A long time ago Jillian and I discussed the idea of posting about some of the people we meet that have different, special or compelling stories. We’ve met plenty of these people, but have never written about any of them specifically. Martin, we feel, makes a good person to start with.

We met Martin at our hostel in Istanbul when we first arrived in Turkey. He had been there for about 10 days because, as he said, he had hurt his foot while walking. He seemed a nice enough guy but I found it odd that a grown man would be able to bear such an injury while enjoying museums and such and so I decided he just liked Istanbul and had become a semi-permanent resident of this hostel…something not terribly uncommon in our area of travel. When we got to talking a little later, I found just how completely mistaken I was.

Martin is walking from his home in Austria, all the way to Jerusalem. Istanbul is his halfway point.

Back home he drove an armored truck. He’d had some money saved and wanted to take an epic trip and started to research going to Africa and touring via bicycle or something like this. He did some research and all he could find were blogs about people driving through Africa,, much as we did. He happened on a blog of two Germans walking to Jerusalem. He loved the idea, and stopped reading there….and ‘walked’ with it. He hasn’t followed their route, just their idea.

The quest is something spiritual for Martin but it is not exactly a religious pilgrimage. He mostly walks without maps, instead following features like the Danube River the majority of the way so far. He stopped carrying a stove because he found that keeping food and fuel was too heavy and cooking too time consuming. He stops to sleep when he tires, in his own tent. He doesn’t accept rides, he is walking, but is open to most other forms of hospitality. He says a lazy day is one where he sleeps in, talks a lot, and walks maybe 25km. The most he’s done in a single day is 50km. By contrast, one of my proudest moments is when I walked 100km (62mi) in a single day, but I had a support team, no tent on my back, and didn’t do anything the day before or after.

He was resting in Istanbul because he ‘overdid’ it as he rushed up to the Turkish border, over hills, from Bulgaria. It was still farther to go to Istanbul and I’m grateful he chose to stop there to ‘freshin up’ rather than elsewhere so that we could meet him. He keeps a journal and blog (in German) so that he can maybe write a book when he is done, but otherwise has no stresses. Mostly he enjoys the slow pace that allows him to see things that would otherwise go unnoticed.