In his last column for MSN, Simon Reeve explains the art of ‘stunt travel’..
If you have a go at stunt travel, I guarantee things will happen on your journey that you weren’t expecting, and random encounters with wild, wonderful people and creatures will brighten your day and fill your mind.
I have a long wishlist of stunt journeys, including following the 60s hippy trail east from London to Kathmandu, bagging 10 Munros in Scotland and taking a trip along the glorious River Danube, which flows through or forms the border of 10 countries including Germany, Croatia, Romania and Ukraine.
I even have a local version of stunt travel I want to try: take a mug, turn it upside down over a map of your area, centred on your home, draw a circle around the rim, and then explore that area by eating in every restaurant, climbing every hill, drinking in every pub - really getting to know where you live.
The Waste Land may be unfathomably complex but it is easy to love regardless of whether you understand it. The language is juicy and pungent, full of fire and rain, rivers and dust, birth and death – lots of death. I remember deriving a thrill of pleasurable dread from its sense of crisis and doom when I first read it as a teenager. Lines such as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” or “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” (from The Hollow Men) would be at home on the back of a goth’s leather jacket. Eliot offers a vivid grown-up take on a teenager’s sense that all is not right with the world. At a difficult age you get the impression he’s on to something terribly important, even if you’re not sure what it is.
“Running well demands focusing on our breathing, while staying attuned to our surroundings. These also happen to be the basic principles of meditation. “If we develop a relationship with our breathing, we do not have to struggle with it as much,” he writes. “Intuitively, runners know this. As we become more familiar with the process of breathing, we are essentially developing a relationship with the most elemental aspects of being alive.”“
“Over weeks of gradual exploration and slow experimentation walking a route alone, he was able to memorise a set three-mile course along little-used pavements and grass verges – albeit with some sections alongside a dual carriageway – near his home in Rossington, Doncaster. He also recruited technology to help him form his mental map of the area, using a smartphone app, RunKeeper, to provide aural feedback through headphones about his pace and distance. This information could then be cross-referenced with his knowledge of the route and any obstacles, giving him extra confidence regarding his surroundings.
Wheatcroft explains: “From where I start, the first turning is at about 0.75 of a mile and I knew it would take me seven minutes to run that. So when the app told me I’d been running for six minutes and my distance, I knew in the next 60 seconds there would be a turning and the pavement drops.”
Michael Winslow - Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (Senkveld med Thomas og Harald) (by FifaDragZ)
