The Hindu Kush
Image: Profumo

British Travellers

Eric Newby

Many people have found Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) unforgettable. He reminded us that the one thing we need in a travelling companion is a sense of humour.

Newby was working in fashion when he engineered his escape to the 18,000-foot eminences of the Hindu Kush with friend Hugh Carless. The resulting book is a hilarious and hair-raising account of their adventures. As their expertise in mountaineering had been hurriedly gained climbing a few hills in Wales, their gambits on precipices were usually life-threatening.

George Eric Newby, born in London in 1919 and educated at St Paul’s School, wrote many travel books. According to the Times, “his preferred mode of travel was overland, ideally on a bike with his wife, whom he had met during the Second World War. But in a world gradually shrinking under the pressure of adventure tourism, none perhaps was able so to capture the sheer delight of finding oneself for the first time in the untenanted wild places of the Earth.”

According to Edward Mace George of the Guardian, Newby was handsome and weather-beaten and had a "heart-warming chuckle". He was also, it has to be said, slightly vain-glorious.

In Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric and Wanda's journey down the length of the Ganges begins rockily:

Two hundred yards below the bridge and some twelve hundred miles from the Bay of Bengal the boat grounded in sixteen inches of water. . . I looked upstream to the bridge but all those who had been waving and weeping had studiously turned their backs. The boatmen uttered despairing cries for assistance but the men at the bridge bent to their tasks with unwonted diligence. As far as they were concerned we had passed out of their lives. We might never have existed.

They all get out, including Wanda, who is wearing “an ingenious Muslim outfit which consisted of peg-top trousers of white lawn and a hieratical-looking shift.”

Noting that “the bottom of the river is full of rocks the size of twenty-four pound cannon balls which were covered with a thin slime of green weed,” they begin to dig a passage, “lifting the great slimy stones and plonking them down on either side of the boat.” They run aground 63 more times in the first six days, but Eric and Wanda push doggedly on, a realistic and romantic couple alive to India. Newby describes their beautiful and difficult journey in prose Amazon reviewer James Marcus calls “lyrical yet laconic”, often amused, often amusing, and sometimes wise.

George says that Newby's finest book may be Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a book surprisingly touched by "compelling tenderness and compassion". In Love and War Newby recalls guerrilla warfare against the Germans in Italy (he served in the Black Watch and Special Boat Section), and how he met Wanda, "the girl he returned to find when the war was over".

Newby is one of many adventurous and humorous Brits who thrilled to the wonders of the earth and her peoples. Another intrepid traveller is Susannah Thornton.

Susannah Thornton

Susanna Thornton riding her bike through Hungary in 2006,
on her way home to London from Hong Kong

According to the Daily Express, Susanna Thornton had a good job working for Reuters in Hong Kong. When she was transferred to head office at Canary Wharf, London, she decided to ride her bike home.

It was quite a way.

She kept her blog going as she cycled through fifteen countries over 6,000 miles, probably "the slowest relocation from Hong Kong to London" ever. She raised enough money to build a sports centre for children in Cambodia, and set up sports initiatives for children in earthquake-affected parts of Pakistan.

In her blog, Susannah writes a "Best" list that is like a wonderful 'ancient' poem of Earth in the 21st century. It begins -

I still think THE most beautiful and striking thing was crossing that pass over the Tianshan Mountains of Heaven south of Urumqi, northwest china. I suppose climbers must see that sort of thing all the time, but I have never seen anything like it. It was the one where my brakes and rims iced over and I got in real trouble actually, BUT it was fabulous - I’d climbed for two days, and when I finally reached the top of the pass, it was late evening, bitter cold, the last 10km all in deep shadow up hairpins zigzagging up the wall of ice to the top. You finally go over the top through a scary notch in the rock. Suddenly it’s not dark shadow anymore and you’re in a huge space of luminous blue yellow pink light. Ahead below me are snow-covered mountain tops just as far as you can see, lit pink in the sunset. You stand there cold and alone in the icy air. There was a bright white moon. You just could shout out loud it’s so beautiful.

Listening to mountain birds whistling cries in the roses and hedgerows along empty high hilly tracks east of Guilin

The cuckoos calling in every valley in Guizhou, south west China in spring, among the cornfields, fields of oilseed, and cypresses

A spring sunday in Chengdu in west China, sunny avenues, tricycle rickshaws with green awnings, tea houses with chairs and tables in deep shade
under climbing plants on trellises.

The evening sun as I climbed an empty road along a green tributary of the Red Water River in China’s Sichuan province, fabulous mountains, clover and purple vetch and flowering trees and wild grasses.

The 17th c mosque in Dujiangyan, Sichuan, China, with its pink roses, lattice screens, cobbled courtyard, and wooden pagoda above the prayerhall.

Huge ice-topped black rock mountains, pine forests, and turquoise rivers in the Cham Tibetan region of northern Sichuan province, China. Wild horses on the hillsides, goats, massive black yaks, and huge birds of prey circling overhead, golden eagles or black kites, Tibetan people wearing trilby cowboy hats, travelling on horses, or galloping across the green.

Bells on pagoda eaves ringing in the wind at the city god shrine over Songpan, NW China, thin blue mountain air

Climbing through deep snow in Mountains of Heaven in late spring, silent except for melt water trickling through stones and crying of a few small birds, huge black kites above, and from time to time sharp cry of some furry brown animal like an otter trotting on snow then standing to watch me.

Riding across the northern edge of the Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang, listening to Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard ensemble, the music and the hot land and road under the huge sky just made my hair stand on end

Listening to distant calls to prayer from mosques down in Osh, south Kyrgyzstan heard from high on Babur’s House, a hill above the town

Camping near Zhabagly Aksu in southern Kazakhstan, by a small river, watching huge flocks of birds flap upstream at dusk, and then a warm yellow moon reflected in black river water after sunset.

The southern Kazakh steppe a huge plain of grass and corn and earth the colour of butterscotch.

Big old villas with tall louvre shutters along the roads of eastern Georgia, with grape vines on trellises, yellow stubble and blue mountains of Great Caucasus behind, hay carts, roses, blackeyed susan, fuschias.

The road from Borjomi in Georgia as I left the Lesser Caucasus mountains and headed into Anatolia, a glorious valley of pine trees and oak trees and birch trees all ruslting and rattling in the wind, a green river, cattle on bright green meadows.

The high Anatolian steppe in northeastern Turkey, endless bare pale green hills, no trees, no fences, sun getting lower over huge huge open land, and me doing 60kph down long curves into the shallow valley in the early evening

Riding over the northeast Turkey high grasslands on a summer morning, rough sweeps of wild flowers, dark blue spikes like lupins, purple thistles, yellow ragwort, purple vetch, white meadow sweet. Distant hills pale green pale blue, dark swifts with arc wings diving across the road above

Trebizond in eastern Turkey - cobbles, cafes, old wooden and plaster houses painted pink yellow green with red tiled roofs, gulls crying, the sea, Aya Sofya greek orthodox church with pine trees around it and blue blue sky
and sea

The Kostandagi Pass in eastern Turkey (again), stony roads above a vast beautiful empty landscape, bare hills, clefts, lonely valleys, silence except the wind. . .

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