A Long Walk in the Himalaya: A Trek from the Ganges to Kashmir (Garry Weare, Transit Lounge, $32.95 tpb, ISBN 9780975022870, October) ***

Inspired by his friend Peter Hillary, who has written the introduction, Garry Weare has written a fine account of an amazing trek from the Ganges to Kashmir. Weare is no stranger to the Himalaya and trekking, having run trekking companies and lived in Kashmir for a sizable portion of his life. This is a detailed account of his amazing five-month journey, filled with entertaining commentary on the culture, environment, history and political upheavals of the areas he visits. He also shares his less than complimentary take on some tourists’ behaviour. ‘How many times I had cringed as I had watched tourists pushing huge camera lenses right into innocent faces without so much as a smile, a please or a thank you.’ Weare clearly knows and loves these regions of the Indian Himalaya and Kashmir. The people he encounters as he travels through villages and towns are endearing and add a further character dimension to his narrative. While Weare’s story is highly interesting and appealing, it is detailed and not quite as accessible as Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place or Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It is a marvelous story though and this travel narrative is suitable for anyone interested in trekking or travelling through the Indian Himalaya and Kashmir.

Melanie Barton is fiction category manager at Angus & Robertson

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker