The Splugen: from Sophie Marceau through Wesley Schneider to Billy Idol, and back

In the only Thusis bar with hints of, er, modernity, it is small, very dark and chalet-ish inside. The outside terrace, part glassed, looks out on to the rail tracks. Which is slightly unfair as the mountain view is splendid.

I am the only guest. It is 7.15 on a Friday evening. Whatever happened to that Friday afternoon seque from lunch to happy hour? The arcade game on the terrace is "Bermuda Triangle". Just below the darts. On the soundscape is early Madonna, then Billy Idol - who hasn't really had a late phase yet.

Thusis is bookended by a gardening centre at one end, and a kid's clothing shop at the other. In the centre is Blumen Frigg, yes, which is a flower shop. The furniture in my bar terrace is plastic wicker, which makes me as sole occupier the Wicker Man. Is it fortunate that I am neither a Presbyterian Policeman or a virgin? Only time will tell. Thusis may well do a good line in fertility cults.

Inside the bar is tiny; the smallest I have been in since a place in Ushuia, on the Darwiny tip of Argentina, where I bonded with my dad and various young Argentinian tax exiles.

As I start to think about my day, and perhaps even Tom's, the barman comes out to watch the train come in. The last time, in 2007, I'd made it as far as Chiavenna, around 40 kilometres away over the Splungen in Italy. There in a downpour, with a dodgy Apple, I decided to take the bus over the pass and on to Chur. It was too fast a transition from Italy into Switzerland. I never quite hit the Swiss Mode.

Today the mis-steps are more subtle. My Ipad clock is an hour slow; I miss the early bus to Splungen. When I take the next I discover I should have gone on to the Splungen Pass. I decide to nip up there. It is a three hour walk up, up, up. Johnny in the sports store sells me Factor 50+ and selects a hat. "Too posh" I say. Johnny says he likes that word, heard it a lot in London. But he couldn't live there. NYC is great though - for four days.

Nipping up there means my back turns into a IPOD Sweat Shop in China. I even stop the smokes. My path cuts across the road that leads to the pass, and Italy, and from time to time I hear the whine of the Dukati-Entitled. There are cows as well. At the top they sit with serene indifference. The view is great; not San Marco great, where it can seem after a beer or two that every mountain shy of Everest is in view, but pretty good.

I check my mail, feel guilty, and turn around to descend back to Splungen. Finally, at around 1.30 I am facing the same way as Tom, doing what he did. I begin to attempt the exorcism of the morning's allusiveness: I keep thinking about James Bond. There had been a long flat panorama and isolated petrol station that brought back memories of Connery and Tilly Masterson zooming around in Goldfinger land. Tilly wanted to kill Goldfinger because he'd painted her sister in gold, which was not good.

Then a helicopter flies over, low, with something hanging on what appears to be a short bungee-jump rope. On close inspection - really close - it turns out to be a dustbin, I think. Anyway, I start thinking about helicopters in Bond, then Sophie Marceau in The World is Not Enough, and then that NBNW rip-off at the end of From Russia With Love. I breath in, have a fag, and break my espionage ADD by fixating on a guy with walking poles who, with a terse "Bravo" has set off back to Splungen ahead of me. I give him thirty seconds and suddenly he's three hundred metres away.

I'm hating him now for his youth, his Wesley Schneider haircut and looks - I mean he may have won the Champions League, and almost the World cup, but he announced his engagement to his WAG on the intercom of the plane he was flying on. I hate him for his poles, particularly. Everyone has poles up here, everyone except me and the bikers. Wesley is my hare, but I force myself to let him run free: at my age a day one heart attack is really not cool, Tom didn't have one, neither has Rory Stewart (more of him later, I am sure). I walk in a stately manner appropriate to a man in McQueen jeans.

30 minutes later all animosity drops away as I turn a corner to find Wesley stopped and catching his breath.

Yes.

En passant I say "hi" in the Charles Ryder manner, emphasising all three syllables in a long-vowel drawl I learnt in Manhattan, being English. I move past Wesley and hear him start again, but there's only one man in this race now. I have a moment of religious awe. Then laugh a bit.

The English religious exiles from Tom's time and before, back to Henry's Big Switch from RC to P, must have seen their share of mountains on their way to Rome or Zurich or Validoloid. I make a mental note to map their routes, post routes, I am guessing. For Tom, as for everyone before Rousseau, it seems, mountains were not alluring sites for contemplation or snowboarding but brigand-heavy fearful places of in-breeding and banditry, a bit like the houses of our own Royal Family, I suppose. Tom's seen his share of mountains by now, and from the Splungen anyway, it is downhill at least. Is he still thinking about the courtesans at Venice; Palladio's Vicenza? The glanced but out of bounds Lake Como (pre Clooney). Or is he getting excited about Zurich, Basle and Strasbourg? It is possible.

Back at Splungen I announce to the tourist office that I am to walk to Thusis tonight. It is 4pm. "Eleven hours, minimum," says an officer. I find no joy in thinking about a triumphant return to Thusis at 3am, and neither I am sure do my very correct hoteliers. I walk to Sufers, take in the lake, pass a woman cycling the other way with a kiddie mobile tied to her rear tire, and a sleeping child, and catch the bus back to Thusis with 26 seconds to spare. On the bus I check email, and - somewhat sadly - read the cricket score at The Oval.

On my hotel's terrace I keep seeing Dick Cheney. This is bad. He is ill - or is he?

At the grotto bar with the rail track view Harry the barman tells me that 80,000 people are travelling as we speak to Chur - where I am supposed to be in two days - for a "rock" festival. This explains, he says, why I am the only customer in his bar. He used to have a discotheque on the top floor of the hotel I am staying in. "For twenty one years," he says, raising a multi-wrist-banded hand to his lips and kissing his fingers. "It was very nice." Today the top floor is a sauna-centre. I haven't been. Harry whistles along to Madonna's Holiday with a hint of bird-impersonator, a chaffinch I think. There would have been a career for him in vaudeville once upon a time.

It is 8pm now and Madonna and Billy Idol vie with the church bells. "Rebel Yell" starts again and it is time to eat.

Actually, it is "White Wedding". Same thing, really.

Thusis and Learning to slow down

Three years ago my progress was pretty stately. Osyters in Whitsable, a night in my father's cottage near Dover, a Channel crossing; Calais in the rain. This morning was a blur of home-printed plane tickets, no check in, an Orange store at Zurich airport selling (very reasonable) pay as you go SIM cards for the IPad. In London it is a contract affair with a 30 day credit rating wait. Here the SIM costs 10 francs and comes with three free days unlimited 3G access. I'm checking my emails and sending Facebook messages from the platform of Zurich aiport's railway station in minutes.

As the succession of on time trains take me back towards the mountains and Thusis I can at any time click on my wikihood app and a google map based service tells me not only where I am, but what the nearby buildings are that I can't see. The idea of a paper guide book seems suddenly absurd. The downside, of course, is that there is more screen time than sightseeing as we cruise towards Chur. The far away hills, the nearby lake, the plains, all merge into a backdrop for my emailing and posting. I'm having a dose of empathy-lack.It is as though I've caught ADD.

`I sit at a cafe on Thusis high street, pretty much the sum of Thusis, and read Tom using my new Ton Coryat link app. I have to slow down, the rest of the day must be a process of slowing. "Alles gut" the waitresses asks the assembled groups of women taking coffee and ciggies. It is, they say, as one. This isn't the start, it's the prelude.

My Tool for this Trip

All this and more. It better bloody work.

Some thoughts on returning to Tom Coryat's Walk

Three and half years ago when I started this recreation, this walk across Europe, I had a laptop, a portable hard drive, and a lot of material typed in the British Library. Plus my Merrells. Now I have an IPad. I turn it on and the GPS, plus my wikihood app tells me where I am, what's around, and who has been here; then it maps it out for me. IBooks and a Kindle app let me read a myriad of out of copyright books - I'm weightlessly weighed down with Goethe, Cervantes, Erasmus, Homer, well the list is long and old skool. I can write, read, communicate, shop and learn with a thing about half the size of a baking tray. Is it the future? No, it's the here and now, and will - has - change travel forever.

Perhaps it is good that I start near the mountains: perhaps the signals will be down, and I can move into the mood more slowly. My mood is different from 2007 anyway, and I'm sure it will show. First thing: a flight to Zurich at half past horror tomorrow morning. Thusis by lunchtime, I think.

And I still have the Merrells. UCL want me to donate them afterwards in a Coryat-ish gesture.

The Letter Goes Out, the rains start pouring in London

Hello everyone,

Tomorrow, August 19, I'll be restarting a walk across Europe (with some
fuel-powered assistance) that I began in May 2007. 402 years after the
event I'm again following in the footsteps and barge paths, inscriptions
and "inns" of Thomas Coryat, Jacobean oddity, English wit and global
traveller. Tom crossed Europe by foot in 1608; in 1611 he wrote a day by
day account of his trip: I'll be on his trail for around six weeks. This
time it is the "north" I'm taking on, Switzerland, a touch of France,
Germany and Holland. I start in Thusis, Tossana as was.

In 2007 I made it from Calais to Venice, turned around and crossed the
Italian mountains into Switzerland where, in the spa-cum-casino town of
Bad Ragatz, my beloved Apple gave up the ghost among the drunken gamblers and Lycra'd cyclists. As one point of this journey is to use modern technology to enhance the experience of living Tom Coryat's walk as closely as is possible, I stopped walking with the death of my computer. So did the Betwixt Europe blog.

It is back. http://betwixteurope.blogspot.com/

Now I'm armed with a miraculous IPad. The wonders of the books in the
Humanities One reading room at the British Library, and the gloved secrets of Rare Books still, as ever, inform my thinking, but this time so do GPS based apps, e-books from Amazon and Apple, and, crucially, the ideas of a history Professor from Harvard.

Dan Smail, the author of On Deep History and the Brain, very kindly wrote
to me recently in response to a question I had about my doctorate. I'm
looking at the way two events of terror were "told": these are The
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001. Dan
suggested that I start thinking about how I might infer the ways in which
the "aggregate brain" of 1605 is different from that of 2001.

The idea frightens me too. But I'm hoping that walking this half of Tom
Coryat's route - from Thusis in Switzerland to Flushing in Holland - might
help that process of inferring just a bit. Tom was a post-terror
traveller; now we all are. And Dan's book was my first e-book for the IPad, so I can just keep re-reading it until I get it.

My route is essentially the Rhine, taking in places including Zurich,
Basle, Strasbourg, Baden, Heidelberg, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt, Duysburg,
Bommell and Flushing. The full list will be on the blog from tomorrow.

For those who prefer to follow by Facebook feel free to become my friend, I'll be cross posting:

http://www.facebook.com/AroundRobin

There will be Twitter too, I fear.

http://twitter.com/robhunt510

Finally, if any of you know people along the route who are friendly,
insightful, or both, do let me know, by email or Facebook message. In this
era of the frightening Foursquare app, people who know people - to quote
that venerable academic and pan-Europeanist, Barbra Streisand - are the
luckiest people in the world.

Many thanks,

Robin

Prep

Been walking around Manhattan with my IPAD, getting into the truly mobile world of digital travel.

A thing of wonder. Even bumped into a family from Switzerland - at a Starbucks on Columbus - which seems like an omen of good things. Next week: mobile London. Then mobile Alsace. And then: back to the beginning on the Swiss border.

The Kind of Picture I Can't Take

But will really try this time.



From Magnum Photos picture of the week.

That's Alec Guinness learning his lines. I'd say Richmond, upon Thames.

Countdown

Whitstable, where it all began, and one of Peter's faves.

So tomorrow the countdown begins: first to New York to hang with Portia, meet old friends, buy that IPAD, and some NYC Sales' clothes. Three years on from the first walk things are different. I am a graduate student at UCL, working on representations of "terror" - Thomas Coryat might come into that as a post-Gunpowder treason "tourist". Who knows? Only the Rhine will tell.

Also, my father Peter, is dead; he died suddenly last summer - so one of my favourite readers isn't around any more. The walk will be for him, of course. All those mountains in Switzerland, the swoosh of German traffic (he hated those autobahns) - I'm sure I'll think of him a lot. Thomas's father died shortly before his walk...

These days those I tell about the journey break down into the "so like Leigh Fermor," or the "so like (that lovely) Rory Stewart" brigade. Nothing is new any more. I'll write about both men on the journey. It isn't new what I'm doing, but the technology to learn, communicate, and publish, is. This time there's a thriving Facebook community, Twitter, 18 MegaPixels instead of 3 (though I love that 3MP roughness, so perhaps I'll stick with the little Leica., and of course the new player, Foursquare. Plus, Ebooks, IPADs, more and more wonderful digital transcriptions of old stuff. Wi-Fi is now a wonderland...

...And Apps! Oh, perhaps I don't even need to leave home. But of course there's still the walking; and there's still the old (now sacred) Merrell boots. The Dean of my faculty asked if - like Tommy Boy - I'll be donating them to the University. I think they'd rather have the IPAD.

Anyway, almost there again, almost starting. Switzerland and those Alps very soon.

It begins again soon...

...but this time with an IPAD.

In preparation: part two of the Journey

I will shortly be starting to post my version of the journey from Venice to Bad Ragatz as an exercise in "recollection in tranquility". Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Europe walk haunts my own, did much the same only he was in print. In the meantime I'll post a lecture I gave at the Text, Technology and Interpretation conference at Manchester's Chetham library over the weekend.


Robin

Now this is what I think of when I remember that Come Fly with Me is 50 years old

Flickr has some great vintage French tourist shots.
Thanks to Olen Steinhauer.


And here's some Calais now, thanks also to Flickr.

Amiens raises an eyebrow

One more film poster soon for the Jules Verne museum?

...director McG, who let slip that he wants Will Smith to star in his just-announced 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo at Disney.

"The character Nemo in this film is more about obsession, he is obsessed and people tend to forget that when you become so obsessed you end up being the villain," McG told the site, adding "Man I'm trying to get Will Smith to do it, been trying to get a hold of him. I've been wanting to work with him for a long time already. That guy's great."

An Exhibition of the old new media

The resemblance between early Renaissance journalism and the current state of the Internet is uncanny. But there's a chastening lesson here for the Web as well. The Web is exuberant, democratic, unruly and thrilling. But Web-based journalists haven't really pioneered a new form. They've merely rejuvenated some dusty old ways of jousting with words.

From the Washington Post.

Just like that old Thin Lizzy song...

I can't do this, but it looks like the future to me.

A nice feature of Google maps:

Take a GPS log file
Convert it into the .KML format used by Google Earth.
(You can make these with GPSbabel, amongst other utilities.)
Put it on a web server somewhere
Go to Google Maps, and search for the URL of the .KML file
You’ll get a nice map of your track. And you’ll even get information about how to link to it and how to embed it in your site. Here’s a section of the route I walked today, for example:

Here's the result.


...and here's the man who knows how.


Fantastic.

Happy christmas

I'll be speaking about Tom next year. And walking some more, and repeating some of the journeys I've already made.

Robin

Postwar Europe

Without such collective amnesia, Europe's astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible.

Tony Judt
Postwar

Paris: city of booksellers?

Those Left Bank book stalls in Paris [Bouquinistes] filled with First Editions and rare collections of poetry and are in trouble: books aren't selling so well, and plastic Eiffel towers are doing better. What happens next?

...Paris city hall, alarmed that the garish knick-knacks are damaging Paris's "cultural landscape", has launched a battle to protect the literary soul of the banks of the Seine. Bouquinistes have been invited to crisis talks at the city hall in an attempt to promote more intellectual merchandise. But some warn that if they cannot adapt to the changing market they will "die of hunger".

Imagine this in a market near you:

The trade is strictly regulated. Each bouquiniste is allowed four boxes painted dark green: three must contain books, the fourth can sell items such as prints, collectors' postcards, stamps and souvenirs.

From Le Guardian.

Founder of Technorati launches public beta of his customised print travel guides...

...here's why:

...what I learned is that there is really something special about holding a physical printed book in your hands. Especially when you are travelling. And you know, I travel with my Blackberry and my iPhone and my Laptop and all of that and if I am in the middle of a Siok in Jerusalem or I am lying on a beach in Phuket, Thailand I don’t really want to pull out my Blackberry or end up paying those enormous data rates via my iPhone just to be able to find a piece of information that I could easily find if it was sticking in my back pocket.

Lots more here in an interview with David Sifry.


Gosh: print is back? Just as the E-book gets exciting?

Tom would have loved this

Quicker than Tom

Mr. Rossy, a Swiss pilot, leapt from the plane about 8,200 feet over Calais, France, blasted across 22 miles of water and deployed his parachute, above, over the South Foreland Lighthouse in Dover. Onlookers who dotted the famous white cliffs cheered and waved as he came into view.

Even impressed the New York Times.