Upton Bishop St John's Walk to Jerusalem

Monday 8th February We turned right a little way before Beirut and headed inland into much tougher country with deep rocky valleys and steep climbs. The final approach to Baalbek is along a wide valley with snow topped mountains rising in the distance on either side. The name Baalbek written in Arabic on the signposts looks like a two masted ship.  The city was known to the Greeks as Heliopolis, City of the Sun, and the temple complex is a reflection of its importance in those times: it is breathtaking. For all the conflict that Lebanon has know over the centuries, and particularly over the last fifty years or so, the temples dedicated to Venus, Mercury and Jupiter as well as Bacchus, have remained undisturbed. The temple columns soar overhead, broad ceremonial stairways sweep up to monumental porticos and massive doorways have fine carvings still as sharp as they must have appeared to the Roman pilgrims who came to worship here. Built with brute force and muscle power and built to las

  Sunday 7th February A few miles north of Haifa is Acre or Akko. We paused here to stand on the ancient fortifications, to wander among the narrow streets and the crusader ruins, where we imagined what it must have been like to be besieged for four years from 1189. Those same crusaders made themselves a handsome profit out of the spice trade for a while; no wonder they were in no hurry to get home to damp, grey England. They must have travelled a similar route to the one we are following for the return journey, through Athens and Italy. The atmosphere in Acre was not particularly friendly so we didn't linger. We walked on to our RV at Rosh Hanikra. There is a feeling of apprehension now among us.  'He did say 10pm didn't he? not 10am?' 'Yes, because he said 22.00 hours, so he was clear about it.' 'Will he come?' 'Will it be safe?' None of us was particularly hungry. We spent a lot of the afternoon among the sea grottoes of Rosh Hanikra, travelli

Monday 1st February A feeling of solidarity has sprung up between us pilgrims so that, despite being free to go where we please this week, most of us seem to be keen to stick together as a group. Today we've stayed in Jerusalem. There is, after all, a huge amount to see and do and we've covered a fair old mileage just walking along the Via Dolorosa, where high walls cast deep shade, going from the Wailing Wall to the Yad Vashem, the deeply moving Holocaust memorial, from the Tomb of Lazarus to the Garden Tomb. The golden Dome of the Rock is a gleaming landmark from any height. We climb up the Mount of Olives as the sun is going down, leeching warmth from the air as it goes, and the view is breathtaking. Tuesday 2nd To Bethlehem today, walking up the hill of Manger Street, imagining we are weary travellers with a donkey, expecting our first child any moment now. The town is bustling with people and cars but it does not take much of a leap to wonder how they must have felt findin

Friday 29th January Meeting in the early evening at the pier, we had to resist the temptation to turn around and go back into town because our route from here takes us to the south coast of Turkey where next ferry only goes on certain days of the week, Saturday being one of them. Reluctantly we peeled ourselves away from the Byzantine glories of Istanbul and watched the minarets recede as we crossed the Bosphorus. Saturday 30th We spent the night in Yalova, an pleasant enough modern city, and set out early this morning to find our route ran, again, along a narrow valley by way of a dual carriageway. We had visions of delays for accidents that we couldn't afford so we were lucky to run into a group of young Turks in the filling station who were, apparently, off on something similar to a Duke of Edinburgh's expedition. They led us cheerfully over the mountain tracks and brought us safely down onto the banks of the Iznik Gölü, a large lake where we hardly saw a soul, apart from so

Monday 25th to Thursday 28th Monday It was only when we woke up after our evening's trek in the Carpathians and looked down on the Danube in daylight that one of us remarked that we were now below the famous Iron Gates gorge. Patrick Leigh Fermor came this way before WWII and travelled through the gorge where mountains 'soared on either side in precipices' and the river 'swelled and boiled in protest.' * Since his travels a hydro-electric dam has somewhat tamed the water but the vitality of it is still evident this morning. We didn't follow the banks too closely as the river winds and sweeps through the Romanian countryside. Instead we took the more direct route across the fields, hardly seeing a soul until we came to the Danube again in Bechet. Waiting for the  ferry crossing, some of our pilgrims fell into conversation with Father Silviu, a local priest who took a keen interest in our adventure and pressed into Graham's hand a wooden madonna and child sta

Hungary, the bits we've seen of it, is, on the whole flat. We walked on into the dusk and crossed uneventfully into Romania, which promises us mountains. This, we reflected, might be a mixed blessing: easier on the eye, harder on the calf muscles. We were, however, still on the great Hungarian plain even here and couldn't see now, in the dark, whether the landscape before us was changing much. It didn't feel like it.  Eventually we arrived in Timisoara, a city big enough to offer us a comfortable night's rest.  The squares of old city centre are lined with brightly coloured buildings and two cathedrals, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic, stand opposite one another in Piata Unirii, each as elegant and impressive as the other. We weren't surprised when our waiter told us, in perfect English, that Timisoara is know as 'Little Vienna'. He was a chatty fellow (he introduced himself as Phil) who had come away from his plumbing job in Birmingham after the Brexit refe

Ah Vienna! In spite of our reluctance to leave the delights of the Czech Republic, as soon as we crossed into Austria at the foot of a small lake at Neunagelberg thoughts of Vienna gave us wings: we sped through the fields and villages and the excitement mounted until at last we came to the banks of the Danube. There was a stretch of industrial grimness to negotiate before we crossed the bridge into this most elegant of cities. As there are now sixty-nine of us, there were sixty nine different opinions about the  sehenswürdigkeiten not to be missed. The only thing we could agree on was that we should meet this evening in the Naschmarkt where there are a number of jolly little restaurants where everyone would find something to suit the whim of the moment.  We did the sensible thing and withdrew immediately to Kaffeehaus Demel for fortifying Apfelstrudel and Sachertorte before strolling through the streets and parks of the city. At every turning there is something to draw the eye, to pi