His words are poetic, and he can paint a picture with four or five words - that would take other authors paragraphs, or chapters to achieve. You might need a dictionary - both English and Latin, while reading it. ( )

1. Read the book.
2. Set off into the unknown having been inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor's erudition, open mind and steady pace. Accept the kindness of strangers. Open your eyes to the history being made around you now, as he did then. Later on you'll be able to say that, yes, you really were there, and that you were paying attention.
3. Read this book again. It's light enough to carry on your journey, and is one of the very best I have ever read myself. ( )

This is a wonderful story about the kindness of strangers. It is an autobiographical story a naughty boy who drops out of school and decides to walk from Englanfd to Constantinople befor the second World War. It was a great comfort to me as I had a naughty daughter too and maybe she will grow up and become a hero of the resistance and a great writer with a knighthood! ( )

This first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey to Constantinople takes him up the Rhine and down the Danube as far as Esztergom, on the border between Hungary and Slovakia. As others have said, a lot of the charm in these books comes from the way Fermor manages to recapture the youth and innocence of those days, while writing more than forty years later. It's difficult to make out how much is memory and how much he has reconstructed from later knowledge — he makes it clear that he lost the diary covering his journey as far as Munich. But, authentic or not, his impressions have a lot in them that makes me remember how I saw the world when I was eighteen and travelling independently for the first time.

Of course, there's an extra charm in the knowledge that the Europe he describes was about to change for good. Although he freely admits that he knew little and cared less about politics, he could not avoid noticing that Hitler had just come to power in Germany, and that there was fighting in the streets of Vienna when he arrived there. In a way, his naivety makes his few observations of the political scene more interesting (for instance, the scene where a young man proudly shows off his bedroom full of Nazi posters and emblems, then disarmingly tells him "You should have seen it six months ago, when I was a Communist!"), but this is clearly an aspect of the book that has been heavily filtered through his subsequent knowledge and experience.

Most of the book is written in a charmingly clear and elegant style, but there are occasional passages where he allows himself to get carried away, mostly when writing about the way his ideas on history and painting evolved during the trip, and it all becomes a bit Bridesheadish. Still, it's clearly a classic piece of travel writing, and I don't know why it's taken me so long to discover it... ( )

I do not use superlatives lightly; however, this may be the best book I have read. Fermor leaves private school in Britain in the early 1930's and decides to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He intended to write a trilogy concerning his trip; but so far he has only completed two books. This book is the first and takes him from Holland to the Danube. His original goal was to eat and sleep with the gypsies; however, he eventually befriended members of the nobility and spent some time in their castles. The book is extremely rich in historical asides and one wonders how someone so young could be so knowledgeable. A possible answer is that he wrote the book at an older age from journals he had kept. In any event the book wonderfully captures a rising Germany under Hitler and he is quite prescient about what that may portend for the future. The book had a particular resonance for me because I libved for three years on the Mosel and his journey tracked many travels I have made. Fermor is a treasure. He is the classic English traveler of old: educated, erudite, observant and comfortable with people from all walks of life. Later, During WWII he served with British special forces. He parachuted into Crete where he lived in a cave with the Cretan Resistance and masterminded the kidnapping of the German General in charge of the island. See "The Cretan Runner." After the war, He became somewhat of a Hellenophile and moved to Greece where he still lives. His books on Greece - e.g., Mani - are also excellent. I hope he completes the trilogy before he dies. ( )