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Comment by crummy | Hacker News Reader

How would someone financially do something like this in that era? Carry a lot of currency with you (seems dangerous?) or rely on lines of credit (how?) or...?

I assume they need some way to pay for food and lodging along the way.

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I read the excellent A Time Of Gifts, in which the author as a young man walked across 1930s Europe. While he relied on money sent from home in the form of postal orders in advance to European capitals, which would not be available to Stewart, this occasionally ran out. So he also relied a lot on being a guest of people he met, often with letters of introduction from a previous host. Or staying for free in Orthodox Greek monasteries. Where that failed he had to come up with moneymaking schemes such as being a portrait sketch artist in Vienna, or just foraging and wild camping.

Think about it. Late 1700s in the Middle East, predating the telegraph, train, postal, radio, or television era. All entertainment is local, all news is oral. Someone from England, a place so far away and storied that it might as well be Mars, turns up in the town. Is it really possible that nobody invites him to dinner? In a culture where hospitality is a supreme virtue?

You can still find that attitude in some places, but like a lot of natural resources it's been eroded by the very tourists that came to see it.

(Edit: I would strongly encourage anyone who is the least bit romantic about travel to read A Time Of Gifts, although you will need to keep diving out to wikipedia every five minutes to keep up with the author's historical and literary references. What's remarkable is the number of times he just turns up somewhere and lands on his feet - several times he simply comes to the end of the day, knocks on the door of the first house he comes to, joins the family for their meal, sleeps on their floor, and if he risks making an offer of payment it is sternly refused. This works with Bavarian woodcutters, nomadic herders in Bulgaria, but also German aristocracy. In return he offers his immense personal charm. It helps that he has a classical education; the peak of this is later, during the war, when on a peak of Cyprus he exchanges Horace quotes with the German general he has just captured.)

Fine book. However, one needs to be cautious about taking <i>A Time of Gifts</i> and <i>Between the Woods and the Water</i> as transcriptions of fact. In interviews Fermor admitted to conflating characters, fiddling with other details, and so on. He was also working with very little documentation for events that had occurred many years ago.

I once chanced upon this book about someone who embarked on a similar journey and then wrote about it at the end:

https://archive.org/details/HandToMouthToIndia/page/n11

IIRC, he was 18 at the time and had a flute, a sleeping bag, and less than 60 GBP to his name, and this might happened in the late 90s/early 2000s. Though I suspect he spent less time actually walking than Stewart.

Every now and then I see something like this pop up in the news, though usually its fundraising, or someone's blogging/instagramming their journey. Probably the biggest impediment to this style of travel is gradually increasing border protection in the wake of 9/11.

There's Sylvain Tesson, who crossed Himalaya with a friend on foot East to West in 1997, with barely any money, mostly for one guide and travel permits/visas. From what I read, they relied on people's charity for food and shelter.

They wrote a book, La Marche dans le ciel : 5 000 km à pied à travers l'Himalaya, which, AFAIK, isn't translated in English.

By offering your services in return - physical labour, or someone like Stewart could have offered to read, write, teach - or even just entertain, by telling stories of his travels.

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