Interestingly Foreign
About 30 years ago, I happened upon one of those big glossy travel books, which was boldly titled The Ten Best Walks on Earth. Sceptical as ever, I trawled its pages expecting a succession of brutal expeditions in places totally inaccessible to the average lily-livered strollers such myself and my good lady. Places like Azerbaijan, Outer Mongolia, Peru, the Himalayas, plus, obviously, a few American routes in order to sell the book in the biggest market. And all places you canât get your motorhome anywhere near.
They were all there, too, with the only European representative being, surprisingly, a walk through the Picos de Europa mountains on the Atlantic coast of Spain. I had never heard of the place, but it looked absolutely bleedinâ amazing in that book. We (me mostly) were henceforth determined to walk the walk.
In 1995 we went, we saw, we walked and we were completely overwhelmed. It was everything the book had promised: spectacular, stunning, exciting and totally manageable for a wobbly unbalanced coward such as I. My good lady, Marion (Little FA), on the other hand, can run across a clothes line with one hand in her pocket whilst smoking a fag in the other. With absolutely no fear of falling off. Thereâs
