Christopher Somerville first went to Crete about 15 years ago to write a guidebook, AA Explorer Crete, he told The Greek News from his home in the city of Bristol, UK. To research it properly he had to visit “just about every remote village and mountain, so it was a wonderful way to get to know the ʽisland of earth and dreams'. I made so many friends and fell so deeply in love with Crete that I have been back every year since.”

The opportunity to walk from one end of Crete to the other came about when his wife Jane gave him “the most wonderful 50th birthday present of 3 months free time, to do whatever he wanted anywhere in the world.” He had done a little walking “in the high and wild country of Crete, knew of the ʽexistence' of the E4 European Path across the mountains, and made the decision to take what turned out to be an extremely demanding 300 miles hike across Crete.

But then, walking is his thing; Somerville can be called a professional walker, as The Walking Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, featuring 15 years of “Walk of the Month” and presenter of over 100 “Somervilleʼs Walks for Anglia Television.

Although Jane stressed that Somervilleʼs trip should be for its own sake and not with the goal of producing an article or book as the goal, the result of his trek, aside form his own illuminations, is The Golden Step, published by Haus, a sort of travel diary of descriptions, observations and ruminations, a fun, tasty morsel of a little red book under a gorgeous green, gold, slate and vivid blue cover that is a picture of the Cretan landscape.

In The Golden Step Somerville describes his struggle to follow the sometimes drastically misleading E4 signs on their black and yellow striped poles -- some in tatters from being used as shotgun targets -- as he traverses Crete, gripping his much-admired, hand-hewn katsouna (walking stick). “If you have read my book you will know what a joke E4 turned out to be!” Somerville told TGN.

His only plan for the journey being to begin in the east at Easter and to finish at Whitsun in the extreme west, at the Monastery of the Golden Step -- whose gold step, legend says, can only be seen by those who have purged themselves into purity -- Somerville is chastened. He tackles mountain ranges, braving extreme cold, gorges, plateaus, farming and shepherding country where villages are scarce and each nightʼs accommodation was not only uncertain but also sometimes unavailable. But for Somerville this was a kind of pilgrimage, a journey unlike any he had undertaken in 20 years of travel writing.

His long-distance trek was an expedition where he traded comforts and certainties for real mental and physical challenges, with no mobile phone as back-up or any other sort of technology beyond a compass and his katsouna (he lost his reassuring wild dog-zapper somewhere along the way). Instead he relied on the famed hospitality of the Cretans.

In the seaside town of Loutro, on the southern coast of Crete, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, in a review of his life, he mused that before setting out on the walk through Crete he would have said that he had become a more cautious human being. At this point, however, he felt that he “had got something of a grip” on the “fear-strung ditherer” he had been at the start.

Somerville thinks of the island of Crete “as a country or nation in its own right....the people too. What most appeals to me about the Cretans is their fierce pride in their island and the joyful, generous way they live their lives. You know when you are meeting a Cretan - the energy levels are set at 11 on a 10-point dial! They tell you if they love you, and they let you know if they don't.”

“The Cretan rules of hospitality mean that you have to be 'up for it', all the time you are a guest - dancing, drinking, laughing, shouting, arguing, eating, kissing, mountain-climbing, visiting. I love throwing myself into all this - but after a few days, this feeble Englishman finds himself wondering if he is palikari enough to keep up!”

Somerville finds similarities between the Cretans and the Irish. “All small island nations seem to share some special characteristics - a great sense of pride in their place and customs, hospitality to the stranger and inquisitiveness about him, a view of the world outside that says: 'It's all very interesting and exciting, but really we don't know any better place or people than right here, amongst ourselves.' In this respect the Cretans and the Irish are similar - also in their strong emotional response to their own traditional music, their open-handedness, their naturally poetic natures, and their very fierce reaction if they are being oppressed by outsiders - or by their own fellow-islanders!”

Penguin will publish Somervilleʼs new book, 500 Wild Places of Britain and Ireland, in July, and he is working on his second collection of poems, “many of them about beautiful Crete! - which is called Greenwood Dark,” to be published by Haus.

Later that morning, said Somerville, he was going to speak about The Golden Step at a literary festival “in our lovely old city of Bath. So if any of your Cretan readers should meet an Englishman or woman wandering in the mountains, completely lost on the E4 path, with a copy of my book in their hand and a curse for me on their lips - please give them a glass of tsikoudia and help them on their way!”