Book review: Walking – One Step at a Time, by Erling Kagge
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Norway’s Erling Kagge is perhaps the quintessential explorer for our Google-mapped age. Having become the first person ever to reach the three “poles of inaccessibility” – the North Pole, the South Pole and Mount Everest – and the first to walk alone to the South Pole, he started to look for other, more esoteric challenges. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading his fascinating 2015 book Under Manhattan, in which he explores the network of tunnels and sewers hidden beneath the Big Apple, I can thoroughly recommend it. Not only does it offer a fascinating insight into a world that very few people get to see (largely because very few people would ever want to) it also serves as a sort of manifesto for a new kind of exploration. Just because there are no longer any blank spots on the map, Kagge seems to be saying, it doesn’t mean there aren’t still countless hidden places that are worth exploring.