Overview

"Suffering from culture shock following his successful pilgrimage from Canterbury to Compostela, Ben Nimmo set out again to see if the people in other parts of Europe would be as friendly as those he had met while busking. Deciding that his legs were too tired to walk any further, that travel by train or bus would be too passive, that hitch-hiking was either too fast (if it worked), or too slow (if it didn't) and that any other form of transport would require training, he settled on sailing. With little experience beyond navigating dive boats in tropical waters, Ben set out to cross the North Sea to the Baltic. He found a boat - ""Peregrino"", the pilgrim, a beautiful ten-year-old vessel with a hull that gleamed like a mirror - and set out on his next adventure.Meeting divers, fishermen and archaeologists; getting rip-roaringly drunk with a Swedish dentist, who taught him some new Rugby songs; gate crashing a jazz festival; nearly drowning in a force ten gale and having his boat appropriated as a playschool for a dozen children under the age of ten, Ben proved that people are indeed the same across Europe."

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9780007104758

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Reviews

Nimmo, who trekked from Canterbury to Santiago de Compostela in Pilgrim Snail (2001), here follows the Vikings' trail back to Scandinavia. The author, 31, studied medieval literature and pursued doctoral studies in the Heroic Age of the Germanic peoples before boredom with academic writing sent him to Cornwall to teach scuba diving. That led him to South America and romance with a woman whose murder prompted the England-to-Spain trek. (He was raising money for her memorial charity.) Wherever I walked, history, art and literature came spilling out around me, Nimmo recalls of his earlier journey. Wanting to see Europe in a more systematic manner, he ended up blending his fascination with medieval literature and his love of life on the water. A millennium earlier, the author tells us, England had been under the Danish rule of Svein Forkbeard. Though that invasion was quickly overshadowed by the Norman Conquest, I'd always believed that the English have much more in common with the people of Scandinavia than with our southern neighbors, Nimmo writes. He decided to go see for himself. And what better way to make the educational journey than by sea, Viking style? He bought a boat, hired a crew, drew up a route, and launched. Svein Forkbeard had traveled by water across the Baltic and the North Sea to conquer England; Nimmo more or less reversed Forkbeard's watery path. He was hoping to meet lots of interesting people and encounter some surprises. Both goals were met in full, and Nimmo's pleasant sampling of his adventures in once-heroic, now-civilized lands captures the good times and bad. Convoluted sentences fail to convey the author's muddled thoughts, but often enough he sweeps readers along on charm alone. (Kirkus Reviews)

Fresh from a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Compostela, Ben Nimmo decided to explore Scandinavia - by boat. His ostensible aim is to discover whether Northern Europeans are as friendly as their Southern cousins, and his suspicion that Swedes will turn out to be sensible but dull is thoroughly dispelled a mere 17 hours after steaming into Gothenburg harbour when he finds himself singing English rugby songs with a Hawaiian-shirted dentist in King Kong slippers. It must be the rugby songs that set the seal on his approval, because, apart from when he reminds the reader that he is 60 percent Scottish, Nimmo's account of his eight-month tour around southern Scandanavia seems bent on playing up the archetypal Englishman-abroad angle for all it is worth. He travels, he explains, because he likes people and surprises. Nevertheless, he cannot resist a snigger at the name of a king called Svein Forkbeard, who conquered England a millennium ago and ruled it for 30 years. For Nimmo on his trail, Forkbeard is the 'original Great Dane'. Yes, the wordplay does teeter on the side of hackneyed: 'life is a beach,' he reflects at one point. When he takes to a kayak after his boat proper breaks down, the prospect arises of his having to lug this round the 58 locks of the closed Gotta Canal. 'To sea or not to sea,' Nimmo ponders in a little hamlet. But at least the reader is spared the chronic complaint of descriptive hyperbole that strikes down most travellers faced with the glories of Scandanavian scenery. A bit of history and a lot of fun, this is a book in which the pun is mightier than the fjord. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Ben Nimmo was born in Kendal in 1972 and grew up in Wolverhampton, where he still lives. He attended Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. As a musician he has played in a brass band in New Zealand, recorded a CD with his University Swing Band and played in the Albert Hall. He has spent time helping to rebuild a twelfth century castle in France and teaching scuba diving in Egypt and Belize. He now travels and writes full time.

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