penn: There’s a book in the Bible that I really like, Ecclesiastes. It’s one of my favorite books in the Bible. And I have a Master’s in Theology even though I’m not a Christian anymore. But there’s a quote that I actually put into the book, “As for humans, God tests them so they might know they are animals.” 

And I just love that quote because that to me is something I need to remember. My animal body is what walks a pilgrimage. And my spiritual mind and my intellectual mind are part of my physical body. 

And I feel like so much sometimes, like you and I, we are not physically in the same space. We can see each other, but we’re connecting with our minds across this virtual space. And yet, pilgrimage is such a physical journey. 

And also I was going through the female experience of midlife, hormonal changes, which have a very animal effect. You are just completely out of control. You are like, what the hell is happening to me? And I have no control over this. 

And then like we mentioned, the tides and all these transient things and the idea of memento mori. So when I walked the Camino Portuguese, Queen Elizabeth II died in the UK and as I walked every day that week, her pictures were on all the TVs that you walked past in the cafes and stuff.

So they showed her whole life, the beautiful young woman who ascended the throne across the challenges of midlife to her old age, her husband dying, and her dying. And it was like, I’m not a queen, but I’m another woman. And I see this woman’s life and it will all end, and to me that is so important to remember for my spiritual side.

It’s a sense of being part of this wonderful world and this amazing universe, whether you believe God created it or not. The sense of being an animal walking across the face of the world and nothing else matters. Like that’s the thing. Nothing else matters. 

Now, of course, everything matters. Your family matters. My husband matters. My cats matter, my work matters. 

But when you are walking a pilgrimage and you have that simple life — and the gratitude. I am so grateful for this cold beer or this shade of this tree or the hot shower when I’m really sweaty and it’s gross and I just want a shower or the painkillers. I’m so grateful for the pharmaceutical industry, for my blister plasters and my painkillers, and my Albarino wine and like all those things.

It’s that perspective. That’s what it comes down to. Being able to hold onto that perspective when everything feels overwhelming and you’re just like, what is the point? 

And then you realize this is the point. The point is being an animal in the world.

*** 

I hope you found those clips interesting, and you can listen to the complete episodes on the podcast feeds for Travel Writing World with Jeremy Bassetti, Into the Woods with Holly Worton, and Sacred Steps with Kevin Donahue.

Pilgrimage is available now in a special limited edition signed hardback, as well as a paperback, ebook, audiobook narrated by me, large print edition, and a workbook.

Happy travels until next time. 

The post The Call To Pilgrimage, Resilience, And Embracing Challenge With J.F. Penn appeared first on Books And Travel.

In this episode, I share two chapters from my book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. You can buy the audiobook, as well as the special edition hardback, paperback and ebook, at www.JFPenn.com/pilgrimage

“Nothing ever is, everything is becoming… All things are passing and nothing abides.” —Heraclitus

On each of my three pilgrimages, I encountered places where I was aware of walking through history, where there was a sense of life being but a brief flash of light across the span of time. My passing on each route was momentary, but pilgrims have walked the same ways for hundreds of years and will continue to walk for generations to come.

The three historic cathedrals are must-visit locations — Southwark Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral on the Pilgrims’ Way, and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela at the end of the Camino. Each has their splendours, and it’s worth allowing extra time to visit them. In the same way, the ruined abbey of Lindisfarne and its associated church are insights into history — but these are all obvious highlights.

Here are some other places where I felt a historical perspective.

The first day’s walk on the Pilgrims’ Way from Southwark Cathedral is through gritty, urban sprawl along a main road, dense with traffic. It might not look like much, but this is the Old Kent Road, originally built by the Romans, linking London to the coast near Dover, and later renamed Watling Street by the Anglo-Saxons.

At a busy corner with Peckham Park Road, under the overhanging porch of the Everlasting Arms Ministry, lies a gigantic thousand-square-foot mosaic mural. The History of Old Kent Road by Adam Kossowski has separate panels, each portraying an era of history. The foundation of the city by Romans in their togas surrounded by soldiers with military standards, then medieval London with Chaucer’s pilgrims heading for Canterbury and a quote from the poem. King Henry V rides in triumph along the road after the battle of Agincourt, followed by the rebellion of Jack Cade against the government. King Charles II reclaims the throne in the next panel, and then modern London emerges with its British ‘bobby’ policeman, Pearly Kings and Queens with their mother-of-pearl button suits, and the factories of the city with modern cars driving along.

The mural encapsulates two thousand years of history and yet most pass by without realising that the stones they drive over or walk along have witnessed such historical events.

The artist himself represents another aspect of modern history. Adam Kossowski was Polish and arrived in the UK as a refugee from the Soviet labour camps in 1943. As well as this mural, he created many other artistic works, including the History of the Carmelites of Aylesford, at the abbey, which also lies on the Pilgrims’ Way and where he was buried after his death in 1986.

The ruins of twelfth-century Lesnes Abbey (pronounced ‘lane’) lie on the Pilgrims’ Way in an ancient woodland in east London. Founded in 1178 by the Chief Justiciar to Henry II, it may have been part of a penance to atone for the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket.

After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey fell into ruin and was eventually lost to farmland before being restored in modern times. The ruins now feature much-appreciated public toilets and a cafe along the Green Chain Walk that forms part of the Pilgrims’ Way.

There is a memorial of three triple archways that overlook the ruins, and an ancient mulberry tree with the skyscrapers of the city of London framed on the horizon.

The mulberry tree represents patience, as it will not bud until there is no danger of frost. Its red berries also represent sacrifice, as depicted by Shakespeare’s forbidden lovers Pyramis and Thisbe, who died under a mulberry bush, their blood staining the berries red.

Lesnes Abbey is a place of ancient nature and medieval faith against a backdrop of modern London. Well worth a visit.

There are unusual cadaver tombs in both Southwark and Canterbury Cathedral, at the beginning and the end of the Pilgrims’ Way. These are rare depictions of the deceased as corpses as opposed to the grand effigies usually sitting above the tombs of nobility.

The Southwark cadaver is the medieval tomb of Thomas Cure, who died in 1588, the same year as the Spanish Armada, during the reign of Elizabeth I. Its skeletal frame is weathered by time, its face disintegrated. It’s clearly a dead body, partially wrapped in a shroud, a simple representation of the inevitability of death.

The Canterbury cadaver tomb is on an entirely different scale in terms of grandeur. The tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele, who died in 1443, has two levels, one showing the effigy of the deceased man in full ecclesiastical robes and, underneath, the cadaver stripped of all its finery, lying naked except for a shroud. It’s surrounded by an ornately decorated arch with figures from church history. A tour guide told me that the archbishop had the tomb built many years before his death so he could look at it every day and contemplate his end.

This natural sandstone cave lies within a National Trust reserve on the final day’s walk towards Lindisfarne, Holy Island. The cave has a wide mouth and is ringed by a wood of Scots pine. According to legend, the monks fleeing from a medieval Viking invasion stopped in the cave with the remains of St Cuthbert.

It doesn’t really matter if his body lay there over a thousand years ago. The cave is clearly a natural shelter from the dark and cold and wild weather, and humans certainly rested and slept here over millennia. There is fire damage and graffiti, both old and new, evidence of people making their mark across time.

On my approach to the cave, an adder with its distinctive zig-zag markings crossed the path in front of me. A protected species, the adder is the UK’s only venomous snake, but they are secretive creatures and rarely seen. I had never seen one in the wild before, and it was a precious moment.

As I sat on a rock in the rain eating my lunch, there was a sense of being part of an ancient environment. If I slept in the cave in the dark of night, perhaps I might hear the crackle of ancient flames and the whisper of the long-dead.

While walking an ancient route like the Camino de Santiago helps the pilgrim to reflect on mortality, it is almost impossible to comprehend a thousand years of pilgrims walking ahead and many more coming behind.

But while I walked in September 2022, I had a vivid reminder of memento mori — remember, you will die — as Queen Elizabeth II died at the age of ninety-six on the second day of my pilgrimage. Snippets of her life punctuated each following day of my Camino on TV in coffee bars and glimpses of newspapers, and I couldn’t help but read some of the UK media coverage online when resting at the end of the day.

It was strange to walk outside of my country during such a historically significant week. I remember seeing newly carved statues of the Queen and Prince Philip mounted outside the cathedral in Canterbury on my first pilgrimage in October 2020. The stone was paler than the other sculptures of historic monarchs. The features weren’t yet weathered — and of course, both were still alive then. There was a sense of standing next to living history, as another generation passed, and now they are both gone.

I am not an ardent royalist by any means, but the Queen was a constant across my life, as she was for many people in the UK and around the world. As I walked my Camino, the news was full of pictures of her as a young woman, then middle-aged going through the trials of life, then an old woman at her husband’s funeral, and in her final days, standing bent over and smiling as she welcomed the new Prime Minister. The span of an extraordinary life against the backdrop of history.

Her life passed by, as will mine and yours. Even a Queen cannot hold back the end.

I walked into Santiago de Compostela on the day of her funeral and, as I rested in my hotel that afternoon, I watched her coffin being lowered into the vault at Windsor Castle. It was a fitting end to my pilgrimage and underscored the sense that something must die for change to happen — new life will emerge from the ashes of the old.

Questions:

“All such sites are regarded as thin places, set apart from the world, moving to a different drum, and possessed of an innately special atmosphere because of their connection to another, higher dimension.” —Peter Stanford, Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning

The paths and final destinations of great pilgrimage routes have been imbued with so much meaning over centuries, they call both to those who believe and those who don’t follow a particular faith.

The depth of history and belief of the faithful over generations impart a deeper resonance to certain places where the veil is thin, and you are closer to God, or a sense of the divine. Your pilgrimage will have moments of spiritual meaning if you are open to them, although, of course, they may come at unexpected times.

Here are some moments where I glimpsed the divine while walking these ancient ways.

I was exhausted as I emerged from the Thames Path Walkway and passed through the gritty, urban sprawl of Erith in East London. I’d already walked around thirty-eight kilometres that day, and I still had several more to walk before I reached my hotel in Dartford. It was October, and dusk was fast approaching.

I took a wrong turn and found myself alongside a busy dual carriageway, the noise of so many cars jolting me back into the modern world. I considered getting a bus or even a taxi to carry me through the last few kilometres, but I had promised myself I would walk every step of my pilgrimage and this was only the first day.

As I trudged on through an industrial estate echoing with the rumble of cranes hauling heavy equipment, the screech of trucks, and the shouts of workers, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.

But then the path opened out onto a flood plain where horses grazed on common land, and the way ahead ran alongside the river once more. This was Erith Saltings, an ancient salt marsh, part of the Thames estuary that can’t be built upon as the tide may wash it away. The remains of an ancient fossilised forest dating back to Neolithic times over five thousand years ago lie partially submerged beneath the water, and on the opposite bank lies the Rainham Marshes Nature Reserve. Oyster catchers waded in the shallows, and a regal heron rested on a solitary spar emerging from the water.

But this is no pristine wilderness. The path runs alongside a recycling centre, with the stink of waste coming from huge sorting bins filled with all kinds of discarded human detritus.

I turned my back on the industrial centre and looked out over the salt marsh, as a flock of Canada geese flew overhead, calling to one another in the dusk. With the warbling trill of skylarks and the whistle of the wind off the river, I stood in a moment out of time. The ancient forest buried beneath the waters once echoed with birdsong, and, after human civilisation has passed away, the birds will sing on.

Whether it was the juxtaposition of such ugliness alongside natural beauty, or the timelessness of the fossilised forest with the ephemeral sound of birdsong — or just my exhaustion — I stepped into a thin place there.

After a time, a metallic crash jolted me back to the present. I turned to see an urban fox waiting by the side of the industrial centre, an inquisitive look on his face as I passed by.

My pack seemed lighter as I walked the rest of the way along the River Darent into Dartford, grateful that I had not skipped this part of the journey.

It was dark outside when I entered the cathedral, my final destination on the Pilgrims’ Way. With my mask in place, I walked to my solitary chair in the nave, directed by a similarly masked attendant who made sure all present followed pandemic rules. There were a few other people there, all separated by several metres, the space around us cold in the autumn evening.

The choir entered in a line, walking across the nave in robes of purple, all of them masked. They arranged themselves on the steps in front of the quire screen, physically distanced, before removing their face coverings.

They sang psalms in Latin, their voices soaring high into the vault above, harmonising together even as they stood so far apart. This cathedral was built for the glory of God and these men sang for Him too, but also surely for the sheer joy of human voices coming together in song at a time of so much separation.

Ancient stone, ancient words, ancient faith — and the transience of each note disappearing into silence once more.

I stayed for the service, but it was the practice before that truly moved me, and those minutes almost alone in the cathedral nave that freed my spirit. A fitting end to my Pilgrims’ Way.

I rose before the dawn on the final morning of my pilgrimage on the St Cuthbert’s Way. I stood at a farm gate looking east into the rising sun, next to a field of curious alpacas and chickens quietly clucking in their roost. As the darkness lifted, the castle on Lindisfarne stood in silhouette against bars of coral clouds, shot through with luminous yellow and pink as the sun rose above the horizon.

The end was so close now.

I was relieved because my muscles ached and I wanted to stop and rest and not walk another day, but I was also sad that the journey was almost over. I wanted to finish the path, but also to keep going. Yet there is nothing beyond Lindisfarne, only the North Sea, and I would reach the furthest point that day.

The clearing sky indicated that the weather would be fine for my crossing of the sands, but I still felt some trepidation. The tidal website warned it was only safe to cross with a guide, and there were tales of walkers lost to the sea in the fog, or cars stranded on the causeway as water reclaimed the land.

But I had prepared, and I knew it was safe to cross. All that remained was to step off onto the sands that the sea left behind.

As the sky turned pale blue, I returned to the farm to retrieve my pack, hefting it onto my shoulders for the last time.

It was only a few kilometres from the farm to the edge of the causeway. I walked with Dave and Keith, pilgrims I had met a few days back after getting lost on the boggy moor. On the way down, Keith and I discovered we had both studied theology and read many of the same books. Whereas I had turned my degree into the basis of my thrillers, he had spent a life of service as a social worker, supporting those with mental health issues. We disagreed on matters of faith, but there was a spark of intellectual connection. Pilgrimage encourages the discussion of such deeper matters and I fleetingly wished we could carry on our debate. But we were soon at the edge of South Low, where the tide had turned and the waters were receding.

Several enormous concrete blocks lay just before the causeway, anti-tank sea defences from World War II. There were signs warning of unexploded ordnance in the area as well as quicksand, and more warnings of what could happen if the tide cut you off. It was hard to imagine the military swarming over this area, now a National Nature Reserve, protected for the biodiversity of life within its shifting sands and tidal waters.

A series of marker poles stretched across the sand to Lindisfarne, interspersed by two wooden refuges on stilts for those who could not beat the tide. The sky was pale blue and clouds scudded high above, and I could see all the way to Holy Island. It was safe to cross.

I rolled my walking trousers up above my knees. Walking barefoot was the traditional way to cross, but I had blisters and raw patches on my feet, so I wore my walking shoes with waterproof socks. I grasped my poles to steady myself — then stepped off the causeway onto the sand.

I wanted to walk the final stretch alone, so after taking photos with Keith and Dave, I let them stride ahead.

The sand was initially firm underfoot as I followed the path of tall wooden poles towards Holy Island. I skirted around deeper pools of water, stepping over the wiggly casts of lugworms and the footprints of wader birds. Gulls flew overhead, their calls piercing the air.

There were patches of grass in places and channels of deeper water to navigate, with sections of sucking mud which I clambered through, using my walking poles to gain a more even footing. I almost lost one shoe in the mud, and it was certainly a more challenging walk than I expected. Less a stroll across firm sand, and more an adventure to reach the final destination.

The lower parts of the wooden guide poles were covered with barnacles and bladder wrack seaweed, surrounded by winkle shells and long strands of sea grass. Crabs scuttled in the shallow water, trying to sink away from the light. The upper parts of the poles that lay above the tide were stark white, reflecting the morning sun, and I could imagine pilgrims spotting them with relief on a foggy crossing.

I stopped halfway across and turned my back on the causeway, looking south across the water to Bamburgh Castle in the distance. A mournful sound pierced the air, a low moan like a chill wind sweeping through ruins. The call of grey seals out on the sand flats, singing as they have for generations of pilgrims. I was just one more in a long line stretching back through history, and my footsteps would wash away with the tide like all who walked here before me.

The crossing took about ninety minutes, with time enough to navigate slowly around the mud and deeper water channels. I finally clambered up the bank on the other side and sat on a bench, looking back at the mainland as I changed into dry shoes.

As with my arrival at Canterbury Cathedral a year ago, there was no fanfare, no one cheering the finish line of my pilgrimage. Only a quiet sense of satisfaction that I had accomplished what I set out to do.

After one last look back at the crossing, I walked into Lindisfarne village. After days of solitude, it was a shock to find hundreds of day-trippers pouring out of coaches and cars, streaming over the causeway while it was open during the narrow tidal window. Throngs of tourists rammed into ice cream shops, artists’ studios, and cafes, spilling out into the narrow streets.

While I ate a local crab sandwich in front of the Lindisfarne Mead shop, I wondered what St Cuthbert would have made of the modern Holy Island. There was a frenetic energy about the place as day-trippers rushed to see everything before hurrying back to escape the incoming tide. Some people glanced sideways at me, in a very judgmental English way, as if they didn’t appreciate my muddy pack and dishevelled appearance. It was strange to re-enter the real world again.

I hoisted my pack back on and walked to the ruined abbey while it was still open and then visited the parish church of St Mary the Virgin. A full-sized statue of monks carrying the coffin of St Cuthbert stood inside, and I felt more of a connection with those medieval walkers than the modern religious tourists filling the aisles.

As the island emptied, I walked east to Lindisfarne Castle along the shore. Tourists ran in the opposite direction to catch their buses and I was grateful I’d booked a night on the island when it became quiet once more.

I walked until I reached the coast, where cairns of balanced stones stood overlooking the rough waters of the North Sea. The lands beyond were those of Norway and Denmark, and this was the way the Vikings arrived in the eighth century, bringing violence to the abbey and causing the monks to scatter.

I wrote about Lindisfarne in my novella Day of the Vikings, a modern-day thriller set against the history of invasion and a supernatural power called down from the ancients. Now finally there in person, I sensed a different power. One that emanated from the island and the tide. There was a part of me that wanted to stay there, to sink into island life, and allow the tide to cut off my access to the wider world.

As I walked back from the castle, a murmuration of starlings swooped above the wetlands. As they soared in unison, forming and reforming different shapes in the twilight, I remembered seeing the same thing at Stonehenge a decade ago. Another place where the veil is thin, a glimpse into a timeless realm where I am just another pilgrim in another sunset.

Questions:

Pilgrimage is available now: www.JFPenn.com/pilgrimage

The post Pilgrimage: The Perspective Of History And Glimpses Of The Divine appeared first on Books And Travel.

In this wide-ranging interview, Emily Thomas talks about the importance of perspective and time in travel writing, how sublime moments of pleasurable terror make travel so interesting, how to overcome fears both real and imaginary, as well as the ethics of doom tourism, and how VR (virtual reality) might change how we travel in future.

Dr. Emily Thomas is an associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in England. She’s also the author of several books, including The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad.

You can find Emily at www.EmilyThomasWrites.co.uk and on Twitter @emilytwrites

Shareable and header image generated by Jo Frances Penn on Midjourney.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

My best travel experiences have actually been ones where I have gone to some place where I haven’t understood anything around me. Not not the language, not what’s going on in the street, not the social cues and I have very slowly, by reading and talking to people, come to put the pieces together and come to understand the place.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

When you have a sublime feeling, it’s a kind of pleasurable terror. So it’s the kind of enjoyable fear that you get from standing close to a waterfall, but not too close. You can feel the spray on your face, but you’re not actually afraid of falling over.

And I had definitely had a lot of those kinds of moments whilst traveling that often because I’ve done almost all my traveling by myself, just rocking up in a new place that I find really terrifying. And also really exciting on the other. I think the first time I really powerfully experienced that. I was 18. And I spent a couple of months wandering around China, the very first time I arrived in a big new city, and I stepped out of the hotel room, just not understanding anything that was going on around me it was really scary, but also exhilarating.

Jo Frances Penn

You talk there about terror, you’re using the word fear in the book.

Emily Thomas

But I think there are other fears are more exciting. And in a pleasurable way. I might have a fear that if I walk into a city I don’t know very well. I’m going to get lost. Well, actually, really, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? You know, I get lost it and I ended up asking for directions in a coffee shop or something. The feeling of oh, maybe I could be lost. That’s quite nice.

Have I personally been in some scrapes? I have. What especially springs to mind when people ask me that question. I was once in a taxi in Zimbabwe that caught fire, and the driver refused to pull over. It was just there was smoke, I mean, we could see flames on the bonnet. And he was like, no, it’ll be fine, like we don’t have to stop the car.

Jo Frances Penn

But if it’s in a foreign country, it feels like things will just be more difficult, even like asking someone where the bathroom is, like when I traveled in India, that can be a moment of fear.

Emily Thomas

And I personally get scared by the unknown. So the idea of landing in a new place that I find quite scary, I find it scary, because I have no idea what to expect when I’m there. But if I actually really go back and start thinking, Okay, this is where I want to go. And okay, and this is how taxis or whatever it might work here. The more knowledge that I have about the place that I find that the fear goes away. It’s like horror movies, right? You know, the unseen monster or ghost is always much scarier than when you actually see the ridiculous special effects that the producer has drummed up for your movie entertainment delight,

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

And even if I’m doing more free-range travel, I will have a first night’s accommodation booked. And also as a solo woman traveler, I will make sure the plane arrives at a time of day that is appropriate.

I had a terrible experience arriving at 2 am in Tel Aviv, Israel, back in the early 90s. And the war with Iraq was going on. And it was honestly one of the scariest times. I was in a new city. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I was before the internet, etc.

So you’ve just arrived in Malawi in Africa, which I have talked about on the show in episode 1 because I went to school there.

Emily Thomas

And now it’s a case of really trying to understand how basic things work. So things I was not expecting include there are many power cuts every day. And so it is not a good idea, for example, if you are working as I am to let your laptop go very low on battery, because otherwise when the next power cut comes you might run out of battery quite quickly. So really, really basic things about how to live here is what I’m now trying to get to grips with.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

I’ve had to download the correct apps and figure out how it works. And part of the issue is that people want to avoid the government taking a slice out of certain payment apps. So they always want you to use their particular payment app, but the government takes less money. It has been a learning curve. And I definitely find post-COVID people want to handle objects less, including notes and coins. That is a big deal. And so electronic payments are hugely on the rise.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

But travel books, even though they are within the nonfiction genre, actually, they are using many, many devices from fiction. They are using metaphor or hyperbole, that kind of thing. Travel books often have a plot, where they will start you off at one point in time and then the author backtracks a little bit to kind of give a bit more context. And then we move forwards in time again.

And all these devices borrow from fiction, they obviously serve to make the travel book much more readable, but they also begin blurring the line. And I think one of the important consequences of that is that we get more and more of the author’s own perspective, as they are experiencing the place and writing the book.

If we were to have this list of facts, temperature and longitude, that there’s very little of the author in that, that when we begin to have the author saying, ‘Oh, I saw a hippopotamus in person for the first time and its skin was like this, and its teeth were like this,’ that we’re really starting to get the author’s window on to the world. And then that becomes quite non-factual. And that’s part of writing a good story. But it’s also part of what makes travel writing a bit unusual as a nonfiction genre.

Jo Frances Penn

And of course, we understand that writing is also editing. So you don’t put in a lot of the stuff that happened because it doesn’t fit whatever overarching narrative you have.

I have a particular place in mind, which is Venice. [Note from Jo: Check out my solo episode: Myth and Reality: Beauty and Decay in Venice.]

I’ve been to Venice three times. And the third time was by far the best. But when I went the first time, I feel like all the writing I’ve ever read on Venice, it was just completely wrong. In my experience, I got there, it was flooded. I’ve never read a book about the flooding, and how much it stank of the sewers, and how overcrowded it was, and those huge tourist ships, and it really impacted my experience.

Emily Thomas

When you arrive, you may well have a very different outlook on that. And you’re certainly right. Venice is one of those places that has been so heavily romanticized that in a way, it’s difficult to see how the reality can live up to those romantic images of it.

And I mean it historically, if we go back before the 17th century into medieval travel, travel writing was absolutely chock full of lies, you know, people describe going to the Middle East and encountering dragons or great whales that come off out of the sea, and they’re sort of wandering around on the local coasts. And the Mandeville Travels describes meeting people with the heads of dogs. A lot of this is coming from the idea that whatever is unknown, we can somehow fill in the gaps. And there’s less of that today, partly because the world is more known, but it’s not entirely gone, and our brains are still filling in gaps.

Jo Frances Penn

And they see Africa — which of course, is not monolithic, it’s very diverse — but many show Africa in a way that perhaps it was 40 years ago, but so much has changed in the last decade in terms of what’s happening in Africa.

Emily Thomas

When we are all reading travel books, we must bear in mind the date that they were published, that’s going to have a big impact on how we approach them. Of course, I’m a historian of philosophy, so I’m going to stress the importance of dates.

With regards to changing stereotypes or leaving us to question them, I think that good writers should be conscious of stereotypes as they are writing and flag them up. That seems like something that the best travel writers do, actually, they approach people as individuals, and if there are stereotypes, they are mentioning them in order to deconstruct them.

Jo Frances Penn

And so when we are commenting on other places as we travel, I also worry in this time when we need more diverse voices, can you and I as white English women write about Malawi? And how does that compare to a Malawian author writing about Malawi?

Emily Thomas

You can only ever write from your perspective. All writing is written from a perspective, and that’s the same whether it’s me writing about Malawi, or someone from Blantyre going to the UK and writing about England.

So if I were to go to the US and write about how staggered I am by the sheer number of soda fridges, I should be overt about that, of course, be honest, I find this astonishing, because I’m from the UK, if I was from somewhere else, maybe I wouldn’t.

Jo Frances Penn

Let’s talk about maps, because I love that you start actually start the book with chapters on that.

I love maps, I’ve got a map of the world here in front of me on my wall. It is something that I find really important, and I’ve even written a fantasy trilogy about walking through maps.

Emily Thomas

And what I find fascinating about maps, or one of the many things I find fascinating about them, is that I always assumed that a map was a static thing. You know, it’s something that you hold in your hand and you look at it much like a teapot, and that’s the end of it.

But there are some philosophers who’ve argued that actually maps are much closer to processes. And in defense of this view, they asked us to consider things like Google Maps. So Google Maps are being continually updated, as are all these online mapping software. And then the question is, does that mean that there’s a new map that’s coming into existence? Like once every second or so? Or is it rather, it’s the same map that’s continually changing?

And when you begin to think of maps, like that, I can then begin to think of other maps, perhaps written on paper, but also continually being updated. So famously during the Second World War in London, there are some maps in the British Museum that were updated as buildings were bombed. So as buildings were removed, people would change the map to reflect the new reality.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

In historical maps, perhaps that was Jerusalem, or Athens, and today, if you look at world maps produced in Europe, Europe is usually at the center of the map. If you look at world maps produced by China, or the US, those countries will be at the center of the map. And that’s telling you a lot about how the map maker sees the world. And what maps do and don’t represent, and also tells you a lot about the social power that the map maker is outlining. So whether they are including castles or churches or huts belonging to peasants or not, that tells you about what they’re trying to do.

There are some really striking examples of maps being used to persuade people about where the lines of power lie in the world. So for example, historically, you can see lots of maps of the same place with borders drawn differently, and that’s because the map maker is trying to convince you that here is where the border is, my country is really at this is an even today, depending on where you are in the world. If you access Google Maps, the borders will shift depending on your local country’s attitude towards disputed territories —

Jo Frances Penn

But it’s kind of disturbing, in a way, isn’t it? The way that borders shift? I mean, again, on the map I’m looking at there is absolutely no way it reflects the actual size of the countries. The African continent has often made much smaller, hasn’t it? 

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Where it gets ethically tricky is when we are traveling to places and the very act of traveling is contributing to the doom of the place in question. That’s a really classic example is glaciers or underwater coral reefs. So when we visit a glacier, in addition to the CO2 that we may spend getting there, trampling all over the glacier can be harmful to it in various ways. If the ice is degrading anyway, then people walking all over it can hasten that.

The same with visiting coral reefs, you know, there are many articles on the internet ’10 places you should visit before they die off due to climate change.’ And lots of coral reefs are on the list. But again, the very act of visiting the reefs can damage them, and then it starts to feel unethical to visit these doomed places.

Jo Frances Penn

But I absolutely think that VR scuba diving is what I want to do. I haven’t dived for about a decade, like I’m really not that interested anymore in all the gear and all the boat sickness and all of that. So, to me, a brilliant thing would be virtual reality scuba diving to go see the coral reefs.

Emily Thomas

I think lots and lots of people are going to turn to VR for travel, I really do, and I think as VR improves, the more that that will happen. And I find that quite exciting, in part because we can travel to real world places that have been reproduced in VR, but also because we can travel to imaginary worlds that are going to be created for our enjoyment. And I’m looking forward to that as well. I think that will be that will be great.

Honestly, that said, for me, part of the value of travel lies in the difficulty and the fear and the inconvenience. And I don’t see myself wanting to give that up. I think rather I want to do both.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

I have also been to the pyramids a little bit later than you, before the light show but post the tourism era. And what I was astonished by was the way that if you stood in precisely the right spot, you could take a photograph just with the pyramids against the background of sand. But if you turned in any other direction, the tourist carnival, the shops. It’s a strange experience.

Jo Frances Penn

But then we come back to truth with a little t as in, if I make a VR experience of the Cairo souk, for example, I could walk through and record it with a special camera. And that is my experience.

Emily Thomas

So yeah, it will always be indirect in that sense that there are some VR experiences you can have now where I understand you literally pay a guide to wear a VR helmet or transmit things back to you. And then by telephone, you tell them, could you turn left here, I want to look more at this. So that seems like more that you’d have more control over what you’re seeing, at least in that way.

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

From a philosophy and travel perspective, my book is in fact, the only book on the philosophy of travel. But if you want to take a related but different angle, that Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. He explores the way that various artists and novelists have thought about travel. And that’s also a great read,

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

Jo Frances Penn

Emily Thomas

The post The Meaning of Travel With Emily Thomas appeared first on Books And Travel.

How can we adopt an untethered attitude to life, especially when it comes to expectations of travel? C.L. Stambush talks about how her experience of motor-cycling around India taught her more about herself, and how she brings that to her daily life. We also talk about connecting with people across cultural and language barriers, when taking risks is worth it, and how we need to keep pushing the boundaries of our comfort zone to live a more expansive life.

C.L. Stambush is an award-winning writer, journalist, editor and author of Untethered: A Woman’s Search for Self on the Edge of India.

Show notes

You can find C.L. Stambush at clstambush.com

Header and shareable image generated by Jo Frances Penn on Midjourney and edited on DALL-E.

Joanna: C.L. Stambush is an award-winning writer, journalist, editor, and author of Untethered: A Woman’s Search for Self on the Edge of India. Welcome, Connie.

Connie: Thank you. I’m excited to be here, Jo.

Joanna: This is such an interesting topic.

Connie: That journey was a long time in the coming. I would date it all the way back to when I was in kindergarten or first grade when I was very shy kid and I just hugged the wall and kept one shoulder to the wall at all times. But as I became aware of what I was doing, I didn’t like this aspect of myself. I felt like I was really losing out on engaging in life, because I just kind of watched it from the sidelines.

So over the years, I wanted to become braver and put myself in situations like forcing myself to stay up and watch scary movies or get past this very scary stuffed bear in the museum alone, and just kept pushing myself farther and farther. By the time I got to India, which is in itself a very long, convoluted story, I was working for a pharmaceutical company, and they were downsizing.

I never imagined that I would leave the United States. And I literally had this overnight revelation where I just woke up the next morning and said, I quit. I sold everything that I had, I bought a backpack, flipped a coin, bought a one-way ticket, landed in Germany, and kind of went, ‘Oh, I didn’t really have a plan or anything as to what I would do.’

From there, I progressed on through Europe and then Eastern Europe and then the Middle East. I wound up working in India as an editor for a wire service, the women’s feature service and then when that contract ended, I decided I was ready to leave Delhi but I was not ready to leave India.

I didn’t want to see India on India’s public transportation. So the motorcycle seemed the most obvious thing for me to do, because everybody had a Royal Enfield Bullet. You have this wonderful bump, bump, bump sound. And it just called out to me. So I decided, I’m just going to do this.

Joanna: We’re going to go back into the book, but I just have to ask as a child, you decided to become braver and force yourself to try these things. And then, like you said, you quit, you sold everything. There’s definitely something in your personality that makes decisions quickly, and then does these difficult things. But of course, this book is set back in the 90s. But that’s not the end of your story. How has this attitude to travel and taking risks impacted your life since then?

Connie: I think that it has allowed me to take even greater risks than I probably wouldn’t have. When I came back, I decided I wanted to get a master’s degree. And so again, I just up and left what I had going on here and went to New York and got a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, in creative nonfiction writing, and then came back.

So it has given me the freedom to understand that the world will keep going and keep getting better for you if you just keep trying the things that you want to do, but are a little hesitant to do anyway. Nothing comes to a crashing end when you try something new. Usually, it works out better.

Joanna: I like that. Let’s step into the book. Now, I’ve been to India a number of times. And of course, much of India is ancient as well. And there are some really beautiful places. What are some of the most memorable places that still stand out for you even all these years later, either because of beauty or an emotional or spiritual resonance?

Connie: I had lived in India for over three years by the time I took this journey, so I had traveled to various places. And then when I did this travel journey, I was basically on the edge so not necessarily in some of India’s most famous places. But during my time in India, the places that stand out to me would be the desert.

I’ve always drawn to the desert, Jai Samir, and then also the mountains and South India because it’s just so much lusher and greener down there.

I met just so many amazing people while I was there, even people I didn’t necessarily have a conversation with or engage with, just people who were friendly.

First of all, as a woman alone, riding a motorcycle, I didn’t really look like a woman, I looked like a Westerner. I had full gear on, I had a motorcycle helmet on. And they couldn’t really tell that I was a woman.

But at one point, it was early on in my journey, and I was riding along the highway, and in front of me was this overloaded truck with all these women that had gathered from a field where they were out working, and were being taken back home again. They were very listless and just sort of worn out from working in the hot fields all day.

One of them began to watch me. And as she watched me, she became more intent as to try to figure out who I was, then she began to nudge a woman next to her. And soon, they’re all looking at me. And smiling really big, because there’s the recognition that this is a woman doing something that women just don’t do in India, which is one being on a motorcycle at that time, as well as traveling alone. And then it was just great. They just all smiled and waved, and it was just really uplifting.

There were many experiences where I ran into women. There was another time when I got stopped at a train station, and there was no train on the track, but the barriers were down. And the minute I stopped as a foreigner, the men would sort of begin to crush in on me because of the space or the lack of space that we have between the US culture and the Indian culture. And so they got quite close to me and kind of closed in on me. And it was very hot and I began to take off my gear a little bit at a time.

And the minute they noticed that I was a woman, they didn’t know what to do with me at that point. So they all just kind of stepped back. But this gave an opportunity for these tribal women who had been standing at a far-off distance with some of their sheep flock. They had been watching, but there had been no opportunity for them, so when the men moved away, the women just moved in.

They wanted to feel my hair and compare it to their hair, and feel my skin and compare it to their skin. And I felt like at that point, because I was quite lonely on the road – and this was even still, within the first month or so of my journey – that it was just really a lovely experience to feel that I wasn’t so alone because riding a motorcycle as a woman alone in India, I felt very much like an outlier. And to have these women come up and tell me, we get you. You’re different. We’re different. It was just a very beautiful connecting moment for me,

Joanna: It’s one of the things, isn’t it, with travel there that you feel there are always people who can help. I was cycling in India and I came off my bike. It was after the monsoon rains. And I came off my bike in this tiny village and cut my knee and I was in shock. I was on the ground; I was crying my eyes out. And like you say all these women came out and brought water and tried to help me and we didn’t share the language. They obviously didn’t speak English, but I just remember everyone was so kind.

There’s that human connection, even if you’re a very, very different person from a different culture, right?

Connie: I agree. I think that’s what travel really does is it breaks down all these assumptions that we have in our mind when we’re back in our own culture. We’re back in our own hometown, we’re back in our own familiar settings. But when we’re out, all that is just stripped away. And it’s just people connecting to people, which I think is the most beautiful thing.

Joanna: You mentioned there about being a woman alone. And that example with personal space. I felt that too and it can feel quite claustrophobic. It can be quite scary.

Connie: I think by then I had become a much stronger person, obviously, than the person I started out as a child. I had been working very, very hard and very long to become braver. But it is a scary thing to be out there on your own. I found that when I was not in threatening situations, but just in situations, I would use my height to create a larger presence for myself in a space.

As a woman alone, I found that to be an effective thing just to stand taller, to feel broader in just in the normal space of walking down the street. I didn’t have a lot of scary experiences, but I had some I have, for instance, I believe that all the gear really made me stand out and made me, like I said earlier, a very other type person. But there was a time when these children came up to me, and they wanted to shake hands. And I wasn’t very obliging, and they were very fun, but they just kept on and then this little old man came along, and they pushed him into me.

They had become rather menacing. I don’t know what they wanted, but they weren’t just happy children any longer so they pushed the little old man into me. I got very, very angry, not at the children so much, but at the kind of cultural circumstances are allowed this and all these men then crowded in on me. I ended up slapping one of them, and ended up chasing him down an alleyway, which was a very scary experience because I had become somebody quite other than anything that I knew at all. And it wasn’t until I tripped and fell that I came to my senses.

Joanna: Wow, that seems that’s quite extreme to find yourself in that situation. It’s like you learn these lessons to make yourself less afraid. But I’m certainly listening going, I would not cycle around India alone, I wouldn’t do that. And I know a lot of people listening would feel the same.

But there are lots of things that we can be scared of that stop us in life, even if those things are smaller than the journey you did. What are some of the ways that you might encourage people listening to, some people would say, Oh, I’m not I couldn’t even travel to India. from the US.

Or I’ve met people in the US, say in New York, and someone would say to me, “Oh, you’ve been to New Orleans? I’ve never been there. I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t.” And I’m like, it’s in your country? How have you not traveled that far?

Connie: I think that’s a great question. I would hear people when I lived in the downtown section of my hometown, I would have people tell me, “I would never live down there, I won’t even go down there. I don’t think that’s safe.” So I really think it starts in our mind, what we think of someplace. And maybe these are places we don’t even know.

We have to begin to educate ourselves on what those places are and who those people are. And I just feel like in my experience, when I’m in a place that I don’t know that it’s the people that make me feel welcome there. I find people everywhere make me feel welcome, when I go to these places, whether you go to New Orleans, or to India.

I get that riding a motorcycle is certainly not for everyone. And it’s not even for the majority. But going outside of your comfort zone is something that we can do in small ways. Even if it’s just like a small thing, like, oh, I would never feel comfortable eating in a restaurant by myself, well, that’s a kind of a small thing that we can do. And we can get used to that.

When we get used to that, we find that there’s nothing really bad happening to us. We just perceive that something bad would happen, or we would feel not comfortable there. But then when we experience it, we understand that it is okay. And that inches you along, I think, to try different things. It’s not a big leap. I didn’t go from living in Evansville, Indiana, to riding a motorcycle. There were so many little incremental steps along the way that you just keep elevating to the next level.

Joanna: I agree with this pushing out of the comfort zone, and particularly during the pandemic, I really felt that my comfort zone shrank and we all were so trapped in our areas. I will walk the same paths around and around. It took quite a lot for even someone like me, and I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve lived all over the world, to push myself back out there again. Is that something that happened to you? Have you found that just incrementally you’ve been able to keep pushing this comfort zone out?

Connie: I think that when you stop doing it, then when you try to start doing it again, it gets harder, you’ve kind of lost some ground, don’t you? Once you’re in the groove of keep pushing yourself out there, then it gets more and more comfortable when you stop doing that. You stall a little bit and you’ve got a little bit of a restart to get going. Again, I think that’s pretty usual for most people.

Joanna: I almost feel like if you don’t keep pushing outwards, it shrinks you and shrinks you and shrinks you and that’s why a lot of older people I feel as you get older and obviously maybe you don’t want to travel so much in your 80s for example, but I feel like if you don’t push it, then it will kind of come closer to you and shrink you.

Connie: I think you’re right. I think if you’re not moving forward, then you could be sliding backward. And I think having that awareness of who you want to be and where you want to be and the type of person you want to be, and keep pushing yourself out that way.

My mom’s a great example of somebody who does the things she knows she needs to do, even though she would rather not do them. Forces herself to go out, and she’s in her 90s now, so she forces herself to go out, to do things just to keep engaged with other people when it would be easier just to not go out. So maybe I get that from her.

Joanna: I think you’re right. And also, the wonderful thing about travel is that you’re meeting people in real life. Whereas I feel like a lot of the media, a lot of social media, we get the wrong idea. And we might find things that reinforce stereotypes, or that are completely wrong half the time. So it’s almost like going to these places and challenging what we think we know often makes us see that we didn’t know it after all, especially in a huge place like India, which is so diverse.

Connie: Yes. And I think that’s very good. There’s a line I think that the Buddha said is, “Don’t believe everything you think”, and I really try to remember that because that is so true. When we think we know something, and then we meet the thing that we think we understand, we usually find out okay, I was completely wrong, at least in my experience.

Joanna: What were you wrong about on that motorcycle trip?

Connie: Oh, I don’t know that I was wrong so much about anything on the motorcycle trip because I sort of took it moment by moment. I tried to get through. I had no experience riding a motorcycle, I had taken a one-week course in Indiana. So there were 12 motorcycles in an empty parking lot, which does not at all prepare you to be on a motorcycle in India, where there are billions of vehicles on the road.

My neighbor had given me really great advice. He said ‘just practice stopping.’ That was his advice. So when I got back when I got the motorcycle in India I took it slow and got used to it and got comfortable with it and then took it out on the road.

I didn’t have these big objectives to meet each day. In the beginning, I could not ride very far at all. A couple of hours and I was aching very much and it was very hot and it was very hard and roads could be very dangerous and there would be traffic coming at you and not necessarily staying on their side of the road. But the longer I did it, the more miles I got underneath me the more comfortable I got with it all.

Joanna: You named the motorcycle Kali, a goddess I also identify with. I wrote about Kali in a thriller of mine, Destroyer of Worlds. But a lot of people listening might not know anything about Kali.

Connie: She is the most badass Goddess that there is. I think there are about 33 recognized gods and goddesses and something like 330 million additional ones that not everybody agrees on. But she’s one of the main Hindu goddesses and she is half benevolent and half warrior but all the images of her are very fierce.

And why I chose her is because one of the things that she’s known for is revealing our true selves. In a quest to discover who I was, she seemed to not only be the right goddess to have as a partner with me, but the right one to help me on this particular journey, which I’m trying to identify who I really am and who I really want to be.

Joanna: You say fierce, but most of the images of Kali are holding a decapitated head and there’s all these hands and it’s basically death and multiple arms and pretty, pretty scary. That’s a more extreme version. When you told people along the way were they surprised that you even chose this goddess?

Connie: No, they didn’t seem surprised. I had Kali stenciled on this side of the tank in Hindi. So people recognized it. And one day I was in a hotel and the hotel clerk gave me a note from a traveler who had seen me arrive on this motorcycle. This just comes back to people who are just so helpful and so encouraging along the way. They had seen me ride in on the motorcycle and left me a note telling me, “To the rider of Kali, I wish you all the best of luck in your journey.”

Joanna: That’s lovely.

Connie: Yes. So in order to navigate around this large country on its own, I decided that, as a woman trying to find out who she was, trying to put together the type of person I wanted to be, that I would visit the Kali temples. Now the Kali temples – there are 52 and or 51, depending on which version you read – contain these pieces of the Goddess Kali that fell to Earth.

And then these Shakti Peetha temples sprang up, so they are power temples. Each one of these temples has a piece of the goddess. So my plan was to visit each of the temples and reassemble Kali as I went along the way. But I discovered that I really didn’t enjoy visiting the temples. And when that discovery came to my mind, I realized that I had created that as almost a crutch for myself, and that I no longer needed that.

Joanna: It’s interesting, because I do feel like having a deeper meaning, and or having a framework for a journey, in the way that you did there, is better than just saying, “I’m just going to motorcycle all the way around India.” I almost feel like even though you changed what you wanted, it did start you out with a direction that was more than just get on the road. Do you think that plan helped you?

Connie: Oh, absolutely. Yes. I think what it taught me was what I took away when I felt like I no longer needed to find because, for one reason, they were very difficult to find. I had a map, I had locations, but people didn’t always agree on which was a Shakti Peetha temple and which wasn’t. So it became increasingly difficult to discover the actual temple.

Now, I knew that I wanted to make it to the end and reached the Kali temple for the Kali Puja, and I managed to do that. But it certainly did give me that kind of understanding that I needed this in the beginning. And then when I realized, hey, I don’t really need this, that felt like a growth for me. That was what Kali was doing for me because she is the goddess of rebirth.

And Kali is definitely the goddess of death. I like that.

When I heard the title of your book, Untethered, I knew I wanted to talk to you because I have also got Untethered as a title or draft title for a book, which I’ve had around for a while it might be around for as long as yours was. What does ‘untethered’ mean to you?

Connie: That’s a great question. I feel like because I felt as a child bound and tied to and stuck to this wall that that being untethered was both a physical and but more a psychological undertaking. So I wasn’t physically scared any longer or attached to this wall.

But being untethered for me is really a state of mind, the way you look at things. I saw myself much younger and even as a teen very attached to certain things. But as I became untethered, I became unburdened by the things that I thought I believed, I felt like that they, in the end, were weighing me down as well.

Joanna: Was that also about the USA? Because I feel that a lot of Americans who’ve traveled a lot or who end up as living as expats in other countries, they are trying to untether themselves from what being American is. Is that something that you were trying to untether from and how have you come back?

Connie: I don’t think I was trying to untether from being an American. I think that when I was out in the world, I felt like I needed to be a representative of a good American. I met a lot of travelers who were Americans who would have Canadian flags on their backpacks and things like that, but I always felt like it was it was up to me to show the world that the way that they see Americans isn’t necessarily true, through my own actions.

I think it really became a state of mind for me.

Joanna: When you returned to the USA and like you said, you studied a Masters in quite a traditional industry now, the publishing industry in writing. Have you retained that sense of being untethered, even as you’ve gone back home?

Connie: I think it’s the constant moment-by-moment, where you keep asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing now, or about to do, taking me to where I want to be?” As far as the state of mind, if you don’t pay attention any longer to what you’re doing, you can slide into being back where you are a person that you didn’t want to be. So for me, it’s just a constant moment by moment of trying to figure out, will thinking this way, free me or enslave me?

Joanna: What’s an example of that?

Connie: Oh, I imagine in American politics, or just seeing people as what we think that they are, rather than seeing them for who they are. Everybody’s got the good and the bad in them.

Joanna: So you mean looking at other people in terms of an untethered attitude? I guess I thought it was more about living your life with a certain amount of freedom in terms of I don’t know, for example, not buying a house would be an untethered way of living.

Connie: Yes, I still do not own a house. And I think you’re right. I recently was looking at buying houses and thought again, no, that is like an anchor for me. So you’re right, that would be an untethered way of living.

But I also think it’s not just the physical tethering to the ground. I feel grounded now that I’m back in the United States, but I don’t feel tied down. I feel like I have the freedom to do the things that I want to do. Because the trip taught me that I’m – in fact, all the travel taught me that – that I can pick the time in which I want to do them now.

Joanna: This is something I ponder about a lot. Because up until the pandemic, I didn’t feel like I had a home. And that didn’t matter. Because I like this idea of being untethered. And I can find it, I can make it home wherever I am in the world, right? We’ve lived all over the place. Maybe home is the people that you love, things like that.

But I’m starting to change my mind about the concept of home. I have bought a house in a community and I almost feel like I’m putting down roots. That’s kind of scary for someone like me, who wants the freedom to be untethered.

Connie: They are and like you, Jo, I feel like I could make a home anywhere. But I have been thinking about if I did make a home, what would that home be? I would want a small home so that I wouldn’t feel as anchored by it.

I have gotten rid of a lot of possessions. The more I’m in one place, the more I gather. So I tried to keep an eye and a mind on exactly how I can keep letting things go, keep untethering myself from the physical world like that.

I think it’s nice to think about nesting, it’s nice to be in your home and have your things around you. It’s hard to be on the road for a long period. I was on the road for five months, with nothing more than would fit into the couple of bags on a motorcycle. That is a very stripped-down way of living.

Joanna: It’s very tiring, isn’t it? I had [ digital nomad Nora Dunn ] on the show recently, and she said the work of travel, which is finding somewhere to sleep that night and getting the money right. And in India, finding water that you can drink. There’s work associated with active travel.

Connie: There really is. And it’s on a level that we don’t think about when we’re in our own environment, the things that we take for granted. But when you’re out in the world, and you’re really stripped down of all those securities, you do have to work at finding those sorts of basic things again.

Joanna: That’s also quite nice in our local environment is to try and look at things with the eyes of a traveler, and figure out what would be difficult if someone comes to our country. When I first went back to the USA after the pandemic, a country that I’ve been traveling to for decades, I felt like a stranger for the first time in a long time. I saw some weird things about America that I hadn’t really noticed before.

Connie: I hope so. I hope that I’m still keeping that fresh in myself. I try not to walk the same path. I’m always trying to shake it up. I try to go down alleys because they’re very overlooked pathways in our city but you get a completely different perspective when you go down an alley, then you go down the front of a street. So I constantly try to push myself to change it up so that I can keep seeing things fresh and new.

I do think that is the danger to fall back into not questioning things, to not asking why is it that way? Or how can I see this differently? Or how would this person see this? Because it’s easy to become complacent like that.

Joanna: And then it turns into a sort of jaded, take-it-for-granted attitude, which is why I think people sometimes are unhappy is because they’re not looking at things with new eyes and trying new things.

Connie: That’s very true. Yeah, that’s a good point. I also think people, they just believe what they think. And they don’t even know why they think that way.

Joanna: And that questioning can really help.

Connie: As I alluded to, earlier, I became someone that I did not expect that I would be. I would have never predicted that kind of behavior and myself. And it came as sort of a combination of many things.

I was feeling very tired, the heat of it, the emotional isolation of it – that became very stressful and heavy for me. And then when I was in this situation, I really just felt like I cracked and went over the edge. And then I literally went over an edge when I chased someone. And that is not at all who I am. But I think it showed me that I have the potential to be people I don’t know. I can be good or bad.

Joanna: When you take these trips, when you travel in a certain way with this openness, it often doesn’t end up the way you expected or the way you planned. And if it did, I guess it would just be a holiday.

Connie: Yeah, and I think we can take that even to our hometown, own town roots too. Because if we have these expectations of people just in our everyday lives, that often doesn’t turn out the way we expected or wanted either.

So if we just keep an open mind, and then open our heart and that mindful presence in each moment without putting expectations on things. That’s where the disappointment comes when we expect something to go one way, but it doesn’t.

Joanna: That’s fantastic. So this is the books and travel show.

Connie: Oh, there are so many good books out there, so many written by women that really helped me even understand the kind of story that I wanted to tell.

One of the first ones that comes to mind is Robyn Davidson’s Tracks. A woman who solo trekked across 1700 miles of the Australian outback. She’s this woman who decides she’s going to get these camels, and she’s never handled camels ever, and then take them across this huge journey. So I thought that was very inspiring to see women doing things that women aren’t really expected to do.

The other one would be Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: Lost and Found On the Pacific Crest Trail. I thought that was a great book to really understand what it was like for her, again, to do something that she wasn’t really experienced or trained or skilled to actually do. But she learned and she grew into that as she went.

As far as being in India, one of my favorites is Hindoo Holiday, which is a very old book by J.R. Ackerley. I think it was published in 1932. But it’s very funny. It takes you into the day-to-day life of someone living and working in India, in New Delhi, I think, maybe not in New Delhi, but in India.

And then the other one would be William Dalrymple, City of Djinns, which is about his year of living in Delhi. Again, there are all sorts of characters that he meets and culture clashes, where his own culture and his own expectations are really turned upside down when he’s in a different situation. And then how do you deal with that?

Joanna: All fantastic books.

Connie: My book is just about everywhere. It is, of course, on Amazon and is in Barnes and Noble. If you’re anywhere in the world, if you wanted to have your local bookstore order it, they can order it through Ingram Spark’s global distribution. There is a paperback there is an ebook. And hopefully, by the end of the year, there will be an audiobook of it as well. My website is www.clstambush.com.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Connie. That was great

Connie: Thank you so much. I enjoyed talking with you.

The post Untethered. A Woman’s Search For Self On The Edge Of India With C.L. Stambush appeared first on Books And Travel.

In September 2022, I walked the Camino de Santiago along the Portuguese Coastal route. It was around 300 kilometers from Porto in Portugal north along the coast and then inland to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which took 14 days of back-to-back walking.

I walked alone and carried my pack with everything in it, and I organized my accommodation through Macs Adventure so I knew where I was sleeping every night. I’ve posted a day by day breakdown of the route and my gear list separately, and in this episode, I go through some of my lessons and thoughts from the Way. 

Show notes

You’ll find additional reflections and tips in Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, out now at jfpenn.com/pilgrimage.

The cathedral at Santiago de Compostela is almost a thousand years old, and pilgrims have been walking there since medieval times from all over Europe. I started in Porto, Portugal, with its historic center and cathedral on the banks of the river Douro. 

The route heads north along the coastline past Roman fish-salting vats, and at Matasinhos, there is a sculpture of women wailing as they look out to wrecked boats on the horizon where their fishermen husbands lie beneath the waves. Life retains a familiar rhythm through the ages and some aspects of being human never change.

Walking every day shrinks life down to its basic elements. Eat, sleep, walk.

You appreciate the simple things — shelter from the rain and wind, a hot shower after a long day, painkillers and blister plasters, coffee in the first few hours of the day, or a cold beer when the sun is high, local bread and olive oil when you’re hungry, an encouraging smile from another pilgrim.

Once you step away and see how other people live, and experience being uncomfortable, or in pain, somewhere you can’t control your environment, it’s easier to be grateful for what you have and what you will return to. It’s easy to take these comforts for granted until we lose them, even temporarily.

I travel partly because it helps me see how insignificant I am on the face of the world, and walking intensifies this feeling as it is so slow. When I look at a map at the end of the day, I see I have only crossed a tiny part of a tiny area in a little corner of the world. I can only move at my pace, which for me is what English walkers call ‘bimbling,’ a relaxed gait, stopping regularly for photos, notes, or coffee when available. 

When at home, the daily grind of life makes everything feel important and urgent. It’s easy to get stressed about a deadline or the emails that pile up, or the jobs that always need doing. Perspective narrows, even as we worry about the bigger things we can’t control — the economy, war, disease.

The waves of the Atlantic will continue to crash on the shores after my footsteps are washed away. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela will welcome more pilgrims after I have gone, the same words of the Mass will be spoken by the next generation. I am comforted by my insignificance, and I can return with a perspective on what is truly important. 

While walking an ancient route like the Camino helps you reflect on mortality, it is almost impossible to comprehend a thousand years of pilgrims walking ahead and many more coming behind. But while I walked, I had a more vivid reminder of memento mori — remember, you will die — as Queen Elizabeth II died. Each day of my Camino was punctuated by snippets of her life on TV in coffee bars and glimpses of newspapers, and I couldn’t help but read the UK papers online when resting at the end of the day. 

It was strange to walk outside of my country during such a historically significant week. I remember seeing newly carved statues of the Queen and Prince Philip mounted outside the cathedral in Canterbury on my first pilgrimage in October 2020. The stone was paler than the other sculptures of historic monarchs. The features weren’t weathered — and of course, both were still alive. There was a sense of standing next to living history, as another generation passed, and now they are both gone. 

I am not an ardent royalist by any means, but the Queen was a constant across my life as she was for many Brits. As I walked, the news was full of pictures of her as a young woman, then middle-aged going through the trials of life, then an old woman at her husband’s funeral, and in her final days, standing bent over and smiling as she welcomed the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The span of an extraordinary life against the backdrop of history, much of which I remember over the last 35 years at least. Her life passed by, as will mine and yours. Even a Queen cannot hold back the end.

I walked into Santiago de Compostela on the day of the funeral and I watched her coffin lowered into the vault at Windsor Castle as I rested in my hotel that afternoon. It was a fitting end to my pilgrimage and underscored the sense that something must die for change to happen, and new life can emerge from the ashes of the old.

A pilgrimage is a clear task with a clear direction. You have a starting point and a destination and if you follow the way-markers and the guide book, you have a route to get there. You might get lost for a short time, but if you keep going, you will reach the end.

Once you are on the trail, whatever that might be, the pilgrim’s day is much the same.

This daily repetition is a blessing of pilgrimage, as it simplifies life to its basics. You have no purpose but to get up and walk, and if you make it to your destination for the night, you have achieved your goal. The daily difficulties of normal life fade as you deal with the immediate issues of pain and hunger and exhaustion. You sleep satisfied, and tomorrow you get up and do it again.

Pilgrimage creates clear boundaries, and that can be a great comfort in difficult times.

You need ‘starting energy’ to plan and organize your trip, to turn it from a dream or a goal into reality.

Many people fall at this first hurdle and you need to overcome obstacles and fears to get even as far as the starting point. You need to book time away from normal life and since most of the Camino routes are a physical challenge, you also need to train in preparation. 

I’ve been wanting to walk a Camino for more than twenty years, and I only found my ‘starting energy’ since the pandemic put the brevity of life into perspective. I know how it feels to say ‘some day,’ but that day will never come unless you make a decision, book a route or a flight, and commit.

Once you begin, you need ‘pushing through’ energy, especially on the days when you’re tired and in pain and emotionally broken and you just want to give up. 

I woke up on the eighth day of my Camino in the village of Oia, Spain. A hurricane had blown in the night before, cutting the power to the village as I lay in bed listening to the violence of the wind and rain. When I woke, it was still dark and rain pounded down outside. 

As I taped my feet and plastered my blisters, I wondered what the hell I was doing. I did not want to walk out into the storm, especially when every step was painful. I still had seven more days of walking to get to Santiago de Compostela, and given the state of my feet, it would only get harder.

But pilgrimage is not a holiday. It is meant to be a challenge — and part of the challenge is not giving up. 

A long-distance walk is a test of stamina. Each day might be a manageable distance in itself, and nothing too challenging for a single day’s walking, but day after day — especially on the stones of the Portuguese route — the fatigue and pain compound.

It’s easy to give up on the Camino, as you can call a taxi at most accommodation and other places along the route each day. Many people choose to skip a stage and take transport to their next hotel, so the temptation is always there — and if you truly need help, then, of course, you must take it. But I know the difference between the ‘normal’ pain of long-distance walking and acute ‘something is definitely wrong’ pain.

At times like these, when the struggle is more mental than physical, I write in my journal. Some might pray, but I find solace and answers in writing. 

I moan a lot and list all the things that hurt and why I want to stop and give up and go home. Then I write about why I am walking and why I should continue. I know this pain is temporary and it will fade, but the pride in finishing will be mine for the rest of my life.

That morning in Oia, I took some painkillers, put on my rain gear, and headed out into the storm.

This ‘pushing through’ energy will get you to your destination and help you overcome obstacles along the way. Then you need ‘finishing energy’ to return home and reflect on the experience, to bring the lessons of the Camino to the rest of your life. 

It’s too easy to arrive home, put your pack away and your clothes in the wash, then catch up on the inevitable life admin and everything you’ve missed. By the time your blisters have healed, you may have already forgotten the lessons of the Way, and finishing energy is needed to find the gold and incorporate it into your life. It might be re-reading your journal, or going through your photos and printing those that still resonate. It might be taking action on a decision you made on your walk.

Don’t just slip back into life as if nothing has changed. The gifts of pilgrimage take time to emerge so allow space for them.

This episode is part of my finishing energy and I’m also writing a book on pilgrimage, which includes lessons from the Pilgrims’ Way and the St Cuthbert’s Way in addition to the Camino. It will be out in 2023, so depending on when you’re listening, check out www.JFPenn.com/pilgrimage for links.

A pilgrimage is a journey to a place of meaning. The Camino was originally for Christians who walked to the relics of St James to atone for their sin, or to ask for healing or intercession with God, but it is more of a secular experience these days. It certainly was for me, although, of course, if you are a person of faith, you will experience it differently.

I talked to many pilgrims on the Way and not a single one said they were walking for reasons of faith. Many had thought about the Camino for years and saw it more as a physical challenge, or a chance to get away and make a change in their lives. A surprising number had walked parts of it before and returned to try alternative routes and experience the camaraderie of the Camino once again. 

There were elements of the sacred along the route if you looked for them. Roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary saving sinners from burning boats, and later, shrines to St James, sometimes just a carving on a rock, and other times, full-size sculptures and chapels. There were plenty of churches along the Way, but the convoy of pilgrims stopping to get their Credentials stamped made them crowded and noisy. I found more moments of peace in graveyards along the Way than sitting in the nave of any of the churches. 

Santiago de Compostela itself is a busy city with a thriving tourist center and pilgrims are just one type of visitor. The cathedral is packed full at every Mass, of which there are several each day, and there is nowhere to find silence if you crave it as I do. The cathedral’s imposing Baroque architecture and the relics of St James in the crypt are a necessary part of the end of the Camino, but I felt more of a spiritual insight in the nearby Monasterio de San Martin Pinario, which was completely empty when I visited. The church was also a cemetery for the Benedictine community, their bodies laid under the stones of the nave, so the living could remember them and reflect on the inevitability of their own fate. 

I found the Camino more of a physical journey than a spiritual one, partly because it was busy, so there was little time to walk alone and think as I did on the St Cuthbert’s Way. At the end of a day’s walk, it was about washing off the sweat and changing smelly clothes, attending to seeping blisters and spraying antiseptic on open wounds, resting swollen aching feet, finding food, and sleeping.

The needs of the physical self overwhelmed the spiritual, but then we are embodied souls. The physical is how we experience life, even an occasional glimpse of the divine.

The Camino de Santiago has waxed and waned in popularity and now several hundred thousand walk the different routes every year. It is not a wilderness walk unless you choose the early stages of the Via de la Plata, which are far less developed.

There will be people, sometimes lots of them, and there were moments on the Way where I was literally part of a long line of pilgrims. Many only walk the last 100km, which you need to complete to get the Compostela, so those last few days in particular are really busy. 

The pilgrim industry starts with getting the Credential, which you can buy at many of the starting points and also online before you go. You have to get stamps along the Way from churches and hostels, hotels and restaurants, and inevitably, this results in queues even in out-of-the-way places. There are pilgrim menus at cafes, often very good value, and if you stay at albergues, there are even organized opportunities for socializing with other pilgrims. 

There are two possible attitudes to this industry. You can resent the intrusion of so many people and the overt commercialism, and pine for a solo, spiritual pilgrimage — or you can embrace it and join in wholeheartedly. 

I did the latter and considered it part of supporting the local businesses that play an important part in the Camino experience. I appreciated comfortable accommodation, pharmacies, and supermarkets, as well as coffee shops, restaurants, and bars along the Way. However, I did stop in some sections to let waves of chattering pilgrims pass, and I relished moments of quiet walking when I didn’t see another person for a while, mainly when I left before sunrise a few mornings.

My favorite day’s walk was Baiona to Vigo, or at least the first 20km of it. The main Camino route went through the hills, but there was a slightly longer alternate route following the coast north. I chose the coastal route, which was barely way-marked, but by keeping the sea on my left, it was easy enough to navigate along paths and boardwalks. 

I left Baiona in the dark and walked north as the dawn broke over the coastal wetlands. Wading birds picked their way through the shallows and finches darted between bushes on the shore. The path followed alongside almost deserted beaches. It was a cool autumnal weekday morning, so there were just a few dog walkers on the sand. There were heavy clouds overhead, and the wind blew rain in later that day. I saw a few pilgrims but mostly I walked alone, happy to have taken the alternative route, to step out of the stream of pilgrims even just for a day.

When people say they have “walked the Camino,” it can mean many things, and if you want to walk (or cycle), it’s important to consider what you want your Camino experience to be. We all have different definitions of challenge, and also different capabilities at different times in our lives. 

There are various Camino routes you can choose depending on how much time you have and how far you want to walk. You have to walk 100 kilometers to be eligible for the Compostela, but the longest route, the Via de la Plata, is nearly 1000 kilometers. The Frances is nearly 800 kilometers and is the most popular and busy route, but there are also short routes like the Ingles if you have limited time, or you can do the final stage of the longer routes.

There are many companies who can organize and book accommodation for you, or you can walk independently and stay in hostels/albergues along the way. You can carry your own pack or get luggage transfer and carry a day pack. The time of year will also affect your experience, so you can see how the challenge can vary depending on these practical elements. 

While I originally wanted to walk the Frances route, made famous by countless books and the film The Way, I couldn’t be away from my business for the time needed to complete it. I decided on the Portuguese Coastal route, still a challenge at 14 days of back-to-back walking, and considered much quieter than the Frances.

I carried my own pack and walked the whole route. I booked through Macs Adventure and had a private room each night in hotels or B&Bs. I like to know where I’m sleeping every night, and I didn’t want to deal with shared bathrooms and snoring. 

Those were my choices, and they shaped my Camino. Many people, including pilgrims in their 70s, overtook me during the day carrying day packs, and certainly, getting luggage transferred is a good way to make walking easier.

Every pilgrim is different, and it is easy to end up comparing situations. You might pass a tired and limping pilgrim one day, only to end up like that yourself another day. You might wish your pack was lighter, or you might judge others for ‘only’ walking five days instead of a longer route, or you might judge yourself for not being fit enough, or for not looking after your feet and getting blisters, or for carrying too much stuff.

But no pilgrim is ‘better’ than another. We all have different reasons to walk, and different challenges along the Way. Keep your eyes on your own path. 

In terms of training, I regularly walk 20km with a day pack and I also do weight training, so I have strong legs and no issues with my knees or back. 

This was my third multi-day solo pilgrimage walk, but it was also much longer than anything I have done before. I knew I could do six days back-to-back walking in bad weather, but on reflection, 14 days was difficult, even though there were some shorter days in the middle. I should have scheduled a rest day and certainly recommend one if you are carrying your own gear for weeks at a time. 

I’ve done plenty of long walks without getting blisters in the same walking shoes, but after one long, hot and sweaty day walking on rocky uneven ground, I started getting sore spots and they compounded into blisters over subsequent days. I ended up taping my feet and hobbling the last few days, but the many pharmacies along the way are used to pilgrims, and you’ll find painkillers and blister plasters front and center in them all.

I’ve listed my gear in a separate article, and I was pleased with my Osprey Sirrus 36-litre backpack. I didn’t get any bruising on my hips and no back pain, so it wasn’t too heavy at around 8kg (plus water during the day). I made the mistake of a heavy pack on the St Cuthbert’s Way and paid the price! I was also grateful for my walking poles (LEKI Womens Micro Vario Carbon Trekking Poles), as the Portuguese route is rocky and uneven in places, plus they helped this tired and wobbly pilgrim keep going in difficult times!

During the day, I took pictures and wrote little notes in my phone, and then every morning, I woke early and wrote up the notes from the day before. If you want to reflect on your experience later, definitely keep notes and take photos as you walk. On a multi-day trip, the days blend together as the routine of pilgrimage shifts the passing of time in some strange way. 

Schedule time before you leave to prepare, both practically and also to shift out of your busy normal life into ‘pilgrim time,’ which is a slower, more reflective pacer. 

You’ll also need to schedule time when you return to ease back into things. Have at least a day in Santiago de Compostela to look around and attend mass, but also keep your schedule clear back home. I was exhausted and needed to rest the first few days, but also I found I couldn’t just jump back into busy work and meetings and noise. I needed some reflection time before ramping up to full speed. I’m writing this a month after returning, which has given me some space to reflect, and my blisters are all healed too.

I did my first solo multi-day pilgrimage, the Pilgrims’ Way in October 2020 between pandemic lockdowns, which I talked about in episode 50: This too shall pass. 

I walked the St Cuthbert’s Way alone in October 2021 when I was still recovering from Covid, and I have walked alone for many days in training. I love my husband, Jonathan. He is my best friend and we walk together a lot — but I needed those times to walk alone.

The pandemic lockdowns made me feel like a bird bashing its wings against the bars of a cage as I talked about in my lessons from the Pilgrims’ Way. I walked myself into submission over that time and the pilgrimage helped calm my anger and frustration and grief at everything going on in the world and my inability to change it. 

These last two years have also been a time of change physically and emotionally. I’m 47 as I record this and I’m still in the hormonal rollercoaster of midlife which has impacted my sleep and mental health and, compounded by the pandemic, has made the last few years pretty tough. I had terrible insomnia for most of it but am grateful that has now been fixed by HRT patches, which have been truly life-changing for me. HRT is not for everyone, but I recommend reading Menopausing by Davina McCall if you or anyone you love is struggling through this phase. 

These long walks have given me so much during difficult times. I am goal-orientated and completing a pilgrimage route is a clear physical goal that you can tick off and feel a sense of accomplishment in finishing. I walked alone and proved to myself that I can do hard things, that I can walk through pain, that I can walk in all weathers, that I can deal with things going wrong and I can cope with my fears along the way. I have proved to myself that I am resilient and that has felt like an important thing to prove at this time of my life.

Many people walk pilgrimage at a time of change — out of a need to reset, or change jobs, or recover from grief, or find an answer to a question.

The Camino alone was not about changing my life and in fact, it made me realise how grateful I am for what I have in my creative business and happy marriage. But the three pilgrimage routes together over the last two years have certainly been a path of change through a rocky period in my life, and in the world in general. It feels like the end of one season and the beginning of another. Perhaps that’s just one of the gifts of middle age, but regardless, walking the Camino was the completion of a life goal and it closed one chapter so I can begin another.

You can find more reflections in my book, Pilgrimage, which combines aspects of the emotional and spiritual journey with practical tips which will hopefully help you if you are considering such a trip. You can find more details at jfpenn.com/pilgrimage.

I’d love to know what you think about this episode, or hear about your experiences from your own pilgrimage, or if you’d like to ask any questions, please leave a comment, or tweet me @thecreativepenn.

Buen Camino!

The post A Pilgrim In The Path Of History. Solo Walking The Camino De Santiago Portuguese Coastal Route With J.F. Penn appeared first on Books And Travel.

From the silver mines of empire to lithium mining under gigantic salt flats, Bolivia has played a significant part in history and is now shaping the future of green technology. Shafik Meghji talks about the diversity of the country from its landscape to its people and religious ceremonies, as well as recommended places to visit, and books to read.

Shafik Meghji is an award-winning travel writer, journalist, and author, specializing in Latin America and South Asia. He has co-authored more than 40 guidebooks. His latest book is Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia.

Show notes

You can find Shafik Meghji at ShafikMeghji.com

Joanna: Shafik Meghji is an award winning travel writer, journalist, and author, specializing in Latin America and South Asia. He has co-authored more than 40 guidebooks. His latest book is Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia. Welcome, Shafik.

Shafik: Thanks, Jo. It’s a pleasure to be chatting to you. Looking forward to talking about all things Bolivia.

Joanna: Let’s start with the basics, just in case people don’t know.

Shafik: Partly, as the title of my book alludes to, a lot of people who aren’t familiar with South America or Bolivia specifically, would find it difficult to place. It’s essentially right in the heart of South America. It’s bounded by five different countries; Brazil, and Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, and Chile.

It’s incredibly geographically and climatically diverse, so it’s landlocked, but apart from the sea, it has the world’s largest salt flat, it has massive payotes due to the Lake Titicaca, which I’m sure lots of people have heard of.

It has some of the highest mountains on earth, of course, the Andes, it’s got part of the Panama Canal, which is the world’s largest tropical wetland, which he shares with Brazil, around a third of it lies within the Amazon basin. There are foothills and there are low-lands. There’s desert-like landscapes, this huge metropolis, like cities is incredibly diverse, and the climate ranges from absolutely freezing to sweltering. And you can sometimes experience both of those in the same day.

Joanna: How brilliant. We’re going to come back to some of these places.

Shafik: I think like a lot of places and destinations that people come to love, it was really just by chance, it was a bit of an accident. I started off my career as a news desk sports journalist, and then slowly got fed up with that and resigned, and went backpacking around India, and then around South America.

I was really at that point, just in the highlights, I wanted to go to Rio for Carnival, and I had a wonderful time there.

Joanna: Of course.

Shafik: Of course, it’s impossible not to and really I only planned to spend a few weeks there and ended up spending a couple of months. But after that I’ve managed to drag myself away and I wanted to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, The Classic Gringo Trail stuff. But at the time I couldn’t afford to fly and the cheapest way was to travel overland from Brazil to Peru, through Bolivia. And so I planned to do that and didn’t really think too much about it.

I didn’t really know much about the country.

But as soon as I crossed the border, I got hooked, I ended up travelling to the Salar de Uyuni, an otherworldly landscape, the world’s largest salt flat. I visited the world’s richest silver mine, I traveled into the Amazon and explored the most biodiverse National Park on Earth. I went to some of the highest cities in the world, well over 4000 meters.

During that time, I really started to learn a bit more about the cultures, the peoples, the history, and I realized that this country that most people, including myself, before visiting would have had trouble placing on a map has actually influenced and helped even to shape the world in profound and unexpected ways. And that really led to kind of a lifelong love of the place.

So I later returned as a travel writer to co-author The Rough Guide to Bolivia. And that gave me a great excuse and an opportunity to visit virtually every part of the country. In doing so, I met so many fascinating people who were generous enough to share their stories. And I learned about the history of the country.

I learned about how, really, it feels like the future has arrived in Bolivia. It stands on the front line of so many touchstone issues, like climate, emergency, populism, and so on. And that all was brought together in my book Crossed Off the Map.

Joanna: I want to return something you said, that Bolivia has influenced and shaped the world in unexpected ways. I bet everyone’s listening is as surprised about that, because probably we don’t know.

Shafik: I’ll tell you the story that really first gave me an insight into this aspect of Bolivia’s history, and it was a visit to a place called Potosi, which today most people outside the country don’t really know too much about it, may not have heard of it before.

Potosi is the second highest city on Earth. It’s high up in the Altiplano, which is a high plane between two branches of the Andes. It’s a city and above it, well, is a mountain called Cerro Rico and that was home about 500 years ago to the richest silver mine in history.

During the Spanish colonial period, so much silver was pulled out of these mines that they said that according to legend you could build a solid over railway track all the way from Bolivia to Madrid, and still have enough leftover for a solid silver engine divide on top.

This silver changed the world. It connected up Europe, and Latin America, and Africa, and Asia, together for the first time. The silver was shipped to Europe, which helped to fund the Industrial Revolution, and various wars and conflicts. It traveled over to Asia to Manila on these huge galleons. And there, it was traded for Chinese-made goods.

It became such a significant place for hundreds of years.

And it became synonymous with great wealth in ‘Don Quixote,’ there’s a phrase ‘worth a potosi,’ which means worth a fortune, which would have been commonly understood at that time, now is obviously drifted out. It’s also the source of that quirky things such as ‘pieces of eight’. This pirate phrase is actually based on some of the silver currency that came out of Potosi.

When I visited, I didn’t know anything about this. But I ended up going into these mines, which are centuries old, now they call them rat runs, they’re very claustrophobic and simultaneously thousands of meters above sea level, and hundreds of meters underground, and you’re crawling on your stomach. And then there’s all these poisonous dusts around.

There was arsenic dust everywhere when I visited. It’s a very unsettling place. And you see the miners who still work there now the silver has largely long gone. But many miners still work there hoping to strike it rich in very, very difficult conditions. It’s incredibly intense experience.

That started to give me an idea and an interest in the history. And then the more I read, and the more I learned, and the more I spoke to people in the city, I realized what an influence of this city, once on of the richest and biggest on Earth, but now forgotten, that had on the rest of the world.

It’s stories like that, that helped to spur me to write the book, because I thought these are just fantastic stories. And they deserve to be better known beyond Bolivia’s borders.

Joanna: Wow, that is so interesting. When you look into history, and you realize how far things travel, it’s incredible. What you’re talking about there is essentially pillaged out of Bolivia and taken across the world. I wonder how much of our silver that we look at here even in England is from there. I presume it doesn’t have a mark.

Shafik: Absolutely. People listening to this podcast will have silver, they got old heirlooms, family heirlooms perhaps, or things that are made a few 100 years ago, they may well have something made from Potosi silver.

And I should say at this point that, of course, all of this wealth came at a great cost. It was borne by the indigenous peoples of the Andes.

And it was also born by enslaved Africans who were trafficked over to labor in the mines, and in the smelting plants and so on. But definitely Potosi silver, people will have seen it, and some people may have it in their possession without knowing it.

One other side kind of quirky thing from that is that the dollar sign one of the most recognizable symbols today, the origin of that also kind of drifts back to Potosi. Potosi’s initials, used to be stamped on the silver coins that were made in the Royal Mint, which is now a fascinating Museum in Potosi. And they were shipped around the world. The PTSI over one another vaguely resembles the dollar sign. And that was how that particular symbol developed.

Joanna: Wow. That’s so interesting. Coming back to the indigenous people, because the history of the world is a history of conquest. But there are I think, based on looking at your book, there are still aspects that the indigenous people still play a part in the culture.

Shafik: Well, this is one of the aspects of Bolivian society that really fascinates me and also, I think, is really of interest to the increasing numbers of travelers and tourists that make it out there.

Huge numbers of Bolivians have indigenous heritage. And there’s an incredible range of indigenous cultural groups across the country with often very different beliefs, and practices, and cultural makeups, and so on. And really, over the last 20 years or so, often many centuries of repression and violence and so on.

Some of those things are starting to be collected in Bolivia. Bolivia, about 20 years ago had the first indigenous president in South American history Juan Evo Morales. And although his legacy is mixed, shall we say, one of the things that it led to was a real flourishing of indigenous identity, and pride, and representation.

If you travel in Bolivia today, or any part of Bolivia, from the hot and sweaty east and low-lands, all the way up into the Amazon or to the high-altitude cities of the Andes, you will see indigenous culture thriving in a way that you may not see in many neighboring countries such as Chile, or Argentina, or Brazil.

And of course, these indigenous cultures are fused with European influences. And also African influences, as I mentioned, huge numbers of enslaved Africans were trafficked to Bolivia, and elsewhere in South America, of course, during the colonial period. All of these are fused together.

I’m sure we’ll talk about some of the festivals and celebrations later in this talk, but you really see some of those, this fusion of ideas and this blend and this mixture of influences coming together in events like that.

Joanna: Tell us about these now. And you’ve mentioned that wherever you travel, you can find this.

Shafik: Absolutely. It’s always better to be specific with these kinds of things. I’ll pick a couple in terms of festivals and religious celebrations.

Carnival in Bolivia, and carnival’s celebrated across Bolivia. But the most famous one is in a city called Oruro, which is an old tin mining city in the Andean region, and it can be a kind of melancholy place for much of the year. But during Carnival, late February, early March, it becomes a riot of activity.

As I mentioned the celebrations blend indigenous African and European influences, their parades and street parties. The highlight is the Diablada, which is the dance of the devils. And essentially, that’s a snaking procession of dancers in devilish masks, clanging brass bands coming up behind them, and there is figures representing Lucifer and Archangel Michael, everyone’s in absolutely outlandish costumes.

Despite the Christian veneer behind things, you really see the indigenous origins of the beliefs coming to the fore. Lucifer, as is often said, to represent the Andean god of the underworld.

You can go along and as people might expect from carnivals around the world, there’s copious eating, and drinking, and dancing, and merrymaking, and so on. But the Oruro Carnival is an absolutely fascinating thing to really experience.

But the architecture I’m often most interested in, is in a place called El Alto.

Now El Alto is not too familiar for people outside of South America is the highest city on Earth. It’s just above La Paz, which is the de facto capital. And it’s really it’s developed, it’s one of the fastest growing cities in South America. It’s developed massively over the last 40 years or so. Huge numbers of indigenous migration, predominantly people from the Aymara and indigenous group who have fled droughts and it’s often caused by the climate crisis, which is having a huge impact in the Andes, but also economic crises and political crises and so on.

They flocked to this city and it’s become a real hotbed of Aymara culture and identity. And one of the ways that you see this expressed is in the architecture, and over the last couple of decades, something called cholets have developed. These are multipurpose, incredibly colorful, bright buildings that double up as shops as entertainment spaces for weddings or birthday parties, and so on, which play a big role in Aymara culture, and there’s often some housing as well, and including for the owner, often a chalet, which is part of the portmanteau word.

But the look of these buildings is incredibly eye-catching. You’ll have some that resemble characters for Marvel movies, you’ll have some that represent…there’s one that has been designed to look like Optimus Prime, a character from transformers. They have Technicolor, lots of glass and mirrors and all manner of colors, and they blend both kind of modern touches with indigenous Andean symbols. It’s a real clash of influences.

The last time I visited, I had a wonderful guide, and she described it as firecracker architecture. I certainly can’t do any better than that. But I really advise the audience to stick it into Google after you’ve listened to this and have a look, because they’re absolutely fascinating but also they’ve got a great story behind them, too.

Joanna: That’s great. I always like to find pictures for the show notes. So hopefully I’ll have some, if people want to go look at the show notes. But I want to come back, lots of things to come back on.

You mentioned this thin Christian veneer. I like that phrase a lot. When I was having a look at your book and about a cities that it seems that death culture and occult things are more common.

Tell us what is underneath this thin Christian veneer that you mentioned?

Shafik: It’s something that if you visit a city like La Paz, it’ll immediately become obvious to you just as you wander the streets.

Let’s start off with the cemetery. It’s the Cementerio General, the general cemetery, the biggest in La Paz. But essentially, it’s a mini city, I think it’s roughly about 1.5 square miles. So huge really, kind of dates back to the early 1800s. And they’re really compact, too. So they’re all stacked on top of each other, almost like shelves, and space is of an essence.

La Paz is in a valley high up in the mountains, very, very steep sides. But the buildings are absolutely crammed in there, there’s not a lot of space. So that’s reflected in something like the cemetery. I believe that remains had to be cremated after about 10 years and moved to a smaller space. So you’re often only temporarily in a slot in the cemetery. But if you walk round, it feels like you’re in a mini-city of the dead within the larger city of La Paz.

Actually, just to go very briefly off tangent, you’ll find this similar things in other South American cities, even in places like Buenos Aires, the famous Recoleta cemetery, huge, huge places, and they’re right in the middle of the cities. They’re more of an urban field than often our graveyards and cemeteries are, say in the UK.

But often when I’m traveling to research articles, or to collect books, I always pay a visit to the cemetery because I think they offer an incredible insight into the history, the place just the names, the causes of death and that kind of thing. It offers an insight into the culture and the history.

Something that’s much more on the tourist trail than that though, is the Witches’ Market, which is in the heart of the tourist, their backpacker area. And essentially, although it’s called the Witches’ Market, that’s actually a kind of a Spanish colonial term is women, predominantly indigenous women known locally as chifleras.

It’s a cross between a healer, a counselor, a doctor, a medicine woman, it doesn’t have the kind of the pejorative sense the witch is often used that for in an English language point of view. But their stalls are absolutely incredible to look around. Often they have all manner of amulets and potions and the thing that really strikes newcomers the most are the llama fetuses which are dried…

Joanna: Oh.

Shafik: …and, yeah, and hung up above the door. And you often have to duck under them to get into these tiny shops. And they’re really like almost as big as a broom cupboard is that kind of thing.

The Ilama fetuses feature very heavily in traditional central Andean traditions. For example, if you’re buying a new house, or you’re building a new house, you will often bury Ilama fetus beneath the surface, beneath the foundations, and that’s supposed to bring you luck.

Joanna: It’s like a rabbit’s foot here in the UK. People carry a rabbit’s foot for luck. We don’t now, but it’s one of these lucky charm type things.

Shafik: Exactly. And actually, it’s a really good example to bring up because often if you’re coming from UK, you come from Europe, this seems crazy and outlandish and ‘very exotic.’ But, actually, when you interrogate some of our own beliefs, often actually there are similarities with them.

I should say the llama fetuses are stillbirth, they’re stillborn. So that’s how they come about. Across the Andean part of Bolivia, you’ll see llamas and alpacas play a huge part in the culture both as food, and transport, and for cultural reasons.

The so called Witches’ Market rather, offers a fascinating insight into these beliefs which live in beliefs, really. And particularly if you speak some Spanish, then you can have a chat with some of the chiflera, who normally if you buy something, will be happy to talk.

Joanna: You mentioned that this so called Witches’ Market is in the tourist area, and you said earlier about The Gringo Trail and this backpacker route and it comes down to one of the difficulties that I think you do tackle in your book, which is that yes, we want to travel. We are people who like to travel. But there’s also the climate crisis that you mentioned. Are we changing culture through backpacking and all of this?

Shafik: I think this is a key question for really for travel writers, but all of us who travel and go on holiday at the moment. First of all, if you’re in the UK, you’ve got to fly to Bolivia, which obviously has a huge carbon imprint. Putting that to one side, there are lots of ways that while you’re there, that you can actually have a positive impact on local communities, and particularly local communities that are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

There are lots of really good community-run and indigenous-run tourism agencies. And also lodges give you a really good practical example, there’s a logical Chalalan, which is Parque Nacional Madidi Amazon, is run by an indigenous community. And it’s helped to both empower that community and also help to preserve some of the most biodiverse rainforest on Earth.

So I think if you’re there, there’s ways to have a positive impact. Obviously, try and avoid internal flights, as tempting as that can be. But also be aware that the way you spend your money, you’re obviously having an impact on the local cultures, as well.

The Witches’ Market, which obviously we’re just talking about, is aimed at local people, originally, but it has become more touristy in recent years. And you can generally see that some aspects of it are played up. It’s a difficult balancing act, because also tourists spending money is a key source of income for these people as well.

So I think, definitely look for independent places to stay in, look for locally and, ideally, indigenous-ran tourism organizations to go with travel agencies, and really try and minimize your carbon impact once you’re there, which is taking public transport, avoiding flights.

And also, if you visit reserves, not just in the Amazon, but also places like the Salar de Uyuni, which is the world’s largest salt flat, the tourism gives local people an economic incentive to help conserve these often very threatened ecosystems. So it’s a thorny issue, that there’s not easy answers to it. But there are certainly ways to minimize the negative impact you have, and in certain areas have a positive impact when you visit.

Joanna: You’ve mentioned this salt flat several times. And part of me is like, “Okay, that sounds great.” And then part of me just has this view in my mind that, “I would never want to visit a salt flat.”

Shafik: On the surface, it doesn’t sound super appealing. But if you imagine an incredibly flat blindingly white, the brightest place I’ve ever been, expanse, surrounded by volcanoes, and mountains, and dotted with these islands of giant cacti. It’s a really otherworldly landscape. And I just said it’s the biggest in the world is roughly the size of Jamaica. That’s how big this salt flat is.

This is only one of several salt flats in southwestern Bolivia. But you can explore on detours and the surface of the salt flat, are covered by…they look like giant fish scales, kind of hexagonal shapes. And you can play lots of tricks with perspective, while you’re there. It’s a hallucinatory landscape. It really is. It feels like stepping onto another planet.

And there’s a nearby reserve as well, which is even higher altitude. And there they’ve got mineral stained lakes. So there’s a green lake. There’s a red lake as well, dotted with flamingos. There’s this surreal stones that have been sculpted by the very high winds there. There’s areas that look like lunar landscapes.

Salt flat really doesn’t do this area justice, the Salar de Uyuni and the neighboring Eduardo Alvaroa Reserve, are really almost as close as you can get to stepping onto another planet as you can on Earth.

Joanna: Yeah, that’s kind of crazy. Is that the place where they did some of these fastest cars racing across the what looks like a desert? Is that on the salt flats or is that in America? I’m trying to remember.

Shafik: The time trials, I think, they do on salt flats in the U.S., but they do very much have in the Salar de Uyuni as well. In fact, the Paris Dakar Rally, which confusingly now is often over in South America has been held on the salt flats in the past, and in fact, there’s other sporting events as well. There’s an ultramarathon that goes across it as well, which is challenging to put it mildly because you’re 3600 meters above sea level.

The altitude is really testing. And it’s an incredibly remote area yet is linked by train or a town on the edge is linked by train from some of the bigger cities, but you just have to travel across by Toyota Land Cruisers. You often have this landscape to yourself.

This is dotted with small communities that rely on salt trading, which has been an industry in this area for millennia. Quinoa farmers, llama herders. But, yeah, it’s a fascinating place to visit.

Also it has more modern challenges. It’s a big area for smuggling, both for cars and for drugs, because it’s very close to the Chilean border. And the terrain is very, very difficult to manage. So an awful lot of cars and drugs crisscross over the border.

Beneath the surface of the salt flat, and the surface of the salt, there’s kind of like a briny fluid, which is very rich in lithium.

Lithium is the lightest metal on earth. The fact that we’re able to do this recording is thanks to the lithium battery in our laptops.

Lithium is essential for electric vehicles. It’s used in solar panels. It’s an absolutely vital material, or metal, for our transition to a hopefully fairly soon to a lower carbon global economy. According to some estimates, roughly 50% of the world’s lithium supplies lie in, what’s called The Lithium Triangle, which is in this part of Bolivia, and also in neighboring Argentina, and Chile.

At the moment, if you’re traveling for so long with all these natural wonders, and these things like salt traders, which seem to have been around forever, you will also find these grids of tennis court-sized pools of turquoise water or turquoise liquid. These are the fledgling lithium programs with the brine being pumped up.

And funnily enough, recently, I think over the last couple of months, Bolivia has actually started to produce its first electric cars within the country as well, taking advantage of its lithium reserves. So all in all, the Salar de Uyuni is an incredibly diverse, it’s an interesting place to explore, particularly at the moment.

Joanna: I used to work for a mining company in Australia, and you see the landscape quite dramatically changed when mining wealth is found. So I can imagine that that will change quite a lot over the coming years. So that’s really interesting.

A quick question before we talk about books. You’ve mentioned the altitude a number of times and I do know someone who came to Bolivia and got sick with altitude sickness.

Shafik: Yes, it’s absolutely something to be aware of. If you’re visiting the Western Andean side of Bolivia, most of it is very high attitude. So if you’re flying to La Paz, you’re flying to the world’s highest international airport, which is well over 4000 meters. If you’ve got the time, the best way to avoid it is to fly into sea level, you’re as close as you can at sea level to another city, and then slowly make your way up, pausing every 500 or 1000 meters. So you adapt.

However, that’s not a luxury that everyone has. So if you do fly into La Paz, really take it easy for the first few days until you’ve started to acclimatized. Get lots of sleep, drink lots of water, avoid alcohol, and definitely don’t overdo it.

Even when you adapt, you’ll still feel tired, you’ll get exhausted quickly. I always think of it as a bit of an insight into the aging process kind of speeded up, because even just climbing a flight of stairs will feel like scaling Everest.

Definitely take it easy, but be aware of these symptoms as well. And unless you’ve got a serious attack of it, in which you should go to hospital, the best approach is to descend. Even within La Paz, there’s various park places either in the city or nearby that are lower altitude. So if you’re struggling, descend.

Joanna: Yeah, good tip. So we’re always out of time. And this is the Books and Travel podcast.

Shafik: One of the things, it’s a real shame the very few Bolivian authors are translated into English and beyond academic books, very few English language authors write about the country which is one of the reasons that I wrote Crossed Off the Map to help fill this in, but there are definitely a few other books that I would recommend.

The first one is The Bolivia Reader, which is Duke University Press, and it’s got several editors. It features an incredible range of extracts of writing about Bolivia, mainly from Bolivian authors. You have pieces by the former President Evo Morales, who was the first indigenous president in South America, but also by people like Che Guevara, who died in Bolivia. And also conquistadores like Pedro Cieza de León, who provides one of the earliest written accounts of Bolivia. So the book ranges from ancient stories and poetries, and legends, to fiction, and contemporary journalism. As I say, I particularly found it useful and interesting to read the early accounts from the 16th century.

One of the other books I’d recommend is 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, and that examines the indigenous societies across the Americas, including in what is now Bolivia, prior to the arrival of the Europeans. It was particularly interesting on the ancient cultures of the Llanos de Moxos, which is a part of the Bolivian Amazon. These ancient societies built thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of earthworks structures, including even pyramids in some of the most challenging environments imaginable. It’s an incredibly insightful book. And actually, it was a huge inspiration for Crossed Off the Map.

Also in the Bolivian Amazon, which is the reason that is often overlooked, so I always like to emphasize it is a book called Lost in the Jungle by a guy called Yossi Ghinsberg. People might be familiar with it because he was turned into a film a few years ago called ‘Jungle,’ with Daniel Radcliffe. It’s an adventurous tale of survival in the Bolivian Amazon.

Essentially, Yossi Ginsburg was a Israeli backpacker who went off on a expedition into the rainforest inevitably goes wrong, and he ends up lost and alone. But he survived. He went to great odds, despite being menaced by wild animals, not having any food, and so on. He was eventually rescued by indigenous communities, and wrote a very interesting and exciting book about it.

There’s also a coda to that book because it really helped to encourage interest in the Bolivian Amazon amongst backpackers. Initially, Israeli backpackers, but then, backpackers from the UK, Europe, and beyond. And it helped to turn a place called Rurrenabaque into a hub of eco-tourism. So it’s had an interest in afterlife, as well. But I think those three books will give you a bit of an insight into Bolivia’s history, and also its contemporary life.

Shafik: Right, if you can spell up my name, I’m easy to find. It’s shafikmeghji.com. And then that’s the same for my twitter and Instagram handles and Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia is available from all good bookshops.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Shafik. That was great.

Shafik: Oh, my absolute pleasure, Jo. Thanks for having me on.

The post Shaping The World In Profound And Unexpected Ways. Bolivia With Shafik Meghji appeared first on Books And Travel.

How is pilgrimage different from just a long walk? Why do we feel a calling to pilgrimage even when not religious? How does pilgrimage connect us to our physicality, and simplify life so we find some perspective? Kevin Donahue talks about some of his ‘sacred steps’ on various pilgrimage routes across Europe.

Kevin Donahue began walking pilgrimage routes in 2019 and hosts the ‘Sacred Steps Podcast,’ where he discusses pilgrimage with fellow pilgrims. He’s currently writing a book, Sacred Steps: A Pilgrim’s Journal, out in 2023.

Show notes

You can find Kevin Donahue at SacredStepsPodcast.com and on Instagram @kevincdonahue

You can listen to my interview on Kevin’s podcast about my pilgrimage to Canterbury here.

Jo: Kevin Donahue began walking pilgrimage routes in 2019, and hosts the Sacred Steps Podcast, where he discusses pilgrimage with fellow pilgrims. He’s currently writing a book, Sacred Steps: A Pilgrim’s Journal, out in 2023. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks, Jo. It’s great to be on. I appreciate getting a chance to talk with you today.

Jo: I’ve been on your show discussing my pilgrimage and you talk about pilgrimage a lot. And so, this is fascinating, but let’s start with a definition.

Kevin: That’s a great question, Jo, and I think this is something that’s really a bit intimidating for people when they hear the word ‘pilgrimage.’

I didn’t really know what that meant to me as a walker at first. I went to the Webster’s children’s dictionary, because, for me, if Webster could explain it to a child, surely that could be something I would understand. And the dictionary said, look at pilgrimage and then look at pilgrim, a person who travels to a holy place as an act of religious devotion.

That made a lot of sense to me. Because when you think about devotion, that gets into intention and purpose. And if you’re walking with this intent, versus a long walk, which you and I have both actually done a lot of, Jo, but pilgrimage is as much about the journey as it is the destination.

I think it’s those moments of greater awareness, either about ourselves or, to some degree, maybe our faith or our world, or how we interact and engage with the world around us, that really makes pilgrimage so rewarding. And it’s that spirit of each step of the journey having significance, rather than just the beginning or the end. It’s the full process, I think, that makes pilgrimage much different than just a long walk.

Jo: That’s really interesting. We’ll come back to some of those aspects, but I noticed that you call yourself a ‘reluctant pilgrim’ on your website.

Kevin: I’ve had the opportunity in the United States to do some of our national scenic trails, and we have some great ones. I’ve walked along the Appalachian Trail, haven’t finished the whole thing just yet, the Florida National Scenic Trail. I’ve walked out in the western United States. And like you said, those are long walks.

I had always wanted to do the Camino de Santiago in Spain. And I made the decision, but as it grew closer, I really didn’t understand the concept of pilgrimage and how it related to me. So, I jokingly said I was a very reluctant pilgrim, because I didn’t set out to be a pilgrim or to go on pilgrimage. I wanted to have this bucket list experience, this life-affirming socialization, walking in the footsteps of history, where people had trod for a thousand-plus years. And that seemed really like a great, great walk for me.

It’s those other elements that intervened throughout the process that really reconnected me in some ways to my faith, because I was, I think what we would call ‘lapsed but listening,’ where you can be someone who maybe follows Christ as a Christian, but not necessarily follows the orthodoxy and teachings maybe of a Christian church or denomination.

Being on that walk and going through some of the places that I got to experience, which, I think that’s the great part about pilgrimage, you come and engage with these different places and people, that really, I think you said, what was it that sparked? I think for me, that’s what maybe pushed me over the edge a little bit and changed my long walk into a pilgrimage. And I think it’s something that happens for each person very individually, and perhaps quite a bit differently.

Jo: It’s interesting because as we talked about before, I’m not a Christian, but I would say I’m a seeker and I find moments of connection with the divine, I suppose, or the universe. But I definitely do not follow a Christian religion, or any particular religion.

It’s interesting because you started off by defining a sort of traveling to a holy place as an act of religious devotion, and that pilgrimage is going to these holy places.

And I always feel like even if we don’t adhere to a particular religion, there’s something about pilgrimage that touches a part of every person’s soul, if they have any form of kind of spiritual seeking. And so, it’s not just that it has to be a Christian faith or any kind of, because the pilgrimage is obviously in every religion.

Kevin: Oh, you are spot on, Jo. There’s a great organization in the UK, the British Pilgrimage Trust, and their mantra is that they want to enliven pilgrimage for people of all faiths and none. I think that’s such a powerful mission statement. Because it speaks to so much of what these special places have meant in our lives collectively, for centuries and millennia.

We look across the UK and there are these sacred places that we know had such great value to our ancestors. One of the obvious ones that stands out for U.S. tourists is Stonehenge. Or up the road in Avebury, Woodhenge. And you say to yourself, ‘I’m standing in a place where people have journeyed here for centuries.’

And, to your point, that’s obviously not a Christian church. There’s no cross and steeple. But clearly, people have held that space in high regard. And it might have been something where people had journeyed from a great distance to come to be in this space.

I think we can all recognize that there are these places where we feel a greater sense of purpose or a greater sense of connectivity, whether that’s with something spiritual, or whether it’s with our own self-identity and feeling of self-worth.

I think pilgrimage does mean something different to everyone, but I think it has meaning to everyone. And, again, I think that’s a bit about what separates pilgrimage from a long journey is that it’s the process of making that trip that has significance to the person that’s undertaking it.

Jo: Absolutely. And that resonance with faith in whatever over the generations, and a resonance with that emotional connection and people of faith in a particular place, I almost feel leave an imprint that, and that’s almost what we feel. You can feel that it’s God touching you, and it may be that, but you can also feel that it’s connection to people across millennia.

I remember being at Stonehenge once, and there weren’t many people there. It was winter. It was freezing cold, and there was a murmuration of swallows or swifts or the murmuration when the birds flock in shapes above Stonehenge. And I was standing there going, ‘This has to be some kind of divine experience.’ It was a crazy kind of experience, and feeling like I was connecting to this sort of deep Earth power, whatever it was.

Kevin: We’ve talked about that a little bit on my podcast, the ‘Sacred Steps Podcast.’ My guests are not formally Christians. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people of no faith, and people who are Buddhist and people who are Muslim. These journeys have great weight and significance for people.

You can go into a space, and it might be a church. We’ve talked about, Jo, you love the architecture and the devotion that people have made into creating these spaces, and the beauty that resonates with them.

And you can be in a space that man has made, a church or what have you, and you can feel a significance that is not necessarily tied to a particular orthodoxy.

I think whether you’re going to these ancient sites, whether you’re journeying to…and there are a lot of places where our different faith practices hold in high regard. Their wells and their caves and their springs, but natural places that you find out in the landscape. Also, these sometimes grand shrines that man has made in practice of faith. Being in these spaces, to your point, you sometimes feel like that’s a very special space, and you’ve arrived at just the right moment.

Jo: Absolutely. Let’s talk about some of the various pilgrim routes that you’ve done, because you’ve done some bits of quite a lot of different ones. You and I almost met in person on the Cuthbert’s Way, but you were ahead of me going over to Lindisfarne.

Kevin: Great question, Jo. It’s more a product of necessity than intent.

Let’s circle back to that definition of what makes pilgrimage unique. The importance of the journey itself, step by step. Surely, then, one of the elements of pilgrimage is that it is not defined by just a singular starting point or a singular endpoint, although most frequently, we’re all walking to one spot.

1,000 years ago, a pilgrim would have begun their journey at their door, and walked towards this particular holy place or this particular significant location. And now, we kind of leave our homes and we jump on the train or we get on the airplane and we journey off to this starting point. We’re a bit constrained, at least I know I am, by how much time we can devote to that journey.

So, it’s time away from family. I have a teenage son, and there’s an investment of time factor. And then also, how much time you can take away from work or what have you. As a career person in the United States, we get a certain amount of vacation time.

I’ve always been trying to balance, I think, the purpose of my journey. Why do I want to do this walk? Versus what can I commit fully to the pilgrimage? For me, sometimes it’s only been a week or a couple of weeks that I can be away. And some of these walks are intimidatingly long. You and I have talked about the Camino de Santiago, from St. James, a walk like that’s five or six weeks, and you say, ‘Well, wow, I can’t devote that.’

But I’ve come to learn, and a good friend of mine, English author, Andy Bull, wrote a book called Pilgrim Pathways where he looks at weekend walks, getting into these special spaces, where you’re only devoting a small amount of time because that’s what you have available.

For me, and I want to talk to you a little bit about where I’ve been, but in some instances, it’s been more of a product of what time can I devote to this pilgrimage has defined in some ways the length that I’ve been able to walk. I’ve had to start in some places that had significance for me, that maybe weren’t at the ‘starting gate.’ So, that’s been an interesting part of it.

Jo: I think this is so important, because humanity just makes up rules for things. And it’s like, there’s a measurement of everything that we do. Clearly, the pilgrimage where someone walks for six months from Canterbury to Jerusalem is far more holy than you (!), who only walked for a week or…

Kevin: I would think it would be.

Jo: As you said, it’s about the intention, it’s about the purpose. If it’s an act of religious devotion, and you walk to your local church on a Sunday.

There shouldn’t be judgment or self-judgment around what we did. It’s funny, isn’t it? We always just impose these rules on things.

Kevin: My self-judgment was on full display the day after I arrived in Santiago de Compostela on the Camino de Santiago. You make these walks, and I had done not a long distance. I had done about 100 miles.

I walked the Camino Portuguese section, up through Spain. I was feeling quite proud of myself. I had done this long walk and I had walked along further than some. I was pretty proud of that.

There was some ego there. And there was this lady in the cathedral, and she must have been, I don’t know, 80 years old, 80-plus years old, and she had her walking stick. She was going from the pew straight up to the front of the church. And it was, from my perspective, it looked to be everything she could do to make that walk.

And here I was feeling so proud of myself, in my younger condition, that I had walked 100 miles or whatever. And here she was making a walk that was every bit as meaningful to her, and probably every bit as challenging as mine had been to me. I had to check my ego a little bit, because how we define a pilgrim and how we define that distance of pilgrimage, to your point, we put a lot of rules and a lot of vanity around it. It’s more about what someone gets out of it than what I judge they’ve put into it.

Jo: Absolutely. And I feel like I certainly found my ego broken down by some of the walking I’ve done.

Kevin: Oh my goodness. Jo, you’re an ultra walker. You would lap me a hundred times over.

Kevin: I’ve had the opportunity over the course of the last few years, COVID willing and health willing, to make a few of these walks. I mentioned I did the Camino Portuguese. I started in Vila Nova de Cerveira, and walked to Santiago de Compostela.

That was my first time doing a pilgrimage walk. Everything was a new experience, and it’s like you go to a museum for the first time, and everything you see is the most fascinating thing. And then you move over four feet and you’re like, ‘Oh, now this is now the most fascinating thing.’

Everything I saw and experienced was so fresh and new. I came up to the UK, and I walked a route that you did as well, from London to Canterbury, and the English Pilgrims’ Way. And I did a bit of a different route than you did, because I wanted to be in Rochester. I walked along the Thames Way and then walked over to Rochester, to be in Rochester Cathedral.

Being in the cathedral in Rochester was very important to me, because the patron saint of adopted children is celebrated there. Having an adopted son, I wanted to pay homage and pay respects in Rochester Cathedral. So that was very special to me.

Arriving in Canterbury was wonderful because, and you saw this too, Jo. You get into this grand cathedral, and you suggested to me not to miss Evensong. That was a really special experience for me, with the choir in the background. I was going on to Dover, to begin the Via Francigena. And that night, another pilgrim was arriving. She had walked the old way from Southampton. Caroline is her name.

The two of us were there and we were receiving a blessing. That night, Caroline’s walk was ending, and mine was going on. I had intended, but for those darn ferries in Dover, I had intended to go on into France and such. And so, my walk was continuing. She gave me a coin, a clay coin, that she had been given, and it had a shell sculpted into the coin and she had carried it with her.

It had been given first by a vicar and then to a pilgrim, and the pilgrim had given it to Caroline. And Caroline had given it to me, and now I was carrying it on. I ended up this year, I was in Italy, and I walked a section of the Via Francigena in Italy and I carried that same pilgrim coin with me to St. Peter’s in Rome. I was able to give it to a pilgrim who was walking on from Rome to Jerusalem. It was so special to see that this sort of connectivity between people and purposes was continuing on with his journey to Jerusalem.

As you said, you and I both had the opportunity to go to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, and walk across the sands to Holy Island. To me, that was probably one of the most special moments. I will never forget the storm that happened the night before, because, whew, Northumbria, there’s some storms, and that was a big one. Between the wind, the gusts, and the rain, I was really nervous about getting to walk the next morning.

But walking across the receding tides, the north sea, and you see these poles that mark the high route of the sands. And since the time of St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert, people have made their way to Lindisfarne. Following in their footsteps was really incredibly powerful for me. I’ll never forget walking to Holy Island.

Jo: I’m so glad you mentioned that one. It’s funny, isn’t it, because there are these incredibly grand cathedrals, obviously you mentioned Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury, and I felt it too. And as you were speaking there, I was remembering my own crossing, and yet it is just your feet in the sand and the water.

When I was there, it was a really sunny morning, and the seals were singing, which was just the oddest sound. I couldn’t really see many people, and there’s nobody waiting there, the same as finishing any pilgrimage. There’s no one waiting, going, ‘Wow, you’re amazing. You’ve reached the pinnacle of your journey.’

It’s these, you mentioned earlier, these moments of greater awareness, where we’re so aware of our place on the Earth, physically and spiritually, and part of this great tradition, as you say, and almost just much more in touch with our physical bodies than I feel we are in normal life.

Kevin: Oh, my goodness.

Jo: You know what I mean? Especially with that crossing. Did you do it barefoot?

Kevin: I did it barefoot. It was a visceral experience. You take your shoes off and you pull up your pants legs and you make your way out. Your feet first touch the seawater. And even the receding sea was covering…it hits your toes and it stings them. The water temperature is in the high 50s, and mid-50s. And it’s just, it’s like daggers.

Then it covers your feet. And then all of a sudden, your body adapts to it a little bit, and you’re walking out through the sands, and you kind of feel the sands and you touch these wooden beams, these wooden poles, that are ragged from rising tides and sea air, and the storms that roll in off the coast. You make your way from one to the next to the next.

It’s the bottom of the sea floor. So it’s not uniform. You go through these areas where all of a sudden now that stinging water is making its way up my leg and towards my knee. And then you get to a point where it’s a little higher. All of a sudden there’s grasses and such, sea grasses that may be growing there. And there’s a part that even protrudes above the tide most times. And it’s this sucking mud.

Jo: There’s a lot of mud!

Kevin: And you disappear. I disappeared past my knee, whew, right down into the mud. I’m walking and I’ve got my sticks and I’m trying to sort of maneuver my leg out of the mud, back up to make the next step. And it’s, fup, fup, fup, through the mud, and I look over and there’s this wellie that’s sitting there, stuck in the mud, where clearly somebody had just literally walked out of their boot, trying to make their way across. But it’s not a very long section of the walk. It’s maybe, what, Jo? A mile and a half maybe. It’s a short distance.

Jo: Yes. You can do it in an hour, really. An hour and a half, maybe.

Kevin: Yeah. Maybe 90 minutes at the most, and given the conditions. But, like you, I was alone out there. I like how you said the seals were singing and the birds are flying over, and you have to do it at low tide, which means, in many instances, you’re doing it in the very early morning.

For me, this was October, and it was maybe 7:00 in the morning, and the sun was just rising out over the sea to the east. I’ve been to the Vatican and St. Peters. I’ve been to the crypts and the Scavi. I’ve been to the tomb of St. James the Apostle. And as you said, standing in Canterbury and the beautiful cathedrals at Westminster and throughout England.

I don’t know what tops walking to Holy Island across the sea. That was a really special walk, and I’ll never forget the connectivity, like you said, that I felt in those moments.

Jo: I agree. We should also mention if people are going to do it, that it’s quite a shock to then walk into the little town on the island.

Kevin: Oh, absolutely.

Jo: Because you’ll come off the beach, and there’s cars coming on because the tide is down. And then you walk around the corner, and I was in shock at a coachload of literally American tourists, just arrived.

Kevin: Everyone’s on holiday, right? And here you are with your rucksack.

Jo: Suddenly, it’s mad. It’s bonkers. I stayed overnight. You have to book it, obviously. It’s a very small island. But the mass of tourists, they all leave again when the tide comes in, because it is a tidal island. By staying overnight, the atmosphere got a lot more holy again. But while all the people are there in their coaches, it can be a little bonkers. A really interesting place, right?

Kevin: Absolutely. From low tide to low tide, it’s a holiday market kind of atmosphere. Everyone’s there, they’re doing their tourist shops, and they’re eating and dropping in the pubs and going to the Lindisfarne Abbey, which is beautifully maintained. And there’s a bit of a fake castle there on the island, which is a bit of a tourist attraction.

There’s sort of an artist element, where people are coming to paint or take photographs, and just walk and explore. But then, once you get to that midway point of the tide, maybe 3:00 in the afternoon or 4:00 in the afternoon, the whole island vacates, and it’s just the local residents and those people who are staying overnight.

I agree with you 100%. I stayed overnight, in a wonderful inn, and the storytelling with the locals, and the opportunity to be with people. A few are on holiday, but a few who were also there to see the Abbey, and were treating it as more of a spiritual destination. You have the island to yourself.

I know there’s always this conflict with over-tourism, but to have it to yourself was really special. Definitely stay the night if you can at Lindisfarne. It was wonderful. It’s easy to catch the train up to Berwick, and then you can get a cab over if you’re just going for a bit, if you aren’t walking the way of St. Cuthbert. I definitely recommend a spot if you haven’t been before.

Jo: For sure. I think pilgrimage has to have its challenges, right? It’s not easy, and the challenges can be physical. They can be spiritual, personal.

Kevin: Oh, my goodness. On my very first one, I had spent two years reading, and really trying to understand what the pilgrimage experience was like. Because, to your point, I was a backpacker, and I had done walks, and so I understood how to be a backpacker.

I invested a lot of my preparation into understanding the culture and the camaraderie of pilgrims on the Camino. What I didn’t know to prepare for, or maybe I overlooked, or maybe no one warned me at all, was walking the Portuguese, a lot of the roads, a lot of the paths that you walk on are cobblestones.

As I was walking through these portions of Portugal, you’d go on a cobblestone road for a long stretch, a couple of miles, and then you would go off onto a hard rock stretch and then back onto the cobblestones. It really did a number on my feet. I ended up with what’s called stone bruises on the bottom sole of your feet. Normally, if you have stone bruises, you would want to rest.

Jo: Yeah, stop!

Kevin: Because it’s a bruise on the underside, the sole of your foot. If you’re trying to walk, maybe you can wobble back on your heels, but you certainly can’t go very far very fast. So, I had these stone bruises, and I battled with the stone bruises and just trying to find enough padding, batting that I could put under my foot, between my foot and my shoe, that I could continue my Camino. Because after so many years of preparing, I didn’t want it to be cut short.

I really didn’t want to sacrifice anything that I was looking forward to. So, I had a three or four-day pretty intense battle with the bottom of my feet.

What I learned was that you have to understand exactly where you’re going to be walking, and I didn’t have the right shoes for it. I had my regular walking shoes that I would walk through dirt paths or sand paths and very light underfoot, and a very lightweight type of shoe. I didn’t have a very rugged undersole.

That was a great learning for me. And now ever since, I don’t want to promote any brands, but I’ll tell you that I wear a shoe with a little more rugged undersole, which has been great for me.

Jo: Can you tell us the brand? Because I’m walking that route.

Kevin: Yes. I now wear, pretty much everywhere I go, a max cushioning shoe from Altra, called the ‘Altra Olympus.’ They make that in a men’s and women’s model. And there are a lot of max cushioning shoes, and they’re not for everyone because it’s like having two insoles in your shoe. If you’re a runner or a distance walker, you might feel like you’ve got a little less connectivity to the terrain.

[Imogen Clark mentioned the same issue on the Camino Portuguese, and she recommended HOKA SpeedGoat which also have the thicker sole.]

But if you’re walking with a backpack, on what I came to term as ‘hobblestones,’ that was exactly what you needed and what you wanted. As far as the physicality, this past year, when I was walking through Italy, it’s so darn hot in Europe right now. I was just there, and I walked in May and in June, and the closer you get, it was just so hot, and many places in walking the Via Francigena, especially as you get closer to Rome, the path is an old one.

You follow the route of Archbishop Sigeric, who was receiving his papers, if you will, from the Pope in Rome, and then recorded his route back to Canterbury. So, that is the official route from Canterbury to Rome. But as you walk, the towns have moved. Over time, where there used to be maybe less distance from place to place, because of the wars and Punic Wars and things that have all taken place over this time, you end up with cities that used to be there that aren’t there. And so, you’ve got some longer distances just out in the heat. That was very tough.

But the one thing I had no idea of, and you probably know this, Jo, it seems like, because of these battles and the different Papal States that have taken place throughout Italy, almost every little town and city in Italy is on top of a hill. As a walker, you walk 12, 15, 18, 20 miles throughout the day in this heat.

Then at the end of the day, your reward is that you get to go up this just crazy hill to reach the top of the city where you’re going to be sleeping that night, or where you have the opportunity to get dinner.

That was very, very challenging mentally for me because you’re so tired, and it was hot, and you were exhausted from the day. And then you’ve got this big hill push at the end, which sometimes was 400, 600 big, big meters up at the end, over short runs, that really were super challenging. And if there’s one thing I could change, I would flatten that part of Italy.

Jo: It’s interesting because these physical challenges, it is hard. We do put ourselves through this. And, I mean, either it’s really hot, or I remember my last day walking into Canterbury, it rained so hard for so long. I’d put in a really big day, and everything was so, so wet. And it feels like the gifts of pilgrimage don’t show up at the time.

Kevin: No. There are no trumpets that are sounding as you’re walking.

Jo: As you’re doing it. But I find that the gifts of pilgrimage come later. When you have time to reflect on the journey and you’re not just thinking about how much pain you’re in or how hungry you are, or how hot you are.

Kevin: I do think, in some ways, the physicality of it is an important part of the process. Because pilgrimage in and of itself is such a simple life. You eat, you walk, you pray, if you’re so inclined, and then you sleep.

Walk, sleep. A very simple life.

And you just have with you what’s on your backpack, what you’re carrying. So, you have very few possessions.

But as you go, the physicality, what I found, and you and I talked about this on our podcast together, it quiets the mind, but you become in this state where your body becomes a little numb physically, and you’re no longer aware of you stepped on a rock or whatnot, or you did this or that. It’s just sort of you get into this process of walking.

It opens the mind, I think, a bit to everything else around, and what you can see in these natural places. And the engagement that you have with the things around you.

To answer your question, the things that show up beyond the journey often do come later. For me, I think, well, I’ve had the opportunity to have a deeper connection to understand a bit better what’s important to me, and what I consider to be important faith practices that don’t necessarily involve a physical church.

I’ve become, I think, a little more compassionate for other people. My own awareness of my own sufferings and my own shortcomings, especially when you’re walking, and you’re just physically, you say to yourself, ‘I don’t know if I can take one more step,’ it gives me great empathy for people who are going through something in their lives, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I can definitely put myself in their shoes, and have a greater understanding of their challenges than I ever could before.

I think it’s made me a better father in some ways, because I’m more accepting of my own shortcomings. We tend to build ourselves up a bit. At least I do. I had a very large ego, and I think pilgrimage has been a very humbling experience for me to recognize that you think to yourself, ‘Oh, well, tomorrow’s an easy day.’ And turns out that easy day that you thought was going to be so easy, it rained.

Jo: I don’t think it’s ever an easy day, is there?

Kevin: No, there’s really not, but every day is unique and every day is special. I don’t know that I’ve always had an appreciation for that.

Lastly, I think I’m more aware of the intent that people have had in their own creations. You would go to a museum and you see something that has been painted, and obviously, it’s a masterpiece, and we all recognize the talent and the dedication it would take to do that. But just walking through a small town, a small village, and seeing the very ordinary church that had been constructed, and the less ornate paintings on its walls, that, when that was finished, the whole town must have gathered.

The whole church must have gathered and celebrated this more plain, less ornate, less celebrated fresco if you will, and what it meant to them. I think it’s given me a greater sense of understanding of the intent that people have behind what they do, not judging so much the, what I’m looking at, but what must have gone into it and what it must have meant to the people who were there in those moments.

Jo: That’s fantastic. Of course, this is the ‘Books and Travel Podcast.’

Kevin: I have a few that I’ve finished recently, finished in the last year, that I think are just great. Carolyn Gillespie. Just finished a book called Pilgrim that is a great story of the Camino Frances. Carolyn was a headmaster in a boarding school in England. Scottish lady. And as her children grew and went to university, she ended her professional career.

As an empty nester, now is finding herself without children, where children have been such a huge part of her life, both with the school and her own children. And walk the Camino Frances to give herself the headspace to kind of understand who she might be now. It’s a great book. It’s called Pilgrim by Cary Gillespie.

And another one that I just love, it’s so empowering, is a book by an Australian author Claude Tranchant and Claude…her name is a giveaway, is a French lady, and she walked, at age 64, by herself, alone, from Vezelay to Santiago de Compostela. Claude was not a walker, and had no sense of navigation, and she got lost. Literally, she got lost, and spent some nights in the middle of France, just in nowhere on the side of the road, sleeping on the road.

This little older lady made this journey, and it’s so empowering to me, because there’s a lot of backstory of the things that Claude had put first, ahead of her own self in her life. The Camino showed her what she was truly capable of and what strength she had within. I just love Claude Tranchant’s book. Boots to Bliss is the name of it.

And then for people who are thinking about walking, I mentioned it before, but especially in the UK, Andy’s book, Andy Bull’s book, Pilgrim Pathways, is a great pickup, because it’s written in a way that anybody could walk. It’s in England, Scotland and Wales.

There are 20 short walks, anywhere from a single day to two to three days. A lot of these are sections of longer walks. For example, we talked about the St. Cuthbert’s Way. Andy outlines a section of that, Northern Saints Walk, that you can make, and he shows you how to extend it. But it’s got all the routes, it’s got all the photos, and you can download the GPS routes if you want, and just put it into your OS Maps, and then all of a sudden, you’re a walker. You’re on these pilgrimages.

I just love it. I think it makes what is special to me, walking to these sacred places, so accessible for everyone. So, those are three good ones. Now, there are a lot of Camino books. And I hope to write one myself. I’m almost finished. So, hopefully, I’ll have that for you soon too, Jo.

Jo: Fantastic.

You’re writing Sacred Steps: A Pilgrimage Journal. Is that right?

Kevin: Yes. My first book, Sacred Steps: A Pilgrimage Journal really looks at this intersection of history and faith. The book takes these places that you and I know have been the footpaths of pilgrims for hundreds and now thousands of years, and looks at the historical context as I find myself in some of these places.

It’s really a look at the historical and the modern aspect of pilgrimage along five of these routes that I’ve walked. I don’t think I’ve told anybody this, but I got a little Jo Frances Penn envy when you and I were talking, and you told me, ‘Be careful, because one book could lead to two.’

Jo: Indeed.

Kevin: I’ve also started working on a fiction, a book, The Pilgrims’ Table, which is actually based loosely upon the stories that I’ve experienced and the stories that have been shared on the podcast, where people have encountered really unique and touching experiences throughout their journeys. I’m looking forward to getting that book.

It’s a lot of fun to write fiction, because I’ve never done it before. There’s a lot less fact-checking happening in fiction books, which is great. But it captures that essence of travel as well, and being in these spaces that we all love, and finding something new in discovery, and the things that, unless you go, and you’re in these places, you really just don’t have an appreciation for.

The way they smell, the way this flower dances in the morning light, and the way that the road looks when it’s wet from the rain. I think that’s one of the things we love about travel. Especially for me, slow travel, these walks, when you get to experience places and people and cultures in a way that you never would have on the train or on the plane, or even just motoring by on the highway. That’s become something I’m really so grateful for with these long walks, with these pilgrimage journeys.

Jo: Fantastic.

Kevin: Thanks, Jo. The ‘Sacred Steps Podcast’ is available on all of your podcast apps. So, join us. Jo Frances Penn’s episode is on there as well, from season two, so you can grab that one. We’re almost finished recording season three, and getting ready to look to recording season four. So, very excited about that.

The companion websites, sacredstepspodcast.com, sacredstepsbook.com, and then, slowly but surely, thepilgrimstable.com.

Jo: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Kevin. That was great.

Kevin: Jo, it’s delightful to talk to you. I can’t wait to hear more about your upcoming journeys and where you’re going, because the way you have made these spaces come alive, both in your books and on these podcast, is really, truly special. So, thanks for doing it, Jo.

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