Hikes near Madrid: a new guidebook shows you the way (in English!)

Every year, thousands of English speakers visit Madrid on holiday or to teach English. Most never explore the many hikes near Madrid, and that’s a shame. The Sierra de Guadarrama offers some challenging and varied routes, and the lowland areas of the Comunidad de Madrid offer pleasant rambles. One of the best spots is La Pedriza, which can be a tough slog and easy to get lost in.

One of the reasons these hikes go unexplored by visiting Anglos is that there wasn’t an English-language book dedicated to them. That’s changed with the publication of Take a Hike: The Best 50 Routes in the Community of Madrid. The book is the result of two years of research and walking by expat hikers Beau Macksoud and Cynthia Blair Kane, who also founded Madrid’s only English-language hiking group, Hiking in the Community of Madrid.

I’ve been on several hikes with this book and I can say that it’s accurate and clearly written. Unlike the book I used to hike near Faringdon, Oxfordshire, the maps in Take A Hike are professionally done and easy to follow. They look like they were adapted from Spanish government topo maps. I’ve never understood why some hiking guides think they can get away with sketch maps. In Oxfordshire it’s annoying; in Sierra de Guadarrama it would be downright dangerous.

Take a Hike offers a variety of hiking experiences for all skill levels. It also touches on the history and culture of the area you’re walking through, mentions any local festivals, and even gives you a quick Spanish lesson with a list of hiking and sightseeing-related vocabulary in the margins.

So if you’re headed to Madrid, pick up a copy of this, put the tapas and vino to one side for a day, and go Take a Hike!

[Photo courtesy Ediciones La Librería]

Travel Read: The Coffee Story

As a writer, I read many books by authors I know. As a traveler, I read lots of books set in places I’ve been. The Coffee Story by Peter Salmon gave me the rare chance to read a book about a place I love written by someone I met there.

For the record, I don’t review books by friends because that’s both unprofessional and unwise. Peter isn’t a friend except in the Facebook sense of “I got drunk with this guy once and have his email address”.

I met Peter while I was living in Harar, Ethiopia. Peter’s novel is set in Harar in the 1930s and just weeks before it was published he visited for the first time. That’s right, he visited Harar after he wrote the book.

To 99.9% of his readership that doesn’t matter since they’ve never been to Harar. I have and it did. The book is laden with mistakes. For example, Peter has Harar surrounded by jungle when in fact it’s surrounded by rocky hills and cultivated fields, and where the hell did the Jain community come from? He also uses the G-word for the Oromo. While I suppose this epithet would have been in common usage among whites living in Ethiopia in the 1930s, it will do nothing to endear him to Ethiopian readers.

But this isn’t really a story about Harar, or indeed about coffee. These are simply backdrops with which to tell the story of Theodore Everett, heir to a huge coffee business, now dying of cancer. Most of the action takes place 70 years before, when he’s a kid on his father’s plantation in Harar, where the best coffee in the world comes from. Ignored by his greedy and abusive father, Theodore falls under the sway of an Ethiopian Marxist and other locals, as well as a mysterious white girl who emerges from the jungle one day.

Theodore tells us right off that he’s “not given to suspense” and a terrible showdown is inevitable between the Marxist and his father. To steal the title of a wonderful film, there will be blood. It’s a tribute to Salmon’s excellent storytelling that the final showdown, when it comes, is nevertheless laden with suspense. We have an inkling of what’s going to happen all along, but like two cars veering towards a head-on collision, it’s terrible to see them hit.

While there’s no sense of place beyond a stereotypical “deepest, darkest Africa” worthy of some old Tarzan flick, most characters are brilliantly drawn and often hilarious, and the prose loops and curls in on itself. Like many old men, Theodore repeats himself constantly. This gets a bit irritating but the characters and narrative tension kept me turning pages. The prose is rich (bonus points for using “flibbertigibbet”) and the characters spring to life the first sentence they’re introduced.

I give this book three out of five stars. Sorry Peter, I know it’s my round, but while you’re an excellent stylist and a sharp wit, the whole thing veers a wee bit too close to neocolonialism. You put Harar in a jungle because Africa’s all jungle, right? The Ethiopians all sound like Europeans with a bit of earthy spiritualism thrown in for color, and the only female Ethiopian character is oversexed and two-dimensional. Although she’s sleeping with the underaged protagonist, Theodore’s One True Love is the only white girl he meets in Africa. And the blackface scene made me embarrassed even though I wasn’t the one who wrote it.

There’s an old adage among writers: stick with what you know. Set your next novel in England or Australia and you’ll write a masterpiece.

Travel Read: The East Highland Way hiking guide


Last year for my annual “Oh crap another birthday I need to prove my youth” long-distance hiking adventure, I chose Scotland’s East Highland Way. It runs 78 miles from Ft. William through some beautiful countryside to Aviemore. The route had just been created by hiker Kevin Langan, and was so new there wasn’t a guidebook. Kevin was kind enough to send me maps and a summary preprint of his book and I set off. Check out the link above to follow my adventures.

Now Kevin’s book has been published by independent Scottish publisher Luath Press, Ltd. The East Highland Way is a detailed guide to the route with lots of information on wildlife and history. It’s also richly illustrated with clear maps and photos of Scotland’s beautiful countryside. Full disclosure: I contributed several photos. I didn’t ask for payment, and I don’t receive any royalties. I gave Kevin free photos because I believe in promoting this trail.

I’ve never read a guidebook after going somewhere, yet this strange experience didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Kevin gives lots of detail about side trips I missed and information about Scotland’s nature I wished I’d known before I headed out. I highly recommend the book. Of course, if you’re planning on hiking this route there’s no other book about it, so my recommendation is unnecessary, but it’s nice to know the only game in town has been well played.

The East Highland Way starts at the junction of the West Highland Way and Great Glen Way, both very popular (some would say too popular) routes. It ends at the start of Speyside Way, another popular route. If you want an enjoyable hike that isn’t overrun by walkers, consider the East Highland Way. When I went last year I hardly bumped into anyone. The only other person I heard was doing the hike was a German guy walking a day ahead of me. I never caught up with him and that’s just fine. I loved having the Highlands to myself.

Book Review: Underground England

England is a land of countless half-forgotten legends and secret hidden places.

In Underground England: Travels Beneath our Cities and Countryside, Stephen Smith explores these places, worming his way through damp caves and exploring haunted tunnels under crumbling castles. While he starts with natural caves, of which England is blessed with more than its fair share, he soon veers off into man-made places, trying to puzzle out the history hidden beneath a mass of legend.

Smith discovers that the Green and Pleasant Land is in fact the Damp and Dark Honeycomb. Stately homes have secret rooms under the stairs to hide once-illegal Catholic priests. Cold War governments created massive bunkers to save themselves (but not us) from their folly. And there are follies of a different sort–fake grottoes created by the rich and bored, like that of the infamous Hell Fire Club, which Smith reveals as far more notorious than nefarious. Eccentric Englishmen indulging their whims.

A bit like Smith himself. He’s obsessed with anything subterranean, anything weird or hidden. Burrowing under England with him is like being cornered for hours at a country pub by an uncommonly interesting local wit. Even his language fits the bill–a mixture of double entendres, pop culture references, and bizarre words. Lots of bizarre words. Appurtenances? I knew that one. Demesne? No problem. But to deckle? Prelapsarian? Thank God for the Oxford English Dictionary! I respect a man who can teach me two obscure words in the first six pages without slowing down the prose. And he doesn’t let up for the next 284.

You won’t find much on London’s underworld, however. Its wartime shelters, abandoned Tube stations, and vanished rivers are covered in Smith’s earlier book Underground London. If it’s anywhere near as good as Underground England, I’m buying it. Smith offers us a true glory hole (in the mining sense of the word). A brave traveler could make a whole under-the-road trip out of the contents of this book.

One for the Road: Carl Hoffman’s “Lunatic Express”

Looking for escape and adventure, Carl Hoffman embarked on a journey to ride some of the world’s most dangerous transport, a trip that he recounts in his new book “Lunatic Express: Discovering the world… Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boat, Trains, and Planes” (Broadway Books). A bus through a mountain pass in South America, a crowded ship in South Asia, or an airplane in the Congo – if it had a high rate of fatal accidents, Hoffman sought it out and hopped on.

Though he uses the framework of “danger” as a hook, Hoffman’s story is less about safety and more about the human connections he makes as he chooses the type of transport almost no other traveler will. It’s no coincidence that the riskiest rides are also the cheapest, and he is pleased to discover that he connects to “a whole river of people on the move” – people for whom travel is a necessity instead of a holiday. Rather than danger, Hoffman encounters incredible discomfort; instead of being mugged, he finds he is protected by seatmates, shipmates, and new friends who are curious about his presence among them. In fact, his scariest situation is in Afghanistan, a war zone. There, it’s not simply transport that is dangerous, but his very presence in the country.

His exploration becomes, like so much travel, a search for authenticity and an examination of his own motivations. As a fan of second- (but not third-) class transport, I appreciate Hoffman’s experience off of the tourist trail (even when he’s technically on the tourist trail). He writes, “here, on these buses, I was anywhere but at the end of the earth; I felt right smack in its crowded heart.” This experience is where the value in his book lies.

His use of danger as the structure for his travels yields a fortunate, if not entirely unexpected result: the relationships he forms when crammed into the world’s lowest-class transport, which most travelers can afford to skip.

Travel often provides a clearer picture of the place we come from rather than the place we are visiting, and therefore it’s fitting that Hoffman’s most telling leg of the journey is the home stretch – a cross-country trip on a Greyhound bus from California to Washington DC. Dangerous? Hardly. Uncomfortable? Definitely. But the discomfort of a Greyhound bus, where seats are assigned, the roads are some of the best in the world, and there’s nary a chicken clucking from a box in the aisle, is an altogether different kind of discomfort than he experienced previously. In keeping with the “danger” theme, Hoffman dutifully mentions a recent beheading on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba, but true danger is absent in his trek. Instead, the sweaty, stinking, and seething mass of humanity in the developing world is replaced by the soulless, depressing experience of America’s penniless. Comparing the generosity and curiosity he witnessed in underdeveloped countries to his encounters with American counterparts, Hoffman writes, “we were a bus of lost souls in a country that itself seemed without a soul.” Gone is the fresh, bus station food, the kiosks replaced by “vending machines full of Snickers and Fritos and twenty-ounce blue energy drinks.” Everything, not just his traveling companions, feels empty back home.

Hoffman ends his journey as we all will at some point: alone. Though his words claim otherwise, Hoffman hints at the loneliness of the solo and long-term traveler, arriving to an empty apartment, unable to maintain his relationships, disoriented. He concludes tidily, happily even, though I wonder at his ability to ignore his travel addiction for long.