Eight decades ago Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to the exotic and mysterious Constantinople. He was aiming to chance and charm his way across the lands, hoping to be the recipient of much human kindness. This great walk also gave us three great books, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. Not only are these beautifully written books, but they show Europe and its people shortly before war would sweep across the land. He

Seventy-eight years to the day in December 2011, Nick Hunt steps onto a ferry to the Hook of Holland to follow in his footsteps, and to see what had changed in Europe since his predecessor forged the route. His walk would take him through eight countries: Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey only using Fermor’s first two books to guide him, and he would discover if the modern Europe was still hospital to wandering strangers.

What has changed though was the landscape, just off the ferry he heads to what he thinks is a spire of a church; turns out it is a mosque, and this is a microcosm of what has happened in post war Northern Europe when much was rebuilt and redeveloped after the decimation of the Second World War. Was there anything left from Fermor’s time? Halfway through Germany he finds it at an inn in Heidelberg. The Red Ox has managed to remain the same after all that time, serving the same beer and full of hunting trophies. He stays in the same room, as Fermor too, and gives him a direct link to the past. This part of Germany in the winter is cold, very cold, and Hunt starts to feel as Fermor did, the landscape becoming softened by snow with few pointers to the time he is walking.

The iron curtain has been parted for a number of years now, and beyond this line people become friendlier and welcoming. But some things never change; the underlying prejudices are still there between the swirling cultures of this region, resentments that will never fade. He meets people whose relatives met Fermor when he passed through, and notes the disappearance of the shepherds and the aristocrats from the region.

When Hunt did the walk, the final book in the series had not been published, so having ceremoniously dropped the first two books into the Danube and into the waters at the Iron Gates, he is completely alone to forge his own path through Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains before heading to the journeys end in Istanbul.

I think that Nick Hunt has managed to write a fitting tribute to the journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor made. The Europe that he discovers is different to the one that Fermor saw and experienced, but then there has been a lot of water under the bridge since. And yet there are echoes of the past, some landscapes were unaffected by war and development, and the only change has been the clothes and modern technology; Hunt relies on the site couch surfer to find overnight accommodation on his 2500 mile walk. It is a book that is worth reading, partly as he manages to convey a modern continent still undergoing political and social change, but mostly it is his journey across three mountain ranges, eight countries, collecting snippets of language and culture on the way. I hope that it bring others to tread the original books too, as they are now classics. ( )

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If a thing is worth doing, it's probably worth doing again, and Nick Hunt replicated Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1933-34 walk, as far as possible, in 2011. The world has changed, and the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey have all changed too since 1934. The journey changes the writer as well; the pace of walking is of course far different to the more usual speed of travel today, and enables him to engage with the locals in a way that we casual tourists who drop in and out of hotels, pubs and restaurants will never get. Some of it is depressing - the relationship between Hungarians and Romanians is never going to be smooth; war, Communism, industrialisation and ethnic homogenisations have reshaped and destroyed large parts of the landscape that Leigh Fermor knew, particularly the homes of the Hungarian nobles who he visited and made love to. At the same time, crucially, Hunt is travelling across a continent at peace, and unlikely to return to war; where Leigh Fermor caught a moment in time as the old order entered its terminal disintegration, Hunt captures societies picking themselves up - some more slowly than others - after the disasters of the twentieth century. It is a rather hopeful account.

I LOVED the description of walking through Austria in the winter, and the camping in abandoned buildings. The descriptions in the book were wonderful. It's a pretty fast-paced book. I think the reason I'm not giving it five stars has more to do with the conditions the author experienced and saw, rather than the writing. At times the weather was gloomy, the landscape depressing (industrial or boring suburbs). Lots of quoting Fermor, and comparing current conditions to what Fermor experienced. ( )