A great classic in adventure travel writing, sort of a precursor cross between Theroux and Bryson. A Mayfair fashion executive, who moonlights as a magazine travel editor, reaches out to a Foreign Service buddy in 1956 to travel to the remote Afghanistan province of Nuristan and attempt to scale an unclimbed mountain in the Hindu Kush. It has a nice balance of humor, dangerous thrills, and personal encounters with fascinating geography and peoples. Entertaining with little lightning flashes of e...

This is a good light read.Working in the clothing industry in 1950s London the author and his friends hit on the idea of having a mountain climbing adventure in Afghanistan. Why not after all? This is the 1950s, they'd never had it so good, and there were still years to go before the Profumo scandal.Knowing nothing about mountain climbing and about as much about the Hindu Kush, they still think it's a good idea to attempt some peaks in Afghanistan but they do have a couple of days practise on a

The "Hindu Kush" is the western part of the Himalayan Construct at Central Asia and the "top of the world." (Everest, K2 and similar record-breakers lie farther east). We Americans don't use that term so much, but consider that the Khyber Pass is part of the Hindu Kush. This 1958 travel account by Eric Newby is a kind of cross between the tough-it-out, Wilfred (MARSH ARABS) Thesiger type of journal that pits a Westerner against a nearly impossible environment (here: the world's most forbidding m...

Page 166 of the Picador edition of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ranks among the funniest things I've ever read. On it, Newby quotes from a phrasebook of the Afghan Bashgali language, which apparently contains opening gambits like 'How long have you had a goitre?', 'I have nine fingers; you have ten', 'A dwarf has come to ask for food' and 'I have an intention to kill you', which made me laugh so hard I actually dropped my copy of the book. One day I hope to lay my hands on the phrasebook from

Do we live in a world that has lost the capacity for wonderment? Imagine. After a good few years in the printing industry I had had enough. I had been worn down by the daily grind. One day it was actually all too much, and I thought enough was enough! I rang up a mate and his phone went to message bank I blurted something stupid like let’s climb a mountain in the middle of nowhere or or or or! ……..any ideas? Not expecting anything more I get a reply. All arranged, off we go, …………!Imagine that. E...

If you read any mountaineering books, you would know that they quickly become boring, even if you are an aspiring mountaineer yourself. These books share a similar pattern: travelling to an unfamiliar place, setting up camp, suffering extreme hardships, ignoring danger, persevering despite atrocious weather conditions, ecstatically reaching the summit, surviving against all odds. Maybe losing a few people, or limbs, or at least digits in the process. This pattern became so obvious that in 1956 W...

Topsy Turvy. I started off not really liking the two main protagonists - they came across as a couple of English upper class twits who think nothing of buying a car and driving it to Tehran. Hardly the norm in 1950s Britain. But, slowly Eric's self-deprecating humour and the warmth he shows to the rest of his party won me over.Some of the attitudes and language is pretty dated, but apart from that I think the book has stood the test of time remarkably well.

It seems like it took me an awfully long time to get through such a short book. I think it was just his writing style and the way he included detail about certain things I wasn't so interested in, such as mountain climbing technicalities.However, I did enjoy the book and stuck with it because I wanted to know what it was like in this part of the world in the 1950s as compared to the present. In 1956, the author quit his job in the haute couture industry and trekked with a friend through a region...

I first read this over 40 years ago and it may have been the book that got me interested in this genre. This is travel writing as it should be, witty, dry and self-deprecating: two young Englishmen set out to walk through Afghanistan not that long after WW2, utterly unprepared yet prepared for anything. I’m only adding this note because I recently re-encountered that wonderful incident Newby tells against himself where they happen to meet Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary solo explorer of the Midd...

Very British, humorous travelogue of two friends who set off for "a Short Walk in the Hindu Kush." Of course they are underprepared and the trek is anything but a short walk.Enjoyed the humorous element even though the adventure was extremely dangerous. Really, neither Newby or Carless should have been left anywhere near a climbing rope to start with.Loved the descriptions of the country and the people they met along the way.

This book grew on me. The Laurel-and-Hardy-go-to-the-Himalayas type humor in the beginning put me off at first, but once Newby put aside that vibe and just started describing the Edenic beauty of NW Afghanistan he had me. Strange, because all of the momentum here comes from their trek toward the top and not from any authorial or thematic vehicle which he might have used to keep me engaged. For travelogues usually I prefer a little more than ‘we did this then we did that.’ But he opened my eyes a...

Maybe 3-1/2 stars if I were in a better mood. This was entertaining, although maybe a little too long and detailed, and definitely slightly dated in its attitudes (although not unbearably so). It made good filler between other books, and took me into the terrain of Rudyard Kipling's story, The Man Who Would Be King, so that was interesting.

A travel classic and very funny with it! Two chaps set off to climb a mountain in Afghanistan with no prior experience of climbing mountains.....what could go wrong?I laughed my socks off!

I guess I have to call this "interesting"... It is very much of its time. This trip was undertaken in the 1950s and remarkable for that alone. For two non mountaineers to travel where they did to climb an as yet unclimbed peak may seem a little foolhardy and that could be an understatement. But they were British damn it :) And there in lies some of the problem for me. It is a personal account of an interesting journey into a very wild part of the world done in a somewhat eccentric way. I often f...

The title of this iconic book summerizes it well. One does not just take a short walk in the Hindu Kush, take a look at any map.As EN discovers early on, the beginning and the start are separate events, and the executionsomething else entirely. What began as a lark takes on the nature of a grail quest, without thereligious overtones. Eric and his posh, poseur friend Hugh share more with bumbling Don Quixiotethan with the noble knights, and their destination might appear to be more tangible, but

A very entertaining travel yarn, reeled off in that classic, disarming British manner--and set in one of the few places left in the world which can still evoke mystery. That strange, steeply mountainous region between Afghanistan, Anatolia, Northern India, and Nepal. Nuristan and Kafiristan. This travelogue has some of the best anecdotes you could ask for. Misadventures galore. What were they thinking? Two out-of-shape pasty-pale gits thinking they could just stroll up the sides of Mt Everest? I...

Newby writes in a now-well-established genre of travel writing: the improbable, disastrous trip taken to an unlikely place by the totally unprepared. He wasn't the first to do this sort of thing -- among others, Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure stands out as an earlier blackly comic "bad trip," not to mention Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Today, the torch of the comic "bad trip" is carried by writers such as Redmond O'Hanlon, Bill Bryson, and Eric Hansen. Like several of the writers mention...

I had searched the internet for the best travel book ever and this book showed up on almost every list. How good can a book about two guy hiking up a mountain be? Well, I found out; fantastic, mind blowing great. Newby writes in short straight clear prose with wry, witty self-depreciating humor delivered with impeccable timing. Time and time again he left me ROFL. Hugh comes across as this mysterious, aloof, travel partner whom Newby is able to portray with gut wrenching humor. Part of the succe...

This book made a delightful read for a week resting in the south of France; while Eric and Hugh labored senselessly up a mountain I'd never heard of and through villages full of unpredictable but ultimately missable minor tribes, I reclined on a chaise longue laughing my head off. I think the charm of this book, which is less than riveting in terms of travel discovery or anthropological profundity, is in the hapless and very English "Boys Own" confidence and optimism of the two trekkers. Hugh ha...

A travel classic. This is the unbelievable tale of 2 Englishmen who try to make a first ascent of a 19,000 ft mountain in the 1950s. The journey to the peak is through harsh and remote wilderness near Afghanistan. This would be quite formidable for even the most seasoned explorers/mountaineers but our pair were drawing on British grit and not much else. Allow me- their only climbing experience was a 3 day crash course, when stuck on high glaciers they would refer to their climbing pamphlets rega...

A fantastic travelogue. The book's difficult to obtain in 'the West', but thank god for the illegal presses in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Here, this book can obtained by the 100s. Newby, mid-level management at some fashion firm, quit his job and convinces an old friend of his, Carless, working in the British foreign service, to visit Nuristan, even today a very undiscovered part of Afghanistan. Newby and his wife meet up with Carless in Istanbul, after driving from London to the Turkish c...

I read this book in a rather desultory way picking it up and putting it down for several weeks but it really began to resonate with me during a recent camping trip in the Lake District after putting 2 tents up in the pouring rain late at night and then discovering I had no way of boiling a kettle or making a hot meal.... Of course the English Lake Distruct hardly compares with the Hindu Kush but nevertheless it generated a real sense of empathy. Eric Newby's impulsive adventure took place over 5...

(FROM MY BLOG) By 1956, Eric Newby had devoted ten years of his life to working as a dress buyer for a London fashion house. Then one day, he received a telegram from Hugh Carless, a casual friend, asking "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?"Nuristan -- which until 1896, when its people were forcibly converted to Islam, had been called Kafiristan (land of the infidels) -- is one of the most remote and backward provinces in Afghanistan, nestled in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, northeast of Kabul. Af...

A fabulous book. The ultimate amateur adventure story, everyone should read it. Eric Newby is irrepressible in his aim to climb the mountains of Afghanistan, Embarking on his poorly planned expedition, with little relevant experience, he has no idea of what disasters await him in the hindu kush. Faced with incompetence, illness and equipment failure they soldier on regardless. The delightfully self-deprecating style of story telling does dampen the spirit of high adventure and sheer grit that ke...

A bit tough to stay enthusiastic while reading. Though my mind wandered a lot, I still wouldn't consider it boring. Just a bit slow going is all. Plus there was quite a bit of very old British jargon that kept some sentences from making sense. With each chapter I found myself looking up at least one word, phrase, and/or event in order to properly keep up. It's been a long time since I had to do something like that, but I didn't mind. I did, however, find myself laughing out loud several times th...

I enjoyed this book. Its horrendously British but in a nice charming way. Its a real celebration of naivity, inabilty and grit. Its main strength is Newbys ability to laugh at himself and their situation. The final line is perfect.

A very good read, one heck of an adventure, humorous, with insights, local histories, I've always thought those 50's were a special time and place for a trip of that nature..

An improbable—though hilarious—foray into Afghanistan by two Brits in 1956.After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman decides to quit his job, kiss goodbye his wife and children, and mount an ill-conceived exploration of mountainous Afghani hinterlands with an eccentric foreign service friend luxuriating in Rio.After two days of mountain-climbing school in Wales, they drive off toward Kabul. Within weeks they find themselves scaling 19,000-foot mountains, inching...

A classic book about Afghanistan which has been on my shelves forever...

*******************Love and War in the Apennines not-for -me*A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush not-for -me*Slowly Down the Ganges 1 star DNF