S4 #3 | On the Lost Arts of Pilgrimage & Asking Permission w/ Nick Hunt

On this episode, my guest is Nick Hunt, the author of three travel books about journeys by foot, including Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Emergence, The Irish Times, New Internationalist, Resurgence & Ecologist and other publications. He works as an editor and co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. His latest book is an alternate history novel, Red Smoking Mirror.

Show Notes

Awe and the Great Secret

On Focus, Sight and Subjectivity

The Almost Lost Art of Walking

Pilgrimage and the Half Way Point

What if Left of Old-School Hospitality in our Times?

When Borders Matter Less

Hospitality and Pain

The Costs of Interculturality

Asking Permission: On Not Being Welcome

Friendship, Hospitality, and Exchange

Homework

Nick Hunt’s Official Website

Red Smoking Mirror

Essay: Bulls and Scars

Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Christou: Welcome Nick to the End of Tourism podcast. Thank you so very much for joining us today.

[00:00:05] Nick Hunt: Very nice to be here, Chris.

[00:00:07] Chris Christou: I have a feeling we're in for a very special conversation together. To begin, I'm wondering if you could offer us a glimpse into your world today, where you find yourself, and how the times seem to be rolling out in front of you, where you are.

[00:00:22] Nick Hunt: Wow, that's a good, that's a good question. Geographically, I'm in Bristol, in the southwest of England, which is the city I grew up in and then moved away from and have come back to in the last five or so years. The city that I sat out the pandemic, which was quite a tough one for various reasons here and sort of for me personally and my family.

But the last year really has just felt like everyone's opening out again and it feels... it's kind of good and bad. There was something about that time, I don't want to plunge straight into COVID because I'm sure everyone's sick of hearing about it, but the way it, it froze the world and froze people's personal lives and it froze all the good stuff, but it also froze a lot of the more difficult questions.

So, I think in terms of kind of my wider work, which is often, focused around climate change, extinction, the state of the planet in general, the pandemic was, was oddly, you didn't have to think about the other problems for a while, even though they were still there. It dominated the airspace so much that everything else just kind of stopped.

And now I find that in amongst all the joy of kind of friends emerging again and being able to travel, being able to meet people, being able to do stuff, there's also this looming feeling of like, the other problems are also waking up and we're looking at them again.

[00:01:56] Chris Christou: Yeah. We have come back time to time in the last year or two in certain interviews of the pod and, and reflected a little bit on those times and considered that there was, among other things, it was a time where there was the possibility of real change. And I speak more to the places that have become tourist destinations, especially over touristed and when those people could finally leave their homes and there was nobody there that there was this sense of Okay, things could really be different

[00:02:32] Nick Hunt: Yeah.

As well. Yeah. I know there, there was a kind of hope wasn't there that, "oh, we can change, we can, we can act in, in a huge, unprecedented way." Maybe that will transfer to the environmental problems that we face. But sadly that didn't happen. Or i