Walking, writing, and wonder: The joy of travelling at snail’s pace

A six-day hike in rural France leaves Adam Dudding babbling about the magic and mystery of putting one foot in front of the other.

During one of the Covid lockdowns, chez Dudding discovered a warmhearted French comedy series on Netflix called Call My Agent!

The show has cameos from every famous French actor you’ve heard of plus many more you haven’t, and you really must watch it. But the important thing here is that one of the central characters – a charmingly adulterous secretary called Noémie – is played by the actress Laure Calamy.

So naturally, when a year later Calamy starred in a big-screen comedy, Antoinette in the Cévennes, we went to see that too. She plays another charmingly adulterous Parisian (a school teacher this time) who stalks her married lover when he takes his family for a holiday on a famous hill-walking trail.

Again, it’s flirty French fun, and you really must watch it. But besides the cast (including a very talented donkey), what caught our eye was the setting: the waving grainfields, rocky hilltops and centuries-old hostelries of the Cévennes region. From the depths of travel-starved pandemic Aotearoa, Calamy was giving us a glimpse of heaven.

A couple of months ago my wife and I finally took a look ourselves, following in Calamy’s footsteps on the “Chemin de Stevenson” (Stevenson Trail).

The Stevenson here is Scotsman Robert Louis, creator of Long John Silver, Dr Jekyll, A Child’s Garden of Verses and more. In 1878, long before he wrote Treasure Island, long before his South Seas travels and his death of a stroke in Samoa at 44, Stevenson took a long, self-directed walk in the south of France, with a donkey called Modestine to carry his stuff.

It was partly to collect material for the book he’d publish the following year – Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. But it was also a chance to mooch about and tend a broken heart, as he’d just ended a love affair with Fanny, a married American woman.

In the century and a half since, Stevenson’s 12-day meander from Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille to Saint-Jean-du-Gard has morphed into a fixed route walked by thousands each year, and the lovelorn Scotsman and his stubborn ass have spawned a whole tourist ecosystem: I lost count of the man-plus-donkey themed statues, plaques, street signs, murals and garden ornaments. I drank a blonde “La Stevenson” beer and an amber “Modestine”. I seriously considered buying a walking stick with a donkey-head handle.

Meanwhile, Travels with a Donkey has inspired numerous “in the footsteps of” books and movies including, of course, the Calamy film that hooked us in.

Like many walkers we met, we were reading the book en route, comparing our own progress to his. If we’d been determined to replicate Stevenson’s madcap experiences of fighting with an uncooperative donkey, sleeping outdoors and getting horribly lost, we could have hired a donkey, slept in campsites, and thrown away our maps.

But we did none of these things. We instead carried small day-packs, paid for our suitcases to be lugged between two-star hotels in each village, and kept a close eye on my iPhone’s GPS dot. (We also halved the 250km by skipping some villages at each end, making it a six-day walk.) And reader, despite these soft-tourist compromises, it was bloody fantastic.

The path is well formed and the gradients mellow by New Zealand Great Walk standards: the bits they call “mountain” are more what we’d call “hill”. But freed of worry about where you’re putting your feet, you can just look around and marvel: at the forests and wide open skies and fields of grain, at pretty long-lashed cattle with clanging bells; at the distinctly non-Aotearoan snails, beetles and flies; at a nervous fox, and the occasional blind dog.

I got obsessed with the wildflowers, and used an app to figure out their names, which in English at least, turned out to be just as appealing as the flowers: bladder campion, red catchfly, field mouse-ear, dog-rose, milk thistle, paper spurge, snow in summer, cotton thistle, lady’s glove, pincushion flower, yellow salsify, sea thrift, pignut and field forget-me-not, alongside more familiar broom, poppies, clover, dandelion and violets.

Because this is Europe, you’re walking through millenia-deep layers of human history: dry-stone walls, shrines to the Virgin Mary, aqueducts and viaducts, shepherds’ paths that’ve been carved out by hooves and feet since before Asterix and Obelix passed through in 50BC on their way to beat up some Romans. Because this is France specifically, the baguettes and cheeses are bafflingly good and impossibly cheap.

Most of our fellow hikers were French, forcing me to dust off half-remembered school vocab before giving up and reaching for Google Translate, but we also met the occasional Belgian or German – and we bonded tight with an Australian couple after realising they’d ended up here via precisely the same Netflix-comedy-then-feature-movie-set-in-Cevennes path as we had.

Each day, as I tromped along, enjoying the hell out of all this, it struck me that there was something additionally pleasing about the speed we were encountering the wildflowers and viaducts and long-lashed cattle.

It felt deeply right to be seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling the world on your skin while moving through it at walking pace. Fast enough never to get boring; slow enough that you can really see things. Gazing from a speeding train or car is fun and all, but it felt like walking was the speed my brain was actually built for.

Once back home, I gave Auckland author Joanne Drayton a call. I’d heard she had some thoughts about what walking does to your brain.

Drayton, author of the international bestseller The Search for Anne Perry, is the only person I’ve heard of who writes while walking. As in – literally scribbles words of ink onto a tiny pad of paper held in the palm of her hand while making the 4km commute to her day-job as an English teacher at Avondale College. Her latest book written in this fashion is The Queen’s Wife (Penguin, 2023).

It sounds dangerous, but Drayton says: “I’ve been writing this way for 10 years, and I’ve never fallen over or tripped.”

She’s aware of her peripheral surroundings, so if she senses she’s getting near a road “I’ll stop and look both ways.”

Drayton took her writing outdoors after running up against not exactly writer’s block, “but writer’s anal retention, trying to get the words out perfectly”. It’s now how she writes all her first drafts. During a writing fellowship in upstate New York one winter, she walked more than 30km a day, writing 1500 words per hike.

She says writing on the move lets her tap “a fluid, creative space. It’s like walking into your imagination.”

She’s not the only ambulatory writer in history: apparently Charles Dickens workshopped his dialogue by acting out the parts while taking long walks, and the entire Bloomsbury crowd – Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and co – all believed long walks fired up the creative spirit.

Drayton’s not exactly sure what’s happening in the brain, but suspects it has something to do with “the whole-body experience of being creative. You’re not just using those remote cells in your brain, but it’s like an orchestration of your whole physical being”.

As far I know, Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t write while literally walking. But each evening on the trail that would eventually take his name, he took copious notes.

A century and a half before I got there, he took note of the thrill he had got from the yellow broom on the hills, from the clanging of the cowbells and the views from the top. But he was also thrilled by the sheer fact of moving through it all, and getting into a state that these days we’d probably call mindfulness.

“For my part,” he wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. […]

“To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?”