As
far as I’m aware, it’s a unique guide and not only for Romania! I’m actually
not aware of any other E-book which tries to penetrate a country’s soul (as it
were) by giving such immediate access (through hyperlinks – 400 of them) to books,
blogs, paintings, music, photographs, for example.
Not
that I’m an expert on E-books – in fact, truth be told, I;ve never even looked
at one!! Up until now I thought they were just (rather bad) substitutes for the
real thing – but I can now see their potential…
To complete the guide in time
for my daughter’s arrival I had to leave unread about 30 books which had
arrived since I started the work some 4 weeks ago. One of the first I picked up
at the weekend was Paddy Leigh-Fermour’s The Broken Road - the last part of the famous trilogy of a walk through Germany, Austria,
Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the early 1930s which was, however, transcribed
into two books in the 1970s and 1980s and finished posthumously just a year or
so ago. I had waited for the paperback version to be published and eagerly picked it up from Bucharest's English Bookshop in April.
Yesterday I reached his
chapter on Bucharest – so moving to see the city and some of the characters he
bumps into painted in such a vivid manner 80 years later – but as fresh as he
had just written it (which in a sense he had!). By coincidence, the New York
Review of Books arrived in my (electronic) mail this very morning and with an article assessing Paddy’s writings as a whole and posing the question whether he is our greatest travel writer.
Overnight I had realised that
I had forgotten to put Nick Hunt’s occasional blogposts during his journey following in Paddy’s
footprints into the list of “goodies” which I
had given recently as a “taster” for the guide.
I have noticed, however, that
this hyperlink does not appear to be working in the pdf file. My apologies – I clearly
need to check them all – and put a final version online – in a few weeks!
In the meantime Nick Hunt’s
After the Woods and Water blogposts can be read here. Obviously someone who is walking several thousand kilometres is not hugging a laptop with him but, somehow, he was able to post a few thoughts. Only one, however, in Romania - and that in the Retezat mountain peaks
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