A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor

In 1933, at the age of eighteen, the author set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople, following broadly the routes of the Rhine and the Danube. This first volume records the journey as far as Hungary. Aside form being an extraordinary journey it also a world on the edge of Arriving From german woodsmen, hungarian horsemen, dutch barge workers, peasants - perhaps the last generation of Europeans who could be described as such, to Aristocrats, What happened to the witty Jewish baker? The nice young men in the university towns? Fermor has three qualities which make this work. Firstly his adventurousness and openness to experience , memory, style It is certainly the finest travel book I have yet read.