Fellow travelers

One of the greatest contemporary proponents of walking (although he prefers the term "traveling on foot") is film director Werner Herzog. In the winter of 1974, after learning that his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill, Herzog embarked on an epic walk from Munich to her apartment in Paris. He believed his walking to be with her was the only way Eisner would survive the illness. He walked in a straight line, sleeping under bridges and in abandoned houses. "When you travel on foot with this intensity," Herzog later said of this journey, "it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes."

It was with a walking-related quote from Herzog that I marked the end of the Nakasendo phase of this blog. The same book (Herzog on Herzog) from which I harvested that quote also contains the following response by Herzog to an interviewer's question.

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had traveled alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometers… During your voyage you will learn more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom."

Such is the esteem in which some members of the film community hold Herzog that at least two budding filmmakers have been inspired by this pronouncement to make epic journeys which they later turned into documentary films. "Long-distance Herzog stalker" Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner, 2006) walked from Seattle, Washington to Herzog's Los Angeles home in the hope of meeting his favourite director (who happened to be in Thailand filming Rescue Dawn at the time). Lee Kazimir (More Shoes, 2008) took the German director's advice quite literally, setting off from Madrid and walking across most of continental Europe on his way to Kiev.

Being an amateur filmmaker myself, I've occasionally considered taking my video camera along on my epic walks. But for the same reasons that I was initially reluctant to incorporate an art project into the Nakasendo walk in 2007, I've always rejected the idea. Not only would shooting video take up a lot of time, but also it would change the nature of my relationship with the environment and with the people I meet along the way. I will be taking a still camera again when I walk the Tokaido, but I believe the most appropriate way of recording such a journey is to write a diary. I think Herzog would agree. He kept a diary during his 1974 journey. It was later published under the title Of Walking in Ice and won its author a literary award.