One Long Walkabout ( from Outlook)
My dinner companion at the British Museum trustees dinner was the MP Rory Stewart. He's a slight, wiry man who smiles a lot and is very good company. His grandfather was stationed in India, he was born in Hong Kong. For two years, 2000-03, he walked alone through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, including my birthplace of Amritsar, Jalandhar, Anandpursahib and Shimla. Walking meant literally that—no hitch-hiking on cars or trucks. Going step by step, he practised walking meditation and read Persian poetry and theBhagavad Gita. He walked through Afghanistan through the dead of winter and in the middle of the war. Soldiers with Kalashnikovs stopped him for questioning and children threw stones at him, but people opened up their homes to him because there were no hotels. He covered about 6,000 miles on foot and slept in people's homes in about 500 villages. Places in Between, his bestselling book about his travels, has been translated into several languages. He also briefly served in the British army and British foreign service, was Iraqi governor of a province of 3 million people, and lived in Kabul for two years, where he set up the Turquoise Mountain charity. And he's not yet 40! He follows in the footsteps of great British adventurers like Sir Richard Burton, who translated the Kama Sutra into English, shocking his fellow Victorians no end when it was published.
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