Peter Pinney

Peter Pinney is as excellent a travel writer as Bryson, Dalrymple or Theroux. But Pinney belongs to another age. A World War II veteran in Europe in 1948 who sets out to walk home to Australia (writing ´Dust on my shoes´). He meets with disaster in Burma, turns back and zig-zags through the length and breadth of Africa between 1952 and 1955 (writing ´Who wanders alone´ and ´Anywhere but here´) . This African journey rates as possibly one of the most directionless in history, perhaps (in part) as a reaction to his experience in Burma. It takes Pinney another six years to ´get home´, via the Caribbean and the Pacific (writing ´The lawless and the lotus´).

Pinney never travelled in order to write. He was – and had been during the War – a diarist, capturing conversation and scenes in the smallest detail while reflecting on some of the big questions of life, the randomness of fate, good and bad. He is a man mostly on foot, mostly alone, living on his wits and the kindness of strangers and fate. He never has a job except to earn enough to travel to the next place, he described himself as a man whose heart lay on an always retreating horizon. Pinney is never maudlin or self indulgent, but rather has the travellers eye for the absurd and the philosophical.

This book, ´Dust on my shoes´ could hardly be described as less polished than his later work. It is the logical place to start with Pinney, and the most commonly available volume in the second hand trade. Long before this became the hippy trail, and long before parts of it became someone´s axis of evil, Pinney travels through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Burma. It is dated, but a traveller is always a traveller in space and time, but most of all he or she is a traveller through other lives and cultures – and the satisfaction of reading those stories is timeless. Pinney captures the essence of place and people, the poor, the displaced and the marginal in these societies; because there was a lot of that in him, and he travels the same road. Bryson, Theroux and Dalrymple might write engagingly of foreigners and alien cultures and places but they travel too comfortably to ever to be able to engage with the real world - or the reader - in the way that Pinney is able to do. Highly recommended.… (meer)