THERE is a photograph in Clear Waters Rising, which shows Nicholas Crane standing with his wife on what might just be the misty shores of the Bosphorus. He wears owlish spectacles, longish hair, and a cheerful, open smile. Sticking out of his rucksack is a black umbrella; his wife is called Annabel. Just the sort of chap, in fact, to walk from one side of Europe to the other. Or, to be more precise, from Cape Finisterre to Istanbul.
If the name Crane rings a bell - a bicycle bell - it's because the author is also known for having cycled, together with his cousin Richard Crane, across Tibet and the Gobi desert. Another journey involved a 1,000 kilometre odyssey on horseback into the mountainous region of the Hindu Kush to investigate aid distribution in the area. The walk from Spain to Turkey, however, was just for fun - if you can call walking 10,000 kilometres fun. The little matter of reaching 40 was a further spur.
Nicholas Crane comes from a walking family. His parents, Nol and Naomi, were walkers and so was his grandmother, whose diaries he used while planning this journey. When he was 16, he and his cousin were taken by No to the middle of Dartmoor, given a tent, a supply of food and a grid reference. They made their rendezvous two days later with 20 minutes to spare and the only bad thing about the experience was that he lost his aluminium camping spoon.
Anyone interested in walking across the Sierras, the Pyrenees, the Cevennes, the Alps, the Carpathians and the Balkan mountains will find this book fascinating. I didn't. After a while, one ascent seemed very much like another, one camp site as wet and uncomfortable as the previous one, one rustic in Bulgaria not unlike the one sighted months ago in Spain and yet one more chunk of information looking suspiciously like padding: a village he passes through, we learn, is the birthplace of Placido Domingo's mother.
What did engage my mind - partly because I'm living out of a rucksack in Bosnia as I write this - is the nitty gritty of travelling: should he take two pairs of socks or confine himself to one and a half and rotate the three? His kitchenware consisted of mug, spoon, tin opener and twin bladed penknife - one knife for food, the other for chiropody. A plastic bag was used to carry pen, paper, a language dictionary and current map. Annabel was detailed to post, at regular intervals, a supply of vitamin pills and other maps.
The most engaging description of life on the hoof, however, involved his economical method of dressing within the confines of a tent: "I dismantled my pillow of clothing and stowed my trousers and shirt and socks down into the sleeping bag, to preheat them prior to dressing . . . Since Grenoble, I'd carried two sets of thermal underwear, one for sleeping and one for walking. So my first task was to remove the thermal long johns and vest and then replace them with an identical set inside the sleeping bag without either muddling the two lots or pulling on garments back to front." More swivelling and intent heaving takes place before he emerges through the flap in Goretex outfit and trilby - in which he stores his spectacles overnight.
Getting to the top of a mountain is inspiring, of course, but it's what goes on at base camp that tells you what a chap's really made of.
